It's a good thing I have visitors soon.

Save me. I'm quickly becoming one of those people who tell their life stories to anyone who has the bad judgement to ask "How are you?". Several things have combined to make me this way - let's take what I hope is a comical-and-not-too-whiny tour of my descent into crazy, shall we? A.A. Milne has agreed to be our tour guide, so there's that.

We need to start way back in May. My boyfriend left me unexpectedly after 2.5 years, then almost immediately after, I moved here to Peterborough where I know no one. I subsequently hermitted up in my apartment for the month of May because I didn't feel like making new friends just yet.

This is the greatest rendition of Eeyore I have ever seen.

I don't think that was an unreasonable reaction given the circumstances. So then my field work started, in which I got to do what I love (watch birds), but I did it alone, and it required ridiculous hours such that I wasn't able to start, let alone maintain, a social life. 

You're damn right I talked to the birds. 

The only people I had any semi-regular contact with were Joe, my supervisor, and Kristen, another Master's student under the same supervisor, but even then I would go a week or more without seeing them. I would hear  my neighbours downstairs, but we had opposite working hours so we didn't really cross paths. So I didn't accumulate any friends, needless to say, although I did feel like I learned a lot about birds and agriculture. I also hit the first round of homesickness. This marks the point where I began telling cashiers stories of my friends and family, and expounding on the plight of grassland birds in hay fields, just to be able to talk to someone.. Even I want to tell Past Sarah to shut the heck up.

"I've got a twin, and my best friend gets married next summer, and bobolinks are at risk!"

Then my field work ended at the start of August, as it did for everyone in the same line of bird work that I do, so Joe and Kristen both took well-deserved vacation time. Kristen left for a cottage, then went home to Windsor, and is now camping in Algonquin Park. Joe tidied up loose student ends across Ontario and has now gone to the Adirondacks for a couple of weeks. Which leaves me both work-less and aquaintance-less. This was fine for the first week, as it let me catch up on sleep and go back to a regular eating/sleeping schedule, but without the field work to keep me active, that quickly led to too much of both of those things.

A month of this would not have had good results.

I loathe jogging, but needed some form of cardio, so I started skipping rope. At first I had to stop every 20 jumps or so because I had mis-timed the hop. And, the day after my first round of skipping, I thought I might be dying. Muscles and tendons I didn't know I had were screaming at me. Walking was painful and stairs were problematic. It took me three days to recover and try again, but I am pleased to report it has gotten much better now, and I'm even coordinated enough to do at least 150 jumps without having to disentangle my feet. 

Proportions eerily accurate. Minus the tail.

But skipping is not a multi-person activity. I had solved my couch potato-ness but not my lack of social contact. But now I had gone so long without seeing people I knew, and without any social obligations, that the thought of making the effort to ask someone I had met once or twice to go out to eat/go to a movie/go for coffee, or even do these things by myself, was actually more than a little stressful. Especially when one of those few people would ask me to do something without any advance notice.

You mean...I'd have to shower? Now??

I'll make no excuses for myself: I'm being a baby. A shy, somewhat lazy, non-confident, nervous baby. Which brings us, finally, to present-day me. I haven't seen anyone I know in 2.5 weeks. I haven't had a real in-person conversation with anyone for that period of time as well. I've been trying to arrange to go see a movie with someone but it hasn't worked out yet. My self-confidence swings between so-low-I-don't-make-eye-contact-at-the-grocery-store to so-high-I-think-everyone-wants-to-know-everything-about-me. Most recently I swamped a few people (who I haven't seen in years) on Facebook with the whole story of my university career and fieldwork to date, along with some random Italian language knowledge, just because they asked me how I was. Before that I was having trouble responding to texts because I didn't think I had anything interesting enough to say. My confidence is bi-polar.

<--->

         :D I'm the only one! :D                                    :( I'm the only one :(

I am so very glad that I have some visitors arriving soon. Not just for my sanity's sake, but for the sake of the people who have to deal with me. And soon after that I'll start classes at Trent, in which I will hopefully make some friends - if I don't scare them off by being neurotic.

