We’re spending the week at our cabin in Wisconsin, our annual tradition. I’m pretty sure every other cabin owner in northwest Wisconsin does the same, at least judging from the number of watercraft on the lake and people in line at the local grocery store.

This is our fourth summer owning this place. I remember it feeling very overwhelming at first. I struggled to understand what sort of yardwork needed to be done. I didn’t have any strategies in place for cleaning or hosting. I’ve since developed some tips and tricks; I should do a real blog post on this someday. But so far my top cabin-owning/hosting tips are:

1. Buy a rainbow of bath towels so that everyone can have a different color. And put hooks in all the bedrooms so that people can squirrel away their towels.
2. Buy tons of hand towels. You will want to change out the bathroom hand towel at least once a day when there are guests.
3. Even if you are a minimalist like me, you must have an extra set of sheets for every bed.
4. Buy the kid sleeping bags with built-in pillows; fewer things to keep track of!
5. Pick two kinds of beer and only keep those on hand. Guests can bring up other stuff if they want it, but if you expand your own beer purchases beyond just two kinds the refrigerator will quickly become a disaster.
6. Sandwiches for lunch; burgers for dinner. This allows the lettuce, onion, and tomato to be sliced up in the morning and used for multiple meals in a row!

This list ended up being longer than I expected. Maybe I do know what I’m doing.

I have been busy this week mostly with mowing and yardwork. I had to break up the mowing into a two-day project because there was so much to do. I cleared some raspberries (terrible job!) and I’ve been spending the afternoons de-mucking and weeding our beach area. I did not expect to be spending my 40s carefully collecting muck from a lake with my bare hands but here we are.

I have not seen my beaver friend, but I did see the water snake and he is disturbingly large and I am really still not okay with swimming snakes.

I am also very pleased with the fact that our cabin has an upstairs living area and a downstairs living area. We’ve brought the kids’ favorite cousin up with us for the week and they are all having a great time. It’s nice that they can take over the basement but I can still read on the couch upstairs undisturbed by their boisterous wrestling and even-more-boisterous farting.