poll: garlic?

Remarkably, the heat wave that reportedly has hit Toronto never fully reached us at the cottage. Yesterday, I even ended up wearing a t-shirt, sweatshirt AND fleece jacket in the evening to keep warm!

We've settled into a bit of a ritual here now. I'm first up around 6:30 a.m., head down to the boathouse (the main cabin) to work on my daily Market Watch column, Blatherings, and my novel. I have cereal with blueberries and milk. The others come down a short while later, make coffee, have breakfast, go read books on the dock or in the boathouse. JBR comes down with a cup of coffee to chat. I go for a long swim in the lake, usually my main exercise of the day.

When Jeff wakes up and comes down, I retreat to our sleeping cabin and work on my novel for the rest of the morning. Unless he decides to cook up a big breakfast with everyone, in which case I have a second breakfast (oink). Yesterday he made pancakes, which optional blueberries for those who wanted them, with real maple syrup, yum.

Around 11 or 11:30, I take a nap. Sometime in the afternoon, we all do something together. Yesterday we went for a hike on the Rainbow Lake portage. It was somewhat buggy, but a good walk, with lots of steep hills. I ended up coping with the bugs by spraying a bandanna with Muskol and wearing it under my cap, Lawrence of Arabia style. Worked like a charm, too. :-) We saw another moose, female this time, as well as a muskrat swimming across the river.

As you might have guessed, my favourite cottage activity these days is napping. After napping, however, I like swimming. I'm not the greatest swimmer, but I'm confident enough to swim a fair distance from the dock. No sign of the snapping turtle during our visit. I do some workout-type swimming (I can't do any running here at the cottage since there's nowhere to run) but take breaks by floating on my back with my face to the sky, arms outstretched, eyes closed.

It's incredibly relaxing, floating out in the lake like that, and something I can never do in the city.

One of our guests made a delicious mushroom risotto last night, with a garlicky broiled vegetable dish appetizer. I'm a big fan of garlic, but tend to avoid it unless the friends I'm with are eating it too, just so we can all be stinky together. I love garlic cloves that have been baked a long time in the oven, and spreading the resulting mush on toast. My mouth is watering, just thinking about it.

Poll: are you a garlic fan?

Do you like the smell? The taste? Do you like eating baked garlic cloves? Do you like cooking with it? When you and your partner or close friend are dining out, would you hesitate about eating a garlic-heavy dish if he/she isn't?

Hey, only a couple of weeks until Conchord! I've been practising on my guitar every day. Can't wait to visit with Scott and Amanda Snyder before the convention, and to finally meet Zoë. :-)





Today's Blatherpics

ScottD gave me permission to take and post one photo of a fish he caught off our dock. He ended up throwing the fish back into the lake because it was too small.

The second photo is of a Lola, a frozen treat I mentioned in Blatherings a while back and that some people were confused about.