The best parts of the last two days …

leaving out the beautiful people.

Dawn and winter eats another flag.  It was pretty … pretty damned cold.  A wind to chill your bones.  But it turned into a beautiful sunny day, with an almost caricaturish display of Canadianness, with chainsawing of wood, raking roof, [not me, that’s what nieces and nephews are for], boiling sap … even a niece handing her niece a sapsicle, a frozen stick of sap she pulled from a frozen bucket.  But March Madness was also in the background, so the two worlds did collide, but peacefully.

Piglet [one of the wood boxes looks like a pig, if you have the right mindset] boils away.

The Range Rover attempts to hide in the woods, but fails.

That is the sailboat behind it, not doing such a good a job at hiding.

Sap still boiling, but it was a bit of a problem because the collected sap was frozen, and we might have [did] over boil the first little batch and might make something else out of it.  Something more solid, like the lake, as the sun began to set.

And then back to dawn, but this time with pink snow!  Just for a magic moment.

And then Mouse came down the path with something repellent and astonishing in her mouth, which she politely dropped for my inspection.

And then things just got silly.  “Nephew-in-law, and great-nephew who is four,” said I. “Come and see the hideous thing Mouse brought me.  You are good on identifying hideous things.”  So they did, and then n.i.l. says, and I almost quote verbatim, “That doesn’t look like it came from the hide I am working on.  I don’t remember cutting that piece.”

So I walk away, and go back to the upper boathouse and mention this to my sleeping hubby, who calmly says, “Oh, yeah, we were scrapping a hide on the back deck yesterday,” as if he, an electrical engineer, does that sort of thing every day.

But at least we now know what we mean when we are talking about a dog’s breakfast.  A chunk of hide with dubious provenance.