Halloween, Only Scarier!

Our house is pretty scary around Halloween, though my kids are quick to point out we are scary enough on a normal day.

Birk's cast off clothing plus Halloween decor equals what looks like a crime scene...

Canadian Chronicles: Happy Holidays 2014!

II was texting a friend about the old days at the cottage in the winter.  You know the below zero kind of days where the power goes out and we were all huddled around the wood stove for warmth.  Candles were a premium then and provided much needed light to supplement the nearly dead flashlight batteries.  My grandmother's brass candelabra was a god send on those evenings--filling the room with warm wonderful light.

The outhouse was a popular place at that time.  The inside toilets couldn't be used, so all of a sudden, a place mostly avoided with dread got the appreciation and respect that it deserved.  It was a long and chilly walk, but it sure did make you think about the wonders of modern day plumbing and central heat.

That was the winter we decided to go "out" for dinner to the local restaurant.  This eatery is only 20 minutes away on a good day, but a great deal farther in the ice and snow.  Our dining experience started in a well-lit place with heat and power.  15 minutes into our visit, the power went out there, too.  We were served whatever was warm in the kitchen by the cook and waitstaff in their head lamps.

I wonder what the memories will be of this winter that endure.  The skating on the lake when it finally froze over?  Playing indoor "bags" where the rule was that you had to have a drink in one hand while you threw with the other hand?  Eating raclette and fondue and watching fireworks that almost blew up the boat house?

Which does remind me of the year that Birk set her mitten on fire with a sparkler as we watched terrified through the window.  Yes, old parents inside, young kids outside with fire AND unattended. Thankfully, we've come a long way there, too.

This winter I was on full mouse alert, and oh, bat alert, too.  I kept a wary eye out for any vermin. Miraculously, this winter was the first time I did not see a creature stirring out of the corner of my eye.  The Cot-Taj felt almost like a real house.  We had cloth napkins, lights, toilets, showers and the mice laid low.  We are happily and sadly civilized.

We also had no lack of warm food, cold drinks and holiday cheer.  Surrounded by family and friends, we really were nestled in the woods.  Sending you all warmest wishes--whether from the fireplace, wood stove, space heater or furnace-- for a jolly 2015 full of love, peace, adventure and friendship!

Nana grabbing some shut eye in the shade of the tree.

Roxy grabbing some shut eye by the warmth of the fire.

Pretzel making for German Night.

Stove covered with foil to protect is from the LYE?

Lye.  Yes, lye.  Note skull and crossbones.

Finished product.

A double batch--eaten in a few days.

Pretzel making is a family tradition.

A strange visit from captain and crew of the Enterprise.

Happiness is skating on the lake.

Ringing in the New Year 2015!

More fun on the lake--sharing the good times with friends!

Skating on the lake--a new adventure for some.

Quiet time.

Hockey games and frolic and the beautiful first days of January 2015.

Halloween 2014: When the Food is Too Scary

I've finally learned my lesson, if the food is too scary, no one eats it.  This is true of punch with eyeballs floating in it, too.

A few years back I found that when I covered the labels of $35 bottles of wine with spooky pretend labels, no one drinks them.  This is especially a bummer if you go ahead and uncork 3 or 4 bottles for the party ahead of time.  There is only so much spaghetti sauce you can make.

The margarita punch with the fresh raspberry brain? Left untouched.  Pouring that down the drain was a bummer, too.  I saved the eyeball ice cubes for next year, but I don't know how to use them for good instead of evil.

One of my favorite moments of Halloween prep? I told my daughter to put the eyeballs next to the brain in the freezer.  Sounded so nefarious! 

Another Halloween come and gone.  I hope yours was spooky, but not too scary. I also hope it was full of treats instead of tricks and that the goblins didn't get you!  

Canadian Chronicles 2014: The Princess Tent

After my near rabies experience with the bat colony (well, truth be told it looks like I have about 19 years to develop signs of rabies), we put up a mosquito net.  At least if those pesky critters were going to fly over my bed I was going to know about it!  If they bite me through the netting, I should be able to wrap them in it and take them to the local animal control department like I should have done in the first place. Too bad I was screeming in the bathroom instead of learning my ABC's of bat invasion.