And I've just realized this whole blog is just me telling my life story to people, like I've been doing to random cashiers and Facebook friends. Heh. I hope you find it funny, if not interesting :)

<3 BirdNerd Sarah

In which nothing is straightforward.

Hello hello there...Emily? Maybe? Mary-Claire for nearly-certain :D {by the way, is it capital-M capital-C? or capital-M lowercase-c?}

I digress.

WARNING - RIDICULOUS/EMBARRASSING PHOTOS TO FOLLOW - PROCEED WITH GLEE.

The last couple of days have been filled with administrative Trent things. Calendars and information on their site had proclaimed August 1 to be the Glorious Day Upon Which Graduate Students May Finally Register, and I have come to accept that I have this deep-seated need to be in control of my life (is that normal? sounds normal) so as soon as August 1 arrived I was on the site, logging in, and trying to register.

With combined excitement/mania.

Which I could not do.

Now just panic.

But..but why?!

(and each of you that thought "But why is the rum gone?!", take a shot. Of rum. Obviously.)

Turns out that Trent is rather lackadaisical {I spelled that right on the first try! BAM said the lady} about graduate registration, since courses never get over-booked or full. Well then. So a few days later, on August 3, my friend Hazel informed me that the courses were finally visible and we were able to register. So off I went again...and this time got as far as the link to the registration site, only to be told that the browser I was using (GoogleChrome, love of my life) was incompatible, and to proceed I would have to download Firefox.

Fine.

So I did, and registered for what's called the Core Course - the only required graduate course for my whole two years. I have to take three courses total over four semesters, and two are electives, so it will be great to get this required one out of the way. The main purpose of it is to write and defend a research proposal for my Master's thesis research, so I'm not predicting too much difficulty (touch wood). 

Next on my list of things to figure out was my Teaching Assistantship assignment. With my letter of offer from Trent came a promise of a TA position for the full two years of my Master's degree. However, I had no idea if we just got them assigned to us, or if we had to apply, or what. Hazel, wealth of information, said that they would eventually put a list of positions up on what's known as WebCT, and we were to approach the indicated professor for the ones we were interested in. Dandy. But when I went to log in to WebCT, I got this message:

"Sorry, but you seem to be running an unknown version of Firefox. To access WebCT, you will need to download a supported browser such as Internet Explorer."

.........

FINE!

So I did. And still couldn't get in, at least not through the myTrent portal. Having dealt with WebCT at Dalhousie though, I knew I could log in directly to Blackboard. So I did THAT and finally found the TA list, among several other very useful documents, and sent my requests. I'll let you know what I get assigned when I hear back. But I still couldn't access my Webmail, no matter which of my three browsers I used. Thankfully, after I piteously posted on the discussion board of WebCT, someone was kind enough to send me the link to directly log in to Netmail, much like I directly log in to Blackboard. 

In summary, instead of having one browser and logging in to one portal, I now have three browsers and log into three different places. 

Oh pillow. You understand.

Next on the list of crazy shenanigans was sorting out what I owe for tuition and by when it must be paid. My online account stated, scarily, that I owed around $6,000 and that $4,000 of that was due by August 15th. For someone who wasn't even able to register until August 3, that was a bit soon. So I went scouting around and found the graduate fees schedule, which stated that I owed around $3,000 and nothing was due until September 28th. Which is it, damn you?! I emailed financial services, who told me that in much the same fashion as registration, graduate accounts were on some sort of delay and nothing would be properly applied to my online account until September 10th, at which point it should reflect that I owe the latter amount by the latter date. At this point I was just sad at the level of difficulty presented in seemingly straightforward tasks.

Simplicity has abandoned this place.

But at least I pay the lesser amount by the later date. I could keep going and tell you how I went on Tuesday afternoon to drop payroll forms at the graduate office, which happens to close at noon on Tuesdays for no apparent reason. I could also tell you how I went to get my student card that day, since I had taken the 40 minute bus trip up to Trent anyway, but was told I was one day too early, as the person who encodes the access pass onto the cards was coming in the next day, and could I please come back Thursday instead. 

