New improved laundry system, using a 20L pail. I purchased the wash plunger in an "antique" store. The plunger is circa 1850-1900. Not sure if it still qualifies as an antique when I am actively using it for its intended purpose. In rainy or snowy weather I often have to finish drying clothes in the tent with the wood stove making it nicely dry.
A lunch break after a morning of doing laundry. Not my favourite chore, but a necessary one. I usually do it weekly to keep up. Takes about 3 hours of continuous labour.
List of chores commonly done
Daily:
- Pick salad ingredients.
- Cook supper meal.
- Wash dishes.
- Send SPOT "OK" message.
- Fetch water.
- Gather fireplace or stove wood.
- Break firewood to size or saw stove wood.
- Heat water and fill shower bag.
- Update calendar and journal.
Weekly:
- Check satellite phone voicemail and text messages.
- Spa treatment (Trim nails and hair.)
- Aliquot grub for next week. (Most is cached elevated for protection.)
- Laundry
- Catch and clean fish or game for two meals.
As required:
- Gather fruit or mushrooms in season
- Sharpen tools (knives, axe).
- Mend clothes.
- Mend gear.
- Leather treatment for boots
- Set saw teeth.
- Clean stove and pipes.
- Fetch birch bark for tinder.
- Split kindling.
- Prepare and bake three bannocks for three days' worth of meals.
- Level tent floor with moss.
- Clear or create portage trails.
- Portaging (the hardest chore of all)
- Setting up camp
- Breaking camp
The above list is to help answer the question that I am often asked "What do you do all the time?" It is not just exploring, canoeing, hiking, fishing, hunting, which are all great. It is amazing how much time is spent doing "chores". Duties like these make me appreciate the work that people had to do in the "old" days without electricity, running water, appliances.
I eagerly look forward to Sunday as a rest day, doing as few chores as possible and reading some of a few novels that I take with me. Usually I put down a novel, and do not read any more until the following Sunday, but all week I am thinking about the story ... "Wonder what happens next ...?" I am convinced that old-time families often took Sunday as their day-of-rest, not just because they may have chosen it as a worship day, but like me needed one day to rest and recharge.