My little piece of the Internet

I have had an "odd" season at the cottage, this year. I opened the cabin late (after the May long weekend), and only managed to get up to the lake sporadically during the summer. Fall has now arrived, and I find myself planning for the cottage closing, sometime in October. I don't know that we really had a summer this year, and I certainly missed the cottage.

Cottage time quickly approaches, and I've got much to prepare. Part of that preparation includes the selecting of games and passtimes for those rainy days and lazy evenings. This time, I decided to be a bit frugal, and concoct my own chess, checkers, and backgammon games.

And so, I give you my 2 page (duplex printed) Chess, Checkers, and Backgammon set.

Recently, a friend of mine was "caught", twice, by malicious websites. Under the guise of representing Microsoft, these sites each reported (with alarming audio and text) that my friend had been infected with spyware and viruses, with the advice to call a 1-800 number to obtain a fix. There was no apparent way to escape this notice; all my friends efforts to close or escape the page were ignored, and the system seemed at a standstill

I managed to help this friend get out of these traps, and found that no harm had been done to the computer.

The end to the 2016 cottage season fast approaches, and I have done almost all that I can do this year.

Two long-standing components of my late mother's cottage are gone: a long-dead snowmobile, and an even-longer-dead iron cookstove.
I have cleaned out most of the junk (next year will complete the job) and started the much-needed renovations and improvements.

I think that my Mother would be very happy with the changes.

Another visit to the cottage, and more incremental improvements and repairs. This time, two jobs: painting the master bedroom walls, and rebuilding the deck at the waterfront.

In "Haul Out", I showed the float assembly for my haul-out. That float has been anchored with a temporary anchor (a "killick") for too long. I wanted a heavy anchor that couldn't be easily dragged or lifted from it's final resting place. A boat anchor wouldn't do; it would be too light or too expensive, and a heavy anchor would be very difficult to get up to the cottage to install. So, I made my own anchor from stuff I had around the cottage.

Since I installed the "Dock In A Box" dock, I've continued working on the cottage, cleaning up fifty years of cruft and making repairs. The last few trips have been rewarding, and have resulted in some significant improvements around Fugawee.

At the start of May, I trekked up to Kimball Lake to open the cottage and see what the winter had done to the place. The cottage suffered no damage; the winter was mild. However, the dock that I've been building for the last two years was crushed beyond repair. It would take all season to disassemble this mess, and then another two or three years to rebuild. Time for "Plan B".

While others may enjoy the freedom of letting someone else account for their expenditures, I learned money-management differently. I regularly balance my own accounts, confirming deposits and withdrawals, and derive my own running balance, independent of my bank's online tools. To do this, I use a "cheque register", a small booklet that mimics an account ledger, that my bank freely provides to it's customers. However, lack of demand has caused the bank to cut back, and they no longer make or distribute these "cheque registers".

Over the past few years, I have developed a web-based recipe program to replace a couple of programs that I used to use.

Last year, the code reached a point that meant that I could begin to use it as my primary repository for recipes, and just yesterday, I added a facility to "export" to a PDF file all the recipes that I had accumulated.

So, if you look below, you will find a PDF file containing all the recipes in my recipe file.