Revenge of the Rodent: The Sequel

This JUST in!

Mouse # 2 has been detected. But we suspect that this one may be hungrier, bigger and more bad ass than the first. That's just the way sequels roll isn't it? This time we're not messing around...no more of this trying to be humane and giving him three chances. We're setting the real trap right away this time...tonight. Maybe they used team work last time to escape from the humane trap. Maybe there is a whole army of mice back to avenge the death of their fallen comrade. The one we've detected tonight is just trying to lure us into the cupboard by loudly munching cereal boxes and sweet potatoes, and then, as we peak into the cupboard to try to catch the rascal, BAM, the army is unleashed!

I suspect we'll be stocking up on traps tomorrow in preparation for war.

All work and no play makes KP happy...but quite possibly extremely dull

The Friday before a long weekend is always the best. You still have classes to go to so you end up being productive for at least part of the day, but classes usually end early and are less work than normal because profs know that no one is focusing. Plus knowing you have 3 full days of weekend ahead make it that much more ok to accomplish absolutely nothing Friday afternoon. The best part about this coming long weekend is the reason: Islander day. It's the PEI equivalent to Ontario's Family Day, so it's not even a real holiday, just a good excuse not to go to class or work.

This week, I learned that the more time I have, the more time I waste. I think this is why I choose to be so busy all the time. If I didn't have a million things to do all the time, nothing would get done. I am fully aware of how ridiculous that sounds, but this week proved my logic perfectly. Swimming is officially over for the year and one morning of volunteering got cancelled so I was left with a lot more free time. It also happened to be a week with a much lighter work load for my classes than I've had in the past few weeks. One would think that all this extra time on my hands would make me more productive, and allow me to get caught up and ahead in school / sleep or accomplish fun and exciting things that I normally don't get the time for. In addition, I also had a car this week for the first time, which could essentially be referred to as a time saving device. So here I am, fewer time commitments, a new time saving device and less to get done. The problem with free time is that it's addictive. Once you take a break it makes getting going again that much harder. I wasted so much time this week doing nothing. At the time it seemed as though I was being productive somehow, but it was just on silly little time wasting things that didn't actually need to get done. So here it is, Thursday night and there is nothing more crossed off my weekend to do list than there would have been if I had been my usual crazy busy self all week.

Luckily, the swim coach sent out a list of swim practices we can attend every week. It means swimming with the younger club swimmers who kick my butt, but on the bright side it means I can add an hour and a half to two hours of swimming to my daily to do list. Not only is this awesome because it forces me to get a good workout in 3-6 days a week, but it will also force me to be more productive the rest of the day. Knowing you have no time makes you a lot more efficient. I happen to like being efficient. Efficient makes me happy.

There's that saying "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" I wonder if I am making myself super dull by being so convinced that I have to be super productive all the time. It's not that I feel that I HAVE to be, it just feels a lot nicer than stressing all the time and depending on the last minute to get things done. My problem is that I love too many things, and I get really excited about too many new things and try to squeeze it all into my schedule somehow. Maybe instead of trying to be productive I should be trying to learn how to prioritize instead of doing everything.

University presents you with so many new opportunities that it's hard to turn any of them down, and even harder to admit you just can't handle more things to do. There was a request for volunteers from the Family and Nutritional Sciences department (thats me!) this week to volunteer with the Diabetes Association of PEI and it took every fiber of my being, and some stern talking to from Sam, not to reply and say "Pick Me!" Even as I sit here, I find myself figuring out in my head how and when I could make time for more volunteering.

I am crossing my fingers that this obsessive busyness is just a phase and that I'll eventually out grow trying to do everything, but I am also crossing my fingers that I never outgrow the passion I have for my profession and willingness and enthousiasm to try anything and everything.

Fired Up!

This week is Diversity Week on campus and today I had the opportunity to attend one of the diversity week events; a luncheon on Quality Access to Food. I am soo happy I went! First of all they served a really delicious curried carrot and peanut soup, yummy oatmeal raisin cookies, and fair trade coffee. The discussion was led by one of my professors, and included a panel of 3 local farmers from PEI. One was an organic pig farmer, originally a chef from north of Toronto who moved here 2 years ago to start a pig farm. One was a young women who started volunteering on organic farms as a cheap way to travel across the west coast of the states, she ended up falling in love with organic farming and came back to the island in 2008 to start her own farm. The third was a fair trade advocate who has done a lot of work with Via Campesina.

I feel like I came away from the lecture with renewed passion for my profession and the acquired knowledge of where to source more local, organic food here on the island. We talked about a couple things that I have really been interested in but haven't been able to devote the time to figuring out for myself such as Community Supported Agriculture. I've been really interested in participating in a CSA for a while now, but haven't really been able to source any farmers offering the service near me until today. Very exciting stuff! I look forward to digging a little deeper into the resources I learned about today in order to find more delicious food. I am hoping to be able to visit some farms, be able to see exactly how they produce their products, and then buy directly from farmers come the summer when everything is in full swing. Having a label say 'free-range' on a package of chicken just isn't enough anymore. Industry has found so many loop-holes to be able to market their products as organic or 'natural' in order to increase sales. My goal is to become a lot more connected with what I'm eating, to know first hand exactly where it came from, what went into its production and the nutritional and environmental impact the product has. I feel very fortunate that I will be on PEI for the majority of the summer because I feel that this is one of the only places where it's possible to learn all this first hand and have direct access to a wide variety of farmers.

