Carden Challenge 2017

I didn't want to brag about this excessively on facebook since some of my competitors this weekend are fb friends, but since I only share my blog with non-work-world contacts, check this out:

WE WON THE CARDEN CHALLENGE (biodiversity category)!!!!! And had a blast doing it!!

Are you wondering, what is the crazy wordy/birdy lady talking about? This is a 24 hour birding/critter-finding competition where you spot as many species as you can between 6 p.m. Friday night to 6 p.m. Saturday night in a set count circle. Birds are key (you can get upwards of 100-125 different species of bird in the Carden Alvar area if you know where to look), but mammals, odonates (dragonflies and damselflies), butterflies and herptiles (frogs, turtles, snakes, salamanders) are all on the table too in the biodiversity category. Funds raised by our friends feeling sorry for us for putting ourselves through the madness go to a great local land trust in the Carden Alvar area, and the event is basically just a wild and crazy ride careening around these 60,000+ acres of land by car to hit all the good "hotspots" for species again and again until the clock runs down on your day!

In past years, there's been a bit more 'drama' than I prefer - personality clashes, harsh words, hurt feelings, etc. Not to mention my trip to the ER in the middle of the night in 2015. But this year, with a fresh new team aside from my stalwart companion Trish (Challenge buddies since 2014) including a fabulous birding colleague from NCC to nail all those tricky hiding/high-talking warbler species, we were ready to go. We were called The Bruce and Spruce Moose - because 3/5 team members were from the Bruce Peninsula, and 2/5 were representing the White Spruce of the Carden Alvar.. and because we were all hoping to see a moose! Good for just the one point, but a rare find on the Challenge unless you're in the right place at the right time. (sidenote, I've decided I want next year's team name to be For Those About to Rock Pigeon - I'm writing that here so I don't forget!).

We started at 6 p.m. with a bunch of other teams and the mayhem was instant: there's a Northern Mockingbird over there! Did you see the Ruby-throated Hummingbird in the apple tree?? I hear a spring peeper! Throw down the robin and red-winged blackbird though we're going to see a LOT more of those this weekend! We had 10 birds in 7 minutes.

The evening was cool - we visited Prospect Marsh to hear tons of frogs calling, and all sorts of interesting marsh birds like Virginia Rail, Willow Flycatcher, Marsh Wren and Sora. As the sky darkened we crept up Wylie Rd. (the most famous road in Carden) and saw Common Nighthawk displaying in the sky, heard American Woodcock "peent"ing, and listened to the insistent call of the Whip-poor-wills "whip poor will! whip poor will!" like a broken wind-up toy that won't stop!! We called it around 11 p.m. and were in bed by 11:30, anticipating our 5 a.m. wake up call and very long next day!

Whip-poor-will

I felt very angry and sad when my alarm went off at 5 a.m. but in my hazy stupor in the washroom, cursing myself "why do I do this stupid thing?!" (I'm not a morning person), I heard an Eastern Phoebe calling outside the cabin we were staying in and couldn't help but smile and get excited for the day ahead. Armed with caffeine, we were driving away by 5:30, ready for the dawn chorus.

Eastern Phoebe (call: "FEE-BEE!")

It rained on and off all day, but in the dry/warm bits we watched butterflies and dragonflies come alive out the grasses. Olympia Marble is still my favourite spring butterfly, but no complaints about catching the tiny Spring Azure after a long day of nonstop Silvery Blues. We saw two huge Blanding's Turtles just hanging out on logs in wetland, yellow throats glowing. We were sad we may not get our bullfrog, not having heard it the night before, but after getting waylaid IDing a ton of tiny forktail damselflies, just as we were about to climb back into the van we heard the "more rummmm" call from a nearby pond and high fived!

