Hanging Around the Cottage

Anna and I headed out to Nordegg together on June 25th.  We delivered the water tank for our guest cottage, and then settled in for an extended stay.  The heat wave that hit western Canada at the end of June was just getting underway.  The rest of the family would be joining us for the Canada Day long weekend.

On Saturday the 26th we dropped my prints off at the Beehive Artisan Market.  Later that evening we attended the free concert down at the community hall.  Multiple Juno award winner Bill Bourne played a show there.

With the temperatures so extreme the construction on our guest cottage was halted.  The heat in the late afternoon was overbearing, and we had to be careful.

I found that if I closed all the rollshutters on the south side of the cottage during the day, it kept things a lot cooler.  We were able to maintain an inside temperature that was consistently about ten degrees cooler than outside.  Fortunately, in the mountains it cools off significantly at night.  We were getting night time low temperatures down in the range of 15 to 17C.  Once the sun began to set in the west I would lift the roll shutters and open all the windows in the cottage.  This created a lot of air movement and really cooled things off, allowing us to start each day with a relatively cool living space.

We tried to accomplish a little outside, and managed to do some work in the shade.  We had to time our projects to the sun, so that we could work in the shade beside or behind the cottage.  We made some progress on the bunk bed that Anna and I have been working on for the past few weeks.  

One morning I went out behind the cottage and cut up two dead trees that had fallen down.  We set up the log splitter in the shade on the north side and worked splitting all of this for firewood.

Most days I had an afternoon nap.  We made a few nice meals for ourselves, though mostly we tried to avoid cooking inside.  It was stuff done on the BBQ for the most part.  Later in the evenings, once it had cooled off, we went out for ATV rides, visited with neighbors, and did a little fishing.