Fur Hats and Balmy Days

It was so balmy on the lake this past Sunday I didn't even turn the heater on in the shanty. Whoa. However, Karen's soup was still a welcome bowl of warm in the busy afternoon. Bring your own bowl and spoon and you too can have some soup out on the ice every Sunday around 1p.
On Saturday, my big sister came all the way from South Carolina to amaze us, once again, with her clarinet solo stylings. That's her in the black fur wig-like hat and that's me in a rabbit fur baseball cap.
Peter Haakon-Thompson of Autoethnographic Shanty fame ran a knot-tying workshop in the Misfit Toys on Saturday. Once again, it was a rousing success. I cleared out once the shanty was rocking with a bunch of giant men eager to learn how to tie the bowline. These guys seemingly appeared from nowhere, with beer cans in hand and some time to kill. I think one guy called himself 'high life'. Ha! That's one more reason why I love being on a frozen lake surrounded by stuffed animals watching worlds collide.

Tea and Sympathy

Good gravy, opening weekend was brutal out on Medicine Lake. Saturday morning I showed up, eventually got the heater going and tried to boil water for tea (no luck). So I commenced sitting and eating snacks while brave souls came and went throughout the day. Our shanty was only half stuffed(see previous post) so I decided for opening weekend it was the Misfit Vista Shanty: a stuffed animal/clear plastic hybrid of our favorite sunny shanty from last year, The Vista Shanty. We used the same plasic that the Vista folks used last year so it was great to have them darken our door on opening day to compare notes on the wonders of brittle plastic sheeting in high winds.

Existential Crisis

All systems down. Thursday night our truck shit the bed. Friday morning Karen got the vomit virus. High winds and arctic conditions meant sheathing the shanty exterior with brittle plastic became a Herculean task. However, stupidity and a sheer force of will won out. Long-suffering husband Kurt and I left the ice at sundown, leaving behind us a partially stuffed and fully sheathed shanty standing mighty against the wind.