"Hello" (Blanding's Turtle; always smiling)

Spring Azure

We saw a moose 15 mins before the Challenge started and worried we may not see one again. But we were lucky enough to see TWO! As our van driver Brittany squealed over to the side of the road we all laid eyes on these huge beautiful creatures, Trish and I were pounding on our windows like our team had just scored at a hockey game - "MOOOOOOSE!!!!!!!!!!".

Moose views (Carden, May 27/17)

I'm not a patient enough person to be a hardcore birder, but the trick with Golden-winged Warbler and Blue-winged Warbler, which hybridize, is to ID them by sight vs. sound. We heard both of them call ("bzzz bzzz bzzz" from the GW, "bzzz-bzzz-*raspberry* from the BW), but needed to see them. So I patiently followed a GW as he flew from tree to tree, hiding among the leaves, calling intermittently until finally I got my binoculars on him. Perfectly marked, I could now confirm this species for our list - and just then he threw back his head and buzzed his little heart out. Totally worth my hands being munched by mosquitoes for the 5 minutes it took to find him.

Golden-winged Warbler

I left much of my skin and blood for the blackflies and mosquitoes but am happy to report I'm tick-free! We destroyed the van with our muddy boots. We frequently rode around with the doors open on a rental Grand Caravan to listen for bird calls, renaming it "our Jeep", and splashing it through mud puddles. I somehow made it from 5:15 a.m. breakfast to not eating lunch until 12:45 ("somehow" involved pineapple, a fresh baked chocolate chip cookie from Quaker Oaks on Monck Rd., gummy peach slices, chips and salsa, coconut smiles, and homemade "fruit leathers" - yum!) and then basically assaulted the (volunteer) BBQ workers for two giant hot dogs, three raspberry macaroon squares and the tastiest coke zero of my life. We still continued to eat all afternoon, and at dinner I had a full plate of meat/potatoes/grains, AND two slices of pie for dessert. And Chicago Mix when I got back to the cabin. YIKES! We only walked 7,500 steps, but the mental exhaustion of constantly searching/watching, hopping out of the car, squinting through binoculars or the scope, planning, chatting - apparently we took 25,000 mental steps and I was determined to eat it all back ;)

We graciously took our win, and fully acknowledged that we couldn't have done it without the amazing birding skills of Esme who would watch something fly by and then say something ridiculous like "there goes a vesper sparrow" (I picked the most non-descript tiny brown bird I could think of). Then she would patiently wait for the rest of us to find it in our binoculars or hear it's call so we could ID it too. We ended up getting more bird species than the competitive birding category winners (we had 126 to their 125!), in addition to the 10 mammal species, 10 butterflies, 5 dragonflies, 1 snake, 7 frogs and 2 turtles we saw/heard.

Our 2017 nameplate will be added for next year! Cool!

The best part (aside from Moose Mania) was how much fun it was - chatting with other teams, laughing/joking/eating with my team, visiting friends in the area to check out their properties (who has Blackpoll Warbler, Bay-breaster Warbler and Warbling Vireo just hanging out at their house!? I love Carden). Wouldn't trade the insane 24 hours for anything and can't wait to do it all over next year. My memorable quotes were my scream of "IT'S NOT A CABBAGE WHITE!!!!" for the first Olympia Marble caught, "the toads are running away while still having sex!!!" (literally, hopping while copulating - dying to get away from us but unwilling to stop their true love), "this is nerd insanity!" as Brittany tried to keep up with recording our excited species in that first 7 minutes, and Trish's 5:20 a.m. very subdued dance which involved "raise the roof" hands and a quiet repeated "birds birds birds birds".

Now, please avert your eyes from my disgusting blackfly bite covered torso-to-ears and have a lovely week.

From Awful April to Marvelous May

*written May 10 - only finding time to post it now.. Marvelous May was still pretty friggin busy!!