My friend went to the local wilderness store and  brought me the net.  My scoffing husband has been very good about not making too much of a fuss about sleeping in our bed with the netting surrounding us. 

Truth be told, as I type and gaze up at the netting, I feel like I am in one of those princess tents that you buy little girls to hang over their beds.  It's kind of like an adventure, if I didn't already have the nightmare part and vivid memories in my ears and eyes of swooshing shadowy bats.

Calling it a princess tent is actually making it a better situation for me. I feel a little bit like a princess and I'm actually having full night's sleep.  Much better than my eyes and ears peeled in paranoid restlessness.

The other funny thing, is that when I first emerge from the princess tent in the morning, it actually keeps the morning chill out.  Our little tent is balmy.  We can also pretend like we are in the fantasy suite at a Vegas hotel.  I only wish this little beauty was around the first half of the summer when we were losing sleep due to the buzzing of mosquitos in our ears and the sneak attack bites they were laying on us nocturnally.

As I'm typing, I'm also thinking it is a good thing that my husband and I spent the first part of our summer watching seasons one, two and three of Game of Thrones.  A princess tent almost feels like the right prop in a summer filled with all kinds of pestulant drama.

Of course if I ever tire of being a princess, I could start to go with the "On Safari" theme-Out of Africa-alternative-reality.

The Canadian Chronicles 2014: Bat Woman?

My husband was going into town for the night, so it made total sense to have a girl's night at the cottage.  My friend, another Deb, and her two girls joined us for a cottage sleepover.  We were just turning in for the night when I looked out the front window.  What time was it?  It was as light as midday outside.  I checked the time, midnight.  I called Deborah to the back door.

We both made our way out to the lake and we indeed had moon shadows that cast themselves across the white dock.  We could see the lake and the neighboring cottages almost clear as day.  The red kayak was red.  The yellow kayak was yellow, and of course, the blue kayak was blue.  It was amazing and we had both never seen anything like it.  It's always a nice surprise when you get to experience something that really reminds you about how beautiful and unusual and even magical nights at the lake can be.

The moon shimmered a glittery gold in the sky.  It was really remarkable.  We didn't know it just then, but we were witnessing the "Super Moon" a whole evening early.  We took beautiful pictures and then proceeded to hit the hay.

I awoke several hours later to the sounds of bats swooshing outside the open window.  I sleepily thought that it was good as I watched them dart back and forth.  They were back lit by the brilliant light night sky.  My husband was lamenting the lack of bats and the bounty of mosquitos this summer.  I knew he would be happy to know our pest control patrol was back.  Maybe the Super Moon had them extra active that night?

We've also been battling the mice population this summer.  They would reallly like to live with us, but we'd really rather they did not.  As I was contemplating whether to get out of bed to pee, I heard a rustling sound.  I turned on my very dim table night light and searched for my glasses.  My heart was pounding just a little bit.

As I've mentioned before, I like mice just fine outside. They are cute and tiny when they are romping in the grass.  Inside, near my  bed is another story.  As I scanned the room in the dim light something swooshed across the top of my field of vision.  No, it was not on the floor as I had tried to focus, but out of the corner of my eye it was as if something streaked across the top third of the room.

Holy Moly!  I grabbed my phone for added light, hightailed it the two and a half feet to the bathroom and slammed the door.

Now, I was in a heightened state of alarm.  I didn't clearly see something, or did I?  I was using my iphone as a flash light, and at the best of times my night vision is sketchy.  I opened the door a crack. I didn't see anything.  I reached one arm out and grabbed a pillow.  Then, I slammed the door back shut.

I peeked out again.  Holy Moly, I saw a streak again, but, I know I was more than a little panicked.  I quckly grabbed another pillow and slammed the door.

Self-contained in the bathroom, I quickly thought about my options beyond sleeping on the cold, hard slate tile floor.  My husband, two hours away,  Me with twelve feel between myself and the light swtich to the room.  Worse yet, because there were at least three empty beds in the cottage, I was twenty feet to the firmly shut doors in the darkened room...and clear lit, safe escape.