But this post would start to sound whiny, so lets see some happy pictures of me and my bird instead.

Bird. Bird is simple and straightforward.

Bird loves me even though I'm nuts.

Bird only asks to be blown on and whistled to.

Also some for occasional hair-chewing. <3

Ah, peaceful bird-thoughts. Oh! Speaking of birds, I was jumping rope last night in the backyard by the river and had THIS guy watching me:

Mama called him "squatchy" :D

That's a black-crowned night heron, which I've never seen before! He was still as a stone for most of my jumping, and it was dusk outside, so I wasn't sure I was seeing him right until he took off when I went closer. Very nice.

Much love to everyone reading, and I hope you don't think I'm TOO crazy.

Sarah 

P.S. almost forgot. this morning, the cat. peed. on my boots. They may never recover. Honestly. Have you ever tried to get cat-pee smell out of things? It doesn't work.

Help me.

This just in: I'm a goofball...AND a foodie (Part 2)

Alright, so after a bit of struggle of trying to be good about eating only things which are healthy and wholesome etc etc, I have come to terms with reality, and the reality is that I am addicted to food. You might say that's silly, everyone is addicted to food, we need food to survive, and you're right. Everyone has to eat or they'd die. But I don't just need to eat, I need to eat tasty things, delicious things, new things, weird things, things I've never heard of, things that look to beautiful to eat but I will of course eat them anyway. I'm a foodie, through and through.

This leads to my wonderful day today. Elizabeth, a contractor hired by the NCC  to do counts on sites for/with me this summer, came up to Peterborough from Port Hope to give me some data sheets, and we went out for lunch. There was a place I'd walked by, but never gone in, called The Planet, that I wanted to try, as I'd looked it up and read amazing reviews. It specializes in vegan/vegetarian foods, but also has a wonderful selection of gluten-free things, such as bread and wraps on which to offer all their sandwiches and burritos. I joined their Facebook page earlier in the week, and mentioned that I was coming in for lunch on Friday, and they were so very kind enough to offer a GF lunch special today!! Gluten-free gnocchi!! It was soooo good. Pan-fried with mushrooms with shitake mushrooms, zucchini, garlic and herbs. Served with a simple but delicious salad: mixed greens, tomato, bean sprouts, and some tasty garlic vinaigrette. I may have cried, a little. I've never been treated with such consideration before. They have earned a loyal customer, let me tell you. I LOVE THE PLANET and I will demonstrate said love with one of those cute little hand heart things all the cool kids do...

 Is it like this?

Or maybe...

Why can't I do this?!

...most heart-shaped but also most awkward...

That's as good as it's going to get. <3 The Planet.

After that amazing lunch, we wandered into the store next door, called Chasing the Cheese. Never have I ever seen so many different cheeses in such a small place. The choice was overwhelming so I asked what the best-selling firm cheese was, and lo and behold the lady pulled out Avonlea cloth-wrapped 1.5 year-old cheddar, from PEI. *sob* cheese from hoooooome!!!! She let us try a bit, and honest to God it tastes vaguely like potatoes. Of course I bought some. 

It smells like potatoes too. I swear.

Our final stop was a place called The Main Ingredient, which carries organic/natural foods, and which Elizabeth had heard carried lots of neat gluten-free things. Sweet jumpin' Jehoshaphat, do they ever. Had neither time nor money enough to truly shop, but some things are just irresistible. 

GF yogurt-covered pretzels. Literally couldn't stop eating them long enough to take a still picture.

Banana muffins!! I love all things banana.

Mwahaha diabolical cookie-making face. Have never seen shortbread mix before. Also, butter.

Next on my day of random fun, and also to distract myself from those pretzels, I went exploring/playing with my webcam to see what goofy stuff I could capture. Below is a selection.

I went on webcam but I don't want anyone to see my face! Yeah!

Oh, an actual mask. That works better.

For when you're feeling like you need to emote like a Disney cartoon.

