Happy Canada Day, Eh!

In case my US readers do not know about this holiday, Canada Day (formerly known as Dominion Day) is Canada's national holiday, celebrated on July 1st. It seems to be an occasion for a summer long weekend; I spent this one up at Chief Grad Student's family's cottage (four of us), up near Sharbot Lake (see this earlier post for when we visisted in the fall).

Surprisingly, nobody from the family had gone up to the cottage yet to start it up, so we were tasked with putting in the floating dock (taken out in the winter to prevent ice damage) and turning on the water.

Turning on the water was a task by itself... we went down into the crawl space, turned on the well pump, flushed sediment out of the system, and then connected water to the house. This was followed by water blowing out of a broken fitting that had apparently frozen over the winter in an undrained pipe. Due to a lack of isolation valves, this break kept us from having any running water at the cottage. So CGS and I had to spend several hours in the crawl space with flashlights and a propane torch, removing and resoldering the broken fitting. A pain in the butt, but kinda fun in that 'this is an urgent job that needs to get done'/submarine movie way. We rewarded ourselves with beer and a lovely grilled salmon.

Weather was perfect up this weekend--cool enough at night that you could open up the windows and use the covers. Beautiful sunny weather for putting the dock in.

Of course, there was time for fun activities between these jobs--sitting on the porch reading, swimming in the lake, playing a Scrabble-like game (UpWords). I have to say that I must have truly angered the letter gods at some point:

As another piece of cultural knowledge that I'm sure my US friends don't know, there are these Inuit stone monuments that are pretty common around Canada called Inukshuks: they are roughly person-shaped stacked stones, meant as trail markers, but with some deeper significance: see Wikipedia's entry if you're curious. Anyway, they have one at the cottage; I thought he needed some temporary decoration.
The drive there and back were pretty unpleasant--serious traffic in both directions; we got back at 3 AM last night. That's what we get for driving on a holiday weekend.