What does a woman in 2014 do?  She texts her husband..."I think there is a bat in the room. Eeek!"

Of course no response at 3 AM.  

I put all of the towels that were damp from showers, a total of two, on the granite floor, and shoved books and boxes and extra toilet paper rolls at the crack under the door (hey, my mouse friends could be working with the bats?).  Then ears peeled, I tried to get a few hours of sleep.

In the morning light, at 6 AM, after a restless, uncomfortable, and interrupted by terror sleep, there was alas no sign of any bat.  We had a good laugh at breakfast, and when my husband returned he gave me the rolling eyes that let the world know he thought his wife was batty.  Clearly the super moon had made me a super lunatic.

I was never so happy to be wrong.  Yet, I made up a spare bed for me to sleep in just in case. Ridiculed by my husband, he convinced me that he would protect me from any winged or four legged friends.  I was skeptical. It had to be something, right?

We cooked dinner. We made bat woman and vampire jokes.  The second glass of wine had me laughing at my own squeemishness and scaredy-cattiness, er battiness.  I began to relax about the whole sleeping on the cold, hard floor incident, when...

"Mom, there's a bat in the TV room!"  It was a yell, but there was no panic.  Birk and her friend, Izzy, were both very calm.  Me? I screamed, ran into the laundry room and slammed the door. I peeked out just in time to catch a bat the size of a well fed sea gull flying toward me.  Slam again!  There was no way after my sleepless night I could handle the visual. The rest of the friends and family battled the bat.  There were finally successful in shooing it out the door.

We all sat down for dinner. The converstion centered around how what kind of mother would make her children battle the bat while she hid screaming in another room.  The group marveled at the bat being in the wrong place at the wrong time and how happy he was to glide out the door.  Now that he was gone, time to get back to normal.  That is, everyone but me was thinking we were back to normal.  I grew up in the country.  There is never the rule of "ONE"  there is always the rule of "If there's ONE there is MORE."

As we settled in for the night, me on high alert, my husband snoring, I finally nodded off and neglected my vigilant watch.  We both awoke to a chattering sound.  Bat?  Mouse?  Chipmunk for goodness sake?  I grabbed my pillow and was in the bathroom with the door shut in record and practiced time.  Yes, this left my husband in the room with whatever terriffying woodland creature was out there, but hey, it was my idea to sleep in the spare bedroom, not return to the bat cave.

My husband, again, shooed the bat out and called me back to bed.  Exhausted, and not lilking the idea of another night on the floor, I grudgingly pulled the sheets up over my head and tried to sleep.  I learned in passing the next day that it was actually two bats.  We had a colony!  How nice.

Meanwhile, I started doing some bat research.  I googled how do you get a bat out of the house?  How do bats get in house?  I stopped my research, as the pictures of the bats started to feak me out even more than I already was freaked out.  I mean, I saw the bat flying from the TV room down the low ceiliinged hall way to the kitchen and that thing looked like a giant with it's wings flapping away.  Putting a face on the giant-winged Transylvanian creature with giant-sized fangs from google images was putting me over the giant-sized edge.

The next evening, we were making dinner again, and the familiar call came from the TV room...."Bat!"  By this point we all had our stations.  The rest of the family did whatever they did while I screamed in the laundry room.  My husband finally agreed to sleep in the spare room with me.  Feeling braver, I started my google quest again and researched local bat specialists--which turned out to be a thing.

What also turned out to be a thing, was that if you are sleeping and awake to find a bat in the room you need to be treated for rabies.  I was reading this out loud to my husband, who was really convinced at this point that I was crazy, and he told me to turn off the World Wide Web and get some sleep.  The number and duration of the rabies shot process was enough to fuel my nightmares.  

Apparently my 1 percent chance of certain death with no cure was not enough to get my husband concerned.  My fear of shots was 99 percent of my reason for not reading any further on the Center for 

Disease Control website.

After all, wasn't I awake and watching the bats fly outside the window?  How diseased could these country bats be?  Wasn't Old Yeller a victim of rabies?  How did he catch it?  

My girls are big fans of the Vampire Diaries.  Seems to me I am either going to be boring me, dead or undead.