I also got a job today! UPEI has a program called SNAP that collects dietary data from elementary school kids in order to evaluate policies and trends and such. I got hired as a student research assistant and will hopefully be traveling to local elementary schools starting in the next few weeks to help out with the data collection. I am really really excited for this project, and would probably even do it for free. I have yet to participate in any research initiatives, and this project is in my field of future practice. It'll be great to have some research experience before embarking on my research based honors degree next September (which I will hopefully find a prof to take me on for) and for any grad school applications when I decided to get my masters/phd. So much exciting stuff coming up!

This weekend I got my first car. It still hasn't quite hit me yet that I will now be able to venture beyond walking distance of campus and explore the island. I only have one picture at the moment. I actually thought they were on my computer already but somehow I plugged the card reader in (thanks dad!) but never actually uploaded them to the computer. Sadly, I'm not even surprised I did that, totally a kp move. Part of my charm I suppose.

I came across a really neat fund raising project for the disaster in Haiti. Food bloggers have united to create a cookbook called Blogaid. What I like about this cookbook-at least what I've read about it- is that there are all sorts of niche foodies involved in the project. There are bloggers with celiac disease, those who are vegetarians, and even the Island's own Micheal Smith has contributed. I am seriously considering buying a copy. There's just no such thing as too many cookbooks.

The Birds

Yesterday was a strange day. I was woken up not by my alarm clock but by crows. Crows are to PEI what raccoons are to Toronto. They are absolutely everywhere and rip apart your garbage bags and make a huge mess. Except here, the crows are out all the time, not just at night. Usually you see them everywhere but just like anything you become desensitized to them and ignore them. but yesterday morning, they were impossible to ignore. First of all they were so loud that they actually woke me up. It sounded as though the entire house was surrounded, and sure enough, when I looked out the window to figure out what the heck was going on, we were in fact completely surrounded. The trees looked as though they were fully leaved, except instead of being pleasantly green and leafy, they were black and noisy and pooping everywhere. The trees all around the house (out my bedroom window and the bathroom window) were saturated with crows. It was so erie and I couldn't help but remember two things: the movie The Birds, by Alfred Hitchcock, and the incident I had walking to school in November.

I was walking to either school, work or the pool, I can't remember where but I was walking up University Avenue. It was fairly chilly out because I was wear my UPEI Panthers toque. So here I am, minding my own business just strolling along (oh wait, I remember now, I was headed to the farmers market to sell raffle tickets for swim team, hence why I was dressed in Panther attire) minding my own business. I was walking just past the Harley club, and there is a crow sitting on the sidewalk. I notice it but think nothing of it and keep on walking. A few meters later, out of no where, all of a sudden I feel something hit my head and I look up, startled, and see my toque flying away down the sidewalk! Before I could even figure out what happened, the toque thankfully lands about 100 meters in front of my on the ground. This stupid crow had actually snuck up behind me, snatched my hat with it's razor sharp talons and flown away with it!! I picked up my hat and put it back on and kept walking still not fully understanding what had just happened, and thinking to myself that if I had witnessed that scene from a car driving by I would probably be laughing hysterically at the sight of some girl running down the street chasing a crow carrying a hat. So the lesson of the day: beware of hat stealing crows, or all crows on the island if you want to be safe.

Also when I woke up yesterday, it was unusually cold in our house. I thought nothing of it since it's -30 outside and our house is old and poorly insulated. Sam checked the oil the other day with our landlord when he was here filling potential mouse holes with tinfoil, so I knew we had oil. I went to the pool for the first session of AUS Swim Champs, followed by a lunch banquet kicking off the weekend, and then came home around 130. When I got home, it was really cold in the house. I checked the thermostat and it read only 11 degrees! It was still set as it usually is so I put two and two together realized that our heater must be broken again. Big Bummer. Sam and I sat in a 10 degree house for a couple hours while we waited for the landlord to come fix it, and then we had to get more oil delivered to be sure that we would have enough, but they couldn't come until Monday, which would be way to late. So 50 bucks later, we got oil right away. Oil is a huge pain. It's super expensive and if you need it within a 4 days of actually requesting it, they charge you a million dollars extra. But there wasn't much we could do other than that. So we left the landlord fixing the heater and bleeding the lines as we went off to work crossing our fingers that the house would be withing the double digits when we got home.

We had a little mini dance party in celebration of heat when we got home from work. Yahoo for working heaters! We watched a movie and made smores in the oven and had a marvelously chill night here at home and then went to bed in preps for my big day of swimming today! I haven't raced since first semester of last year, and I am very excited! I've done some personal best times this year in practice, and while I know I am not as prepared to race as I have been in the past, I'm just so excited to actually race that I know it'll be super fun either way. Racing is fun, and it's the reason we train twice a day so I'd be more worried if I felt 100% prepared and wasn't excited about it.