This is supposed to be a flame. Looks like I have a fluffie on my head.

Hmm. Slightly more scary, although it looks like I thought too hard and my brain caught fire.

For the Doctor Who fans: Are you my mummy?

Is...is that a walrus? And is it eating my head?!

Now a shark!! Why???

...errkkk. Uncannily well-fit. Creeping myself out.

Imagine the voice coming out of someone like this.

"No. Way."

Run, it's a nose-less mouth-less skinny-headed cyclops!

Something's missing...

Who needs emotions when the webcam can MAKE you smile?

Same goes for frowning. My face was neutral for both these pictures.

Alright, enough goofing around for today. Bye now! Bye! Goodbye! Come again!

<3 Sarah

...I am not eating more pretzels, and you did not see me.

This just in: I'm a goofball. (Part 1)

Aren't you shocked?? I swear it's true: I am a goofball and probably one of the most random people you will ever meet...or blog-creep...or whatever it is you're doing here. And if you don't believe me now, you will at the end of this post. I have resolved to use less words and more pictures, even though it takes more time...although if a picture is worth a thousand words, technically I have less words but more words?

ANYWAY, I know, another new post, and it hasn't even been a week!! (Author's note: I don't expect anyone to be reading this but it makes it easier to pretend I have an audience.)I really have an excess of time on my hands now that field work is done. There's still some data entry to pick at but I'm almost finished with that as well so I haven't been going all day at it. I've been handed all this free time, and I'm having some difficulty filling the gap. I don't play sports. I don't play video games (although I would love to own an Xbox right about now, in order to learn). I don't do art. I've been skipping rope as a form of exercise, but at most that takes half an hour out of my day.

Thankfully, I DO read, and I have recently purchased the first four novels in the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin. I had already read the first one, but they came so neatly packaged all together that I didn't mind buying it as well. These are fantastic novels. They're the sort of story that's so rich in detail, without bogging you down I should say, that I feel like I've read at least half of one and I come back and find that I'm not even a quarter of the way through yet, which in this case is cause for extreme excitement. And I have three of them to read.

Life is good.

I take my book and my bird and go outside to read almost every day. Oh right, bird has arrived! Her name is Minnesota, and she says hello.

Although she isn't sure she likes what she sees.

I got Minnesota the summer after my second year at Dalhousie, so I've had her for two years now. She was only a few months old when I scooped her out of the bin-o'-budgies at the local Pets R Us, so she has probably at least another six-eight years left in her life, with any luck. Cripes, I might be 30 before she dies! Minnesota means "sky-colored water" or "cloudy water" in the language of the Dakota Sioux, and I named her that because of her feathers. It's probably tough to see in the picture but her upper half is white and her lower half is brilliant turquoise/blue, like clouds on water :). But mostly she's referred to simply as Bird. 

The other thing I've discovered I do when I have free time is bake. Which, in 35+ degree weather, is a bad habit to have. But I really wanted to so for a couple of mornings in a row I got up early to bake before it got too hot. The first day I made chocolate cake (gluten-free of course), for which I had all the proper ingredients and which turned out very well. I shared with my neighbours downstairs because there was no way I needed to eat an entire cake by myself...but I totally would have if it sat there. The second morning, I made "biscuits". Now, this baking also served a double purpose of getting rid of my milk before it reached its due date. But I didn't really have the proper ingredients to make biscuits, or bread, or really anything that has a valid name, so basically I mixed all-purpose flour, chickpea flour, oil, milk, and salt together, and baked it into little pucks on a cookie sheet. 

Are you not thrilled?

Needless to say, this did not go as well as my cake. They actually tasted pretty good (the chickpea flour makes them very savoury) but they were hard and dense and, after the first day, incredibly dry. To eat them they needed to be drowned in some sort of condiment or dip, and thankfully their interesting flavour meant they went equally well with things like jam, or things like hummus. I did give some to the neighbours again, but I strongly suspect they went in the bin after the first day. I do not blame them, nor am I insulted. That's where mine went.

Part 2 is forthcoming, in which I accept that I am addicted to food.