April 2017 will not go down as one of my favorite months in history. A lot of amazing stuff happened, such as being a part of the crew of the play I Hate Hamlet which ran at the Guelph Little Theater from April 20 to April 30. It took up a lot of time, but was an absolute blast and I met a ton of amazing people in the process. I wouldn't change it for anything. However, trading in my hobby of regular exercise for a new hobby of sitting on my ass for four hours a night three times a week and sometimes for entire Sundays well eating all of the junk food I could get my mouth on including king-size Twizzlers, baked goods, gummy worms, Tootsie Pops, and just you name it - any bit of junk food that came near me was in trouble. I've always been known to eat my feelings and I feel like I have been on an eating frenzy since mid-March when I came down with the dreaded two-week cold and was literally dying barely off the couch sick for two whole weeks. I started eating to feel better (spoiler alert – it didn't work) and then as things at work got really crazy and things in my personal life took a serious nosedive, I continued to just eat and eat and hope that I would start to feel better. Again…this didn't work. And there is no worse feeling than only being able to fit comfortably into two pairs of your pants (yoga pants excepted, thank god for yoga pants). 


April was definitely an exciting month at work, hiring and training a brand-new staff person and a brand-new office in an area in which I haven't worked before, and getting to tour around Happy Valley Forest a little bit trying to understand the lay of the land and what my new employee will be up to out there for the next little while. However, the more days I spend out of the office the more the emails pile up, the more I get behind on important deadlines, and this all culminated with feeling extremely stressed out one morning, staying home from work to just put my head down and get a handle on things without the added aggravations in my day of packing lunch, driving downtown, walking the 10 mins to the office, chatting with my coworkers (often against my will - though less of that these days), firing up my computer, etc. etc. I just wanted to get going and get my teeth into something so I could feel like I was making some progress. That was the exact moment in time that my boss chose to call me and asked me in her kindest voice "how are you doing?". At which point I decided it was important to burst into tears and tell her I was not doing so well. Then I yelled at her (in a friendly way) for asking, and said "it's not like I would've called you to tell you that I was feeling really overwhelmed, but you were nice and asked, so this is your fault!". The important thing is that my boss has a good sense of humor and is a really kind and caring person. She actually ended up letting me off the hook on a few deadlines which massively improved April for me, taking it from miserable to manageable at work at least.. for a few moments. 


Let's not forget about the home renovation that didn't go well. Jeff and I have been dreaming about refinishing our natural oak hardwood floors that run through our front hallway dining room and out to the side entrance for years. They don't match the barnboard hardwood we have in the downstairs living room or the tiles we have in the kitchen or front entrance. We had a dream of making them blend a bit better with the light colored tiles and adding a bit more light to our fairly dark downstairs by whitewashing them. We love that rough, beachy look that you get with whitewashed natural wood and thought that would look awesome in our dining room. And I still think it would have, but at this point we will never know. On Good Friday when Jeff decided he was going to go full hog on the staining and varathaning portion of the project (after spending two maddening weekends getting the varathane off of the original hardwood, going through multiple rented sanders, reams of sand paper, and much sweat and swearing) I returned from a bike ride to find him sitting desolate on our front step. "What's wrong?" I asked "I ruined the floors". Well, that's just what every homeowner wants to hear!. The problem was that Jeff had run out of whitewash stain partway through the job and since the stores were closed there was no way to get any more stain until the first application had well dried. He was worried about the lines between the two applications blending together. I was less worried – I thought we could blend them together, sand down any overlap, and I'm sure it would look just fine because we were going for "shabby chic" anyway! On Saturday, after the second application of stain went down on the other half of the floor, we were left with a very distinct bright white diagonal line running down the middle of our front hallway and two different shades of white on either side - because no two cans of stain are ever actually the same. Jeff tried to convince me that maybe we should just varathane over it – we're going for that unfinished/messy look right? Well, I said, yes, but I didn't picture it as two tone flooring with a very distinct line running right down the center. After lots of googling, staring, test sanding, thinking, and yes, more tears from my end, Jeff suggested that maybe the best thing to do was put another coat of stain over the entire floor which would hide the line. So we did it. And it worked. However, the floor now resembled the bright white of a hockey rink under florescent lights. You could just draw on some red and blue lines and we could have a fabulous game right there in the dining room. The following weekend Jeff re-rented the sander he had used to take the varathane off in the first place and shabby chic up'd our floor by introducing variations in the bright white, grinding down to the wood in some spots, letting the grain show through in other spots, and leaving some spots with a thicker coat. The end product actually looks nice, though it was not at all what we were planning, and we now have beautiful white hardwood floors… I think I might have reached the end of my DIY rope. I'm starting to wonder if there gets a point in your life where you think "okay… life is too short. We have enough stress at work. I think we should just pay someone to do this." I don't think I'll ever convince the Dutch guy that this is the right way to go. But it's where my mind is heading.


