Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2022 i Cottage Life

Birthday wishes from you CL, you outdid yourselves with the anniversary issue (June/July ’22). I have been a subscriber since day one, and I’m savouring this issue. I’m writing this on a Tuesday, but every day is the weekend!—Malcolm Dunne, via Twitter I just got the anniversary issue in the mail. This magazine has been a cottage bookshelf staple for my family for the past 20 years. What’s your favourite Cottage Life DIY trick or project you’ve made?—Vanessa Westermann, via Twitter Great question, Vanessa! We’d love to hear about the CL tips that have stuck with you. Tweet to us at @cottagelife. The first sip is the best It’s Alan Marr from “The Monk, the Recluse, and a Message in a Bottle” (Aug/Sept ’21). For Mother’s Day, I made my…

Q: What causes “ice cream headache”? I find that I get it a lot.—Gail Gordy, via email A: There are a number of theories, says Werner Becker, a professor emeritus of neurology at the University of Calgary and an expert with Migraine Canada. “But no one seems to really understand what’s going on with ‘ice cream headache’, that is, headache caused by a cold substance passing over the palate or the back of the throat.” One theory—at least in the case of cold substance vs. palate—suggests that the cold stimulus activates sensory nerves in the palate, and those nerves then cause the headache either because they trigger changes in blood flow to the brain or because they directly stimulate pain nerve endings in the palate. Another theory is that the…

WHEN VICTORIAN NATURALIST Alfred Russell Wallace referred to feathers as a “masterpiece of nature…the perfectest venture imaginable,” he wasn’t exaggerating. Wondrous in design, feathers are marvels of evolution—derived from reptilian scales—that enable birds to soar. But it is their beauty that has entranced humans worldwide for centuries. “Where else do you find such an obvious example of iridescence in nature? Birds did it up really well,” says Mark Peck, the manager of the Schad Gallery of Biodiversity at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto. The most valuable commodity (second only to diamonds) on the sinking Titanic turned out to be feathers—more than 40 cases—worth more than $2.3 million in today’s dollars. These extravagantly expensive plumes traveled en route to milliners’ shops as part of the feather fashion craze that…

“I THINK IT’S in the Constitution that you have to have a puzzle at the cottage,” jokes Brigitte Gall. She and her husband, photographer Michael Bainbridge, founded TheOccurrence, a toy and game company, in 2018 after watching their friends huddle around a puzzle of van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” on a freezing New Year’s Eve. “We looked at each other and had that little lightbulb moment,” recalls Brigitte. “We could make puzzles with Michael’s photography.” They launched the company just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. (“We accidentally opened up a jigsaw puzzle business at exactly the right time,” says Michael.) By now they’ve made roughly 30,000 puzzles; TheOccurrence specializes in niche Canadiana imagery including scenes from Ontario cottage country. The Road Trip series—featuring road signs from areas including…

1. Sketch your shape Start by drawing a bowtie shape (on cereal-box cardboard) that’s proportional to the size of the check. For softwood, a bowtie should have a wide 1970s flare; for hardwood, it can be much subtler. The bowtie’s thickness depends on the depth of the check: ½"–¾" thick is about right for a tabletop. 2. Cut the bowtie Only one face of the bowtie needs to be smooth; once you have an appropriately sized blank, rip to thickness via a tablesaw or a bandsaw. With the template on end, set the tablesaw blade angle, positioning its top at the vertex of the bowtie. Clamp the bowtie blank to a block of wood, pushing it between fence and blade to cut the first angle. Flip the blank end for…

COTTAGERS REPLACING THE transom on a tinny might logically consider pressure-treated plywood as a good material choice. It’s rot resistant, right? True enough, but PT plywood and aluminum don’t go well together in a wet environment. Common current pressure-treating formulations such as Copper Azole (CA) or Alkaline Copper Quaternary (ACQ) should never have any contact with aluminum fasteners or building products because the dissolved metals in the treated wood create a galvanic reaction with aluminum, causing serious corrosion. MicroPro Sienna, which is a newer PT formulation, can be safely used with aluminum building hardware, but only indoors or in above-ground exterior areas without exposure to frequent and prolonged wetting. MicroPro in contact with aluminum is not recommended anywhere with continued exposure to moisture, like your dock or your boat, unless…

CLIPPING NORTH ALONG HIGHWAY 400 towards Sudbury, Ont. you may glimpse a red Tesla Model 3 plugged into the Supercharger station outside of the Parry Sound Inn & Suites. Attached, on a trailer, is a 21-foot solar pontoon boat. The owner of the two vehicles, Ian Graham, is what you might call an electric man. He is all about pushing the limits of what electricity can do. The Supercharger station is a 20-minute pit-stop on Graham’s six-hour journey from Kitchener to his Charlton Lake cabin north of Manitoulin Island. With 500 km of range, Graham’s Tesla can almost make the journey in one shot, but towing the pontoon eats up about 60 per cent of his charge, forcing him to make a quick stop. The hesitation to adopt electric vehicles…

