I'm still at Lake Rosseau and it's still raining. Next week it's going to be 28 degrees Celsius and sunny, much good that does me now. So I've been cooking. My hostess asked me to help her with leftovers.They just had a party for 70 of their closest friends and party leftovers always present a challenge. I rise to challenges. My first cookbook was about leftovers and I do make house calls for dear friends. Sometimes I fall a little short, like bread. Not flat, but short. This morning I met a complication.

Working on my laptop, I was making out my grocery order for delivery on the day I return and I was doing double digit thinking, not digits but food items. I'm conducting a mental inventory of my fridge and pantry and bumping into my more recent knowledge of my hostess's contents -well, not her bodily contents, you understand, but the contents of her larder. So I have to stop and double-check before I enter the order.

People who juggle two or more homes do that all the time, I'm sure, except they probably have a housekeeper or someone to do it for them. I remember buying a two-sided notepad designed for home and other places, a grocery list for two, as it were. Even if you just rent a place for a couple of weeks, it can be confusing. You find yourself thinking, "I know I have peanut butter, I just bought some" but it was for the other place. Or else you find you have two of something you never meant to have two of. So this morning; I had to double-think. To buy or not to buy.

Today I will be coping with a plethora of pineapple and several chicken breasts, cooked and uncooked. Plus beets and pecans and some very tired celery, and an overage of asparagus. It's a good thing it's still raining or I'd feel overworked. As it is I feel as if I'm auditioning for "Chopped".

I wish it would stop raining.

Here I am and there is nothing to stop me from writing a decent blog except my own lethargy, inertia and laziness. Oh, and I have to catch up with me. Too many disparate places and people, too much moving my body in space and time; I have to stop and breathe and figure out where I am now. Well, of course, I know where I am: I'm in a cottage/camp/summer place (but it's a year-round home) on Lake Rosseau in Muskoka, Ontario. It's a dull, cool, rainy day I'm happy to say. Otherwise I'd be forced to be active. The silence is deafening. The tap of my fingers on the computer keyboard is the loudest noise in the room. I'm sure I will begin to think soon.

Lots to think about, I must say. My inner dialogue never stops, of course, and I react to everything I see, hear, read, remember and forget. I try to make mental post-it notes for the next blog and sometimes I pick them up. Such a clutter! If they were real, my forehead would be covered with paper. But then, when I sit down to recall and write them out, they fade away, with just a few tschotschkes fluttering behind my eyeballs. No, that's not right. Tschotschkes don't flutter; they pile up, stretch out and cover surfaces not originally intended for them. I am, right now, in a House of Tschotschkes. It is a museum, a muse- see -'em, and I am certainly amused. Also amazed.

And before I start calling the kettle black, I must look to my own dark pots. (Is anyone old enough to remember that expression, about the pot calling the kettle black?) I keep talking about clutter, yours, mine, ours, everyone's, including poor people's - not poverty-stricken, but poor. Rich people just have more expensive tschotschkes, more, and more expensive. Earlier this morning and it is still relatively early by other people's standards, I was thinking I could offer to help and cull some of the clutter in this house. Well, look to your own house, I said to myself. My clutter is not as attractive, consisting as it does of mounds and piles of paper, uninteresting until read. The clutter here is instantly appealing, full of humour and colour and gaiety and playfulness and charm and invitations to linger. How could one bear to throw anything away?

My friend is a designer and an artist and a generous free-wheeling spirit with great panache. She deserves every tschotschke she owns and they are lucky to be owned by her. I must admit I've even given her some - but useful, functional, ultimately disposable ones.

I'm going to have to think about that. Is it too late to change?