This past weekend I spring cleaned and organized the shit out of my house. I wish I had taken before pictures of my kitchen utensil drawers, so there would be any point in posting the after pictures (most people are probably like - don't all utensil drawers have separators? no. they do not. and I do not recommend living like that for 7 years, or any amount of time!). I can't believe how much my life has changed knowing that all the wooden spoons are in one spot and I simply need to open a drawer and reach towards the same spot and a wooden spoon will be in my hand in less than two seconds. It's amazing. I'm also doing things like getting rid of old disgusting sauce stained/food-baked plastic tupperwares, and replacing them with clean shiny glass ones. I also tossed a nasty old coffee mug that always made my tea taste like garbage, and replaced it with a very fancy new one. Okay, I might have been retail therapy-ing my grief out at Kitchen Stuff Plus and Solutions the storage store, but when the end result is that fabulous, no one is going to begrudge me. Jeff and I also decided no more home renovations this spring/summer, so even though we have several hundred dollars of hardwood flooring destined for the upstairs living room and hallway sitting in our guest room, and now that we have white floors we really need to repaint the badly mismatched green/taupe walls, those things are NOT getting done while the weather is nice for bike riding. So if there's another rainy weekend coming up, maybe, but maybe not. I think these two need a break. 

Speaking of bike rides, I got back on my bike and it felt amazing. I rode to and from work today and didn't even regret it even though it was 3°C with a windchill of 0°C this morning. I ran - buggering up my hip, but when is some part of me not broken? I walked on the treadmill while devouring The Handmaid's Tale, I've taken the dog on beautiful epic walks, and hiked up and down hills in fabulous natural areas. Moving my butt feels so so good. As I joyously rode home today in the beautiful 14° sunshine I said out loud to myself "I like who I am when I exercise". I thought it was important that I write that one down somewhere. I've also been cooking again – partly due to the excellent organization of wooden spoons, and partly due to the fact that I maybe mostly didn't eat vegetables for the past seven weeks, and thought it was important that I start trying to do that again. Cooking is amazing. I forgot how nice it is to have an actual meal to simply put in a tupperware and take to work and voilà lunch. More than anything, I'm actually starting to get work under control, by saying "no" – did you know that's a philosophy you have to take on at work as well as in your personal life when you're feeling overwhelmed? Don't go along on unnecessary trips, meetings, phone calls, etc. if you can help it. Because the key to getting your actual work done is putting your head down and doing your work. And I've been able to do that several times already this month, and my to do list is finally starting to shrink, and that feels amazing. And for someone who was once afraid of delegating, I thank the universe every day that I have two permanent staff plus two summer staff to delegate every single thing I possibly can to. :-) In good news, the Happy Valley Forest is now in my portfolio of natural areas! That is so cool, and I'm so excited to get to spend a bit more time in this place that's really special to me, a place that I have been learning about since the middle of my university career. It was actually the place that got me thinking "I'd like to work at the Nature Conservancy of Canada someday" when I was researching it for a project in third year. And now I work there. But I don't have to spray the herbicides, I just get to say how important it is that we kill the garlic mustard, and then a great dedicated local team does that part. As Doreen would say, "life is good".


