Easter in the Mountains

The girls and I spent the Easter Long Weekend out at the cottage.  I closed the shop for Easter Monday, in addition to the Statutory Holiday on Good Friday, so we had a four day long weekend.  Hailey and I drove out on Friday morning, while Margait and the other girls drove out separately later that afternoon.  It snowed fairly heavily all day on Friday and by late afternoon there was an accumulation of a couple of inches of fresh snow.  It was fairly shortlived as it warmed up nicely on Saturday and the snow was gone, leaving mostly just mud.

The girls had an Easter Egg Hunt out in the woods.  Mostly I just puttered around on a few chores at the cottage.  I trimmed the latest two interior doors so they wouldn't drag on the carpet.  I also finished up the jambs and stops for those doors.  I installed a section of handrail on the stairs, and put together a firewood rack.  On Easter Sunday I started installing some of the stone veneer onto the exterior foundation.  If I can get some of this stuff put on, then I will finally be able to build a proper landing and step at our entrance door.  While I was doing that, Margarit pulled out the log splitter and split a big pile of firewood.  There's a lot of yard cleanup to look after this year and now that it has warmed up and dried off a little, we can start to get after that.  I also had the local service company out on Monday to pump out the septic tank and bring us another load of water.  I filled the 2000 gallon water storage cistern last July, and it lasted up until now.  In the future we will probably use a little more water.  Last year we didn't have the shower and toilet installed in the cottage until later in the summer, so there was virtually no water use for the first couple of months. 

 

I pulled the memory card from the game camera and took these pictures off.  The girls were captured during their Easter Egg Hunt.  None of us have been out to the cottage for the better part of a month, so the pictures on the camera accumulated to quite a few.  Seems a Red Fox wandered by a couple of times and got its picture taken.  Also captured one of the deer in a rather odd pose.....

During the extreme cold winter weather I was putting out some oats for the deer.  Now that it has warmed up and there is lots of natural food for them, I haven't been feeding them.  But they still visit regularly to check out if there is anything for them.  The temperature that my game camera records seem to be fairly accurate if the sun is not shining.  But the camera is out in the open, and when the sun shines on it, a temperature much warmer than the actual air temperature is recorded.