<3 S.

...is anyone still there :< .....

Well, I wouldn't be surprised if no one reads this anymore. It's been almost TWO MONTHS since I updated this thing. I'm very sorry :( but those two months were the busiest of my field season, and now field work is officially done!! It would be insane to try and recap two months in this post, so I'll satisfy myself with a highlights reel followed by links to public photo albums, and a promise to now resume regular updates. Even though exciting things are over. Whatever! I'll put it on here, mundane or not :)

Highlights Reel:
- I got a GIANT F150 XRT crew cab truck rented so I didn't have to do that signing-out-a-pool-vehicle madness...which was way too big for what I needed but was all they had and I loved it and promptly named it the Tardis
- counts, counts, more counts
- saw Orchard Oriole on three separate sites :D rare buggers around here
- some wicked storms here; once there were 35 lightning flashes a minute for 15 minutes!!
- heat wave arrived, and is still ongoing. hovers around 35 every day
- goldfinches popped up out of nowhere on my counts and I thought I was crazy until I learned they don't start breeding until very late because they time it with the thistles going to seed - cool!!
- I've been baking more often...rice bread then corn bread, chapatis, more recently chocolate cake and chickpea biscuits
-  dragged a dead deer off the road at 4:45 am, and had people stop to see if it was fresh enough to eat :s blergh maybe I'm a naive east coaster but blerrrggghh
- I've been to see Horrible Bosses (awesome!!), Transformers 3 (ennnhh but was nice air conditioning out of the heat), Harry Potter 7.2 (great, but sad they're over)
- Mary-FREAKIN'-Claire appeared suddenly in Lindsay so I took the Tardis and met her and her wonderful grandmother for supper :D
- parents and Brenna came to visit :D no Emily = sad :c but had a fantastic time, lived out of a hotel with them for a week and did touristy things like the zoo, and a couple provincial parks, and ate more bad-for-me food than I have all summer because we went to all these great restaurants :)
- joined Google+...I think it will be better than Facebook (yikes...don't strike me, FB-lightning) but needs many more people in there before that can happen
- Minnesota is back with me :3 yay burrrd. we shared muffin bits today.
- discovered this amazingly funny blog called Hyperbole and a Half; you need to go right now and check it out. I hope she never ever reads this blog because it is so sad in comparison, and I don't pay nearly enough attention to things like grammar and punctuation and the use of caps lock :/ but seriously, go: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/

Picture Links:
These will take you to the public versions of my facebook photo albums :)
Pics from June (there are new ones)
Pics from July
Pics from Mary-Claire visit
Pics from family visit

Whew. That's all for now. Should be some entertaining updates on the way - I'm going to a karaoke bar on Wednesday....

Still nerdy, still birdy.
<3 Sarah

High gear, engaged

Alright so field work has officially kicked into high gear, so updates will be slow in coming and less detailed unfortunately :(
The day after the last post about banding, we went back to the same field to try and get more bobolinks, but no luck. We caught some more savannah sparrows, including ones we had already banded (one guy a total of three times over the two days - poor bugger) but that's it. I did get to do my first extraction though, on a savannah sparrow that was very cleanly caught and so was a good beginner one. I had no problems in handling the bird, but the physics of the mist net itself are tricky. When you think you need to move it one way to free a wing, it ends up having to go the opposite way. The fine string also loses itself in the feathers so you have to blow on the bird every so often to expose it again. Joe was very helpful in giving me tips on what to tackle first and how to move the string. One thing I would never have done without his advice was to put my thumb on the end of the sparrow's bill while trying to free its head. It seems counter-intuitive as it blocked my vision a bit and I had to navigate the string around my thumb now. However, as I was pulling the string over the bird's head I took my thumb away, and the head immediately drooped backwards, making it impossible to move the string off. Bird's necks are very flexible, and if I didn't leave my thumb there, its head just moved around with the string and I would never have gotten it free.
Since then, I've been out doing counts every morning. Of interest this week: an Upland Sandpiper, which aren't that common, stalking around a corn field. Lifer for me. Also some eastern bluebirds, which were also lifers for me.