After Easter long weekend the worst happened. My grandmother Doreen had been recovering from surgery for colon cancer since the end of January. There were a lot of complications after her surgery, and she had recently started a round of oral chemotherapy. At 82, I was really worried that this would be too much for her system. At the start of the long weekend she been admitted to the hospital, and when I spoke to her on the phone Thursday, she asked that I wait until after Easter weekend and when she was feeling better to visit her because she didn't want me to see her in the current state she was in. That worried me – she had never said anything like that before – but I tried to put it out of my mind and hope for the best, and make sure that I ended the conversation like every phone conversation I've been ending since I found out she was sick in January – by gushingly, desperately, overwhelmingly telling her how much I loved her. I'll never forget the last words we said to each other because it was me telling her how much I loved her, and her telling me just how much she loved me too. I would highly recommend ending every conversation like this because you never know when it will be the last one. Doreen died on the Tuesday. The grief I've been processing since then, three weeks ago, isn't like anything I've ever experienced before. It's completely different from spending most of last year terrified about losing my dad to cancer. It's different than losing other grandparents I wasn't as close with, or ones I hadn't known as long. It's different than losing my beloved childhood dog Rusty. I've never felt pain like this before, and I keep wondering when it's going to stop. But I'm doing my best to feel it all, embrace the waves of grief when they come, and focus really hard on remembering everything that was wonderful about Doreen and feeling so grateful that I had the chance to have her in my life. She and my grandpa met as a fluke, but because of that I had a wonderful grandmother for over 20 years, and a wonderful friend for the past decade. We celebrated her life yesterday, and it was truly a great life. It was full of volunteer work, generosity, family, laughter, love, creating a legacy by being true to oneself, and touching the lives of many many people by simply showing interest and care in everything they had to say and all of their passions. Someone has described grief to me like an earthquake, with many aftershocks. And as awful as it feels when the aftershock consumes me, there is always a small amount of relief afterwards that grows bigger each time it happens so I know I am on some sort of forward-moving journey, and I look forward to getting to a place in time where I have just good memories, and most of the pain is erased. But oh my goodness if anyone is reading this and you have someone in your life that you cherish, make sure to tell them. And watch out for me, because if you're someone I cherish, you're going to be hearing about it.

Sad stuff aside, I have finally moved on to Marvelous May. Funeral aside, May has been a good month. I've got to spend lots of time with my new best friend my electric car Sparky, testing how to drive it, hypermiling, giving up blasting the heat in order to save the battery, searching surreptitiously for plugs everywhere I go, and loving just being able to answer the goddamn phone with the push of a button when it rings instead of fumbling through my purse for my headphones and telling whoever is calling "hang on hang on I've just got to plug in my headphones!!". I think my odds of getting into an accident over a phone call have been significantly reduced. I love Sparky and it's been a wonderful part of my early May. We did 1,200 km on our first 35L of gas plus a bunch of charges, and I'm so proud :-) 

As with any trying time, it comes to the surface how lucky you are to have people who will stand by your side. So thank you so much to my hubby, my friends (with the usual VIP shoutout to Dawn - mother of a 2 month old who was there for me when I needed her, no questions), and my incredible work colleagues for being so sympathetic, so understanding, and so supportive – exactly what I needed during an awful time. You know I'll have your back if you're ever feeling as down as I have been feeling. I don't wish you this pain, but this pain means that you love someone deeply and all the way through. And what would life be without that?

So I'll continue with Marvelous May. Exercising, cooking, walking Bailey in the sunshine, spending time with great friends, smiling and closing my eyes with the top down on the convertible as we drive to Boston for the long weekend, relishing the amazing biodiversity that all of my gorgeous natural areas have to offer when I'm lucky enough to be in them, and being grateful that even though my job is insanely busy, I still manage to find work-life balance, and at the end of the day I'm doing something I can feel good about. So goodbye forever on April 2017, hello Marvelous May, and I'm looking forward to a Jubilant June. Happy Spring all.