BATTERED BY WEATHER and baked by sun, a landing spot for birds and branches, we ask a lot of what lies above. But perhaps we can ask just a bit more of our cottage roofs—to not only keep us dry and protected but also to lighten our overall carbon load as well. 1. Grow a roof and regulate interior temperature Ian MacDonald is an architect who spent 20 years in his old cottage on Go Home Bay, Ont., before he tore down the cabin and built a new one. In those two decades, he says, he learned what he appreciated about the location and the space, but more importantly, he saw what he wanted to change. One change he sought was to make the cottage more sustainable. He originally planned…

Bacon-Infused Vodka Add a smokey, savoury kick to classic drinks by substituting this DIY bacon vodka for plain vodka. Version 1 produces a stronger bacon flavour, making it a good choice for drinks such as the Bloody Mary and the Caesar, where the bacon flavour needs to stand up to the tomato-based mixer. Version 2 is lighter and works well for a Bacon Vodka Tonic or a Bacontini. MAKES 750 ML 1 750-ml bottle vodka10–12 slices bacon (see Tips, below) 1 Pour 250 ml of vodka into each of 3 glass jars with tight-fitting lids. Fry the bacon until crisp and don’t discard the fat. Allow to cool slightly, then add to vodka. For Version 1, use 3 strips of bacon and 1 tbsp fat per jar. For Version 2,…

All hail, Caesars! I’LL START WITH the obvious: it’s been a long two and half years and a time when the idea of entertaining fell way out of favour. But for the extroverts among us (that’s me), two years of relative social isolation has created an intense excitement to see people, and to, well, party. Happy hour on the dock with the neighbours, big meals around an extended table that go late into the night, a campfire under the stars—these are all the things we remember when summer is over. Entertaining is fun, but it can be stressful. I was recently chatting with my friend Rebecca, a Georgian Bay cottager. Although she oozes a relaxed vibe (even when she has a houseful of guests and a meal to put on…

WHEN WE WENT to the cottage, my father used to sit by the lake and just be present. He’d take in the wind and the water, letting them speak to him. I think, as well, he would recall his childhood on the trapline, and the small lake through the trees where he used to swim and play. When I went to the trapline with him for the first time in 2018, I understood how the land gives us life as soon as we hit the water. My father, scanning the surroundings, remembering how his family used to live, looked ten years younger. And when we stepped onto the trapline, it felt like I’d come home, a feeling I’ve come to understand as blood memory. The land lives within me. This…

EVERY COTTAGE IS A cesspit of entropy, where buildings, machines, furniture, and fun toys are in a constant state of falling apart. Repairing this stuff is often doable for the average cottager, but traditional tools and materials can’t always solve the problem. That’s why two-part epoxies should be in every cottage toolkit. Epoxy has excellent durability, gap-filling ability, and very high bond strength (some formulations are stronger than steel). After curing, most epoxy can be machined, drilled, threaded, ground, sanded, and painted. Unlike glues or construction adhesives, two-part epoxies must be stored as separate resin and hardener, then mixed together just before use, usually in a 1:1 ratio (check the label). Some epoxy comes in two tubes that you squeeze out in (hopefully) equal quantities. Or you can get twin-tube…

Q: “My family loves playing board games at the cottage, but I’m not a fan. I think most games are boring. (My sister says I’m a “weirdo.”) I will play one or two rounds to be a good sport, but I usually just end up reading a book while they play. How can I suggest switching things up without taking away from their fun?” A: Board games are enduring fixtures of pretty much every cottage place, filling drawers and closets and blanket boxes with a geological record of game-dom that can reach back to a Parcheesi board that has been in the family since the Boer War. Even people who don’t play games at their regular homes will have a hoard of cardboard entertainments up at the lake, which is…

EACH YEAR DURING his Cordova Cup weekend, John Hogue takes a white plastic chair from the dock and plunks it in the lake. Sitting in the shallows with the water of Cordova Lake swirling around his calves, he takes in one of the in-water volleyball games being played by two of the teams vying for the highly contested championship title. In one hand, he has beer in a red Solo cup, poured from a keg on the dock. In the other, a cigar. From this vantage, off the shore of his family’s cottage in the Kawartha Lakes region, John observes the product of months, indeed years, of planning and tweaking and organizing. For five minutes, maybe 10, he savours it, listening to the good-natured chirping by the other players. He…