Eastern Bluebird

Upland Sandpiper - not what I expected in an agricultural field

Also some pretty sunrises:

 Even with the hydro lines.

Same site, different morning.

And probably the most interesting thing was turning a corner and seeing this on the road:

My brain: cat? dead cat?! mobile rock?!! OH.

That's a snapping turtle, and it's the biggest turtle I've ever personally seen, but I don't think she was necessarily big for the species. Hard to give a scale, as I was not about to stick my head close enough to be in the picture, but if you look closely you can see tire tread marks on the gravel, and extrapolate from the width of a tire to how big this mama must be. I say mama because it's most likely that she is a female in search of a spot to lay her eggs, as that's usually the only reason they leave the water. They like to lay in gravelly areas, so hopefully she didn't just lay them on the road.

Although I think she'll lay eggs wherever she damn well wants to.

I dithered around trying to decide whether I wanted to risk my fingers in an attempt to move her off the road - I didn't. The road she was on was a quiet back road, and there was plenty of room for people to go around her. I have since learned that to move them, you should get them to bite down on a branch then use it to pull them off the road. Or if you want to do it Moragh-Jang-style, use a rope to haul them off. Not sure how you attach a rope without getting chomped but she does it.

After counts, I've been meeting up with Kristen and sometimes Joe in the afternoon to help out wherever I can with Kristen's project. She has a lot on her plate, and her field assistant is away in Guelph for this week, so I'm trying to make it a bit easier on her. I am getting good netting experience out of it as well as some human company :D. She snapped this one of me on the Tuesday, from the previous post:

Squeeee I'm a real birder now :3

I spent one afternoon/evening (it might have been two days ago, or four, I have no idea any more) helping Kristen count bug samples. On all her fields she has a series of cups planted in the ground with a water/soap mixture in the bottom, and once a week she collects what's in the cups, to eventually be able to say something about how haying affects what bugs are available for the birds to eat. Every cup has to be gone through, and every bug identified to an order or other taxonomic group, and counted. I'm not squeamish about stuff like that generally, but I will admit that I am not very fond of the smell of these samples. Some of them have had small frogs get trapped, or even mice, and they've been rotting in the field for a week. Slugs are the worst - they make everything like a goopy mass. But it's gotta be done, and I would never want her to have to do it all by herself all the time. We put on movies and tv shows in the background for entertainment - that day was Modern Family, The Office, Willow, and Mars Attacks. It was a pretty enjoyable time, except for my last sample, which had a total of 715 isopods in it (sow bugs). That was just tedious lol.

So picture these guys. Only times 51. And rotting. You're welcome.

Yesterday, we tried netting at another farm where they've been having trouble getting any bobolinks to tag, and unfortunately we weren't any more successful :( we had the net up for three hours and only caught one song sparrow and one black-capped chickadee. Chickadees have a bad habit of pumping their feet open and closed when they get caught, which makes them incredibly tangled. But Joe is an expert so we got her out no problem. After we furled the nets, Kristen and I tried some radio telemetry to see if we could locate the bobolinks that have already been tagged. It's so frustrating. The receiver is a $12,000 piece of equipment, and she has never been able to detect a bird more than 200m away; less if they're deep in the grass or behind trees etc. The idea behind tagging them was to figure out where they go after a hay field is mown, but they could fly kilometers, and the only way to try and track them is to drive the surrounding roads with the antenna mounted on the truck, or what we did yesterday, which was her driving and me holding it out the window. When fields are routinely upwards of 20 acres, only being able to detect a bird to 200m is as good as useless for finding them. We could find 3 of 5, but that's because those three were right on her field, right in front of us. God only knows where the others flew to, but hopes aren't high for finding them.

The Devil. Despair sold separately. Blood, sweat, and tears not included. 

She didn't need my help in the field this afternoon, but I might go count bugs again tonight; waiting on her word. I really hope her telemetry went better today :(.

Forever a birdnerd, and still loving field work,
Sarah