As for now, I have to go get all my swimming stuff together; I'm in the pool warming up in 30 minutes! The panthers did awesome yesterday, we had a whole bunch of people in consoles/finals and I think almost everyone had either a personal best or a seasonal best in the prelims. I'm hoping everyone will feed of the awesome energy from yesterday and kick some more butt today. I am hoping to contribute to this butt kicking. I'll try to find a link to the results page to post tomorrow!

And Then There Were Three...

Exciting news! Our fourth roommate, who happened to be eating all of our food in the middle of the night is now officially dunzo. We eventually had to resort to a real mouse trap because the humane trap failed miserably on several occasions. So in one try the good old traditional trap worked like a charm. I think we're going to set another trap tonight just in case there are more, but I'm hoping we don't find another mouse belly up tomorrow morning.

This week has been ridiculously busy at school. It's been one of those weeks where I feel like I've been in a rush to do absolutely everything and as a result everything has suffered. I got everything done, yes, but not very well, at least not to my standards. This is the first semester I've ever been forced to settle for that and it really isn't easy. But sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.Something I am trying to and am having issues with accepting.

My Dad is in town (well on the east coast) this week to do some car shopping for my sister and I! It's very exciting for several reasons: a) This time next week I will have my very first car, b) I get to see my dad! It's also exciting because having a car will make it a lot easier to go visit my siter and my grandparents in Amherst and Sackville. Although it's only a hour and a half away, I only realy ever make it over the bridge once or maybe twice a semester. It will also make it a lot easier to get to swim practices and the grocery store and to run errands etc. I'm still not sure what I did to deserve a car but I appreciate it!

The past three years have been spent walking everywhere by lack of choice, and while this can be annoying and time consuming, at the end of the day it's kind of nice. I always resent it a bit while I'm piling on the layers but once I'm out walking I'm (almost) always glad I am. I am really hoping that having a car will allow me to do everything I have yet to be able to here on the island, but at the same time won't make me lazy. I still hope to walk to work and downtown (when it's not too bitterly windy) but I know it'll take a lot of will power not to just jump in the car. It's so easy to just rely on the car all the time for little tasks that are just as easy to walk to or bike to. Every summer I come home and tell myself that I will walk to the grocery store when I'm home but I never end up actually doing any more walking.

It's been freakishly cold here on the island so I opted for a treadmill run today between class and lab. I was in the second row of treadmills and the girl running in front of me was too funny. She was listening to an ipod and not only was she running, but she was busting mad moves at the same time. She had her hands pumping, her head bobbing and was loving her life. It made my day for sure. I was a little envious actually. I was not having nearly as much fun as she was as I was dripping and huffing and puffing. Whenever I do get the urge to dance up a storm at the gym, which is often because my ipod is magic and always plays exactly what I want to hear at exactly the right time, I am always way to self conscious to actually throw a fist pump or two in the air. But I have officially added dancing on the treadmill to my list of things to do before I die.

Tomorrow morning is the first session of Atlantic University Swimming Championships hosted by UPEI and although I don't have any races tomorrow, I am very excited for the meet to get underway. We got our new team jackets today and they look really sharp on everyone, they're nice black soft shells with UPEI Swimming, the panther logo and our initials embroidered on them. I haven't raced yet this year because of my ticker and it's potential to malfunction but I decided I would race at AUs. I race on Saturday morning and Sunday morning and since my dad is here, it'll be the first time he's seen me swim since I swam Esso swim when I Was like 5. I like racing in the pool because since I'm just quasi starting and learning, the improvement rate is huge which is always fun. Plus I don't really have a ton of expectations going into races. Obviously doing personal best times and swimming well is always the goal but there's no pressure to perform, no teams I'm trying to make and no one (including myself) has any preconceived ideas about how fast I should be, who I should be beating etc. It makes racing so much fun! I haven't been this excited to race in a really long time.

As for now I need to hydrate and get lots of sleep before the big weekend, And also attempt to contain my excitement about seeing my dad and getting a car! I may have to learn how to drive standard, which will be quite the adventure since I have major spastic tendencies. Either way I hope to update this blog more often than I managed to last week so it will be a well documented learning experience!

Fabulous February!

Yahoo for February!

February is an exciting month for many reasons, particularly this year with the kick off of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver a mere 12 days away. It's one month closer to spring, home of valentines day, and the month I will be going to New York City for the first time. Lots to look forward to for sure!

Also in February are the Atlantic University Swimming Championships that are being hosted for the first time ever here in our home pool at UPEI. It's going to be a jam packed weekend; we swim prelims every morning and finals every evening. Unfortunately I have to work both Friday and Saturday night so I am going to miss finals but I'll be cheering for my fellow panthers from afar. To get pumped up for AUS champs, I hosted a team spaghetti dinner and poster making party last night. There was sooo much food and we made a whole bunch of giant banners and posters to adorn the pool walls next weekend. Every one is getting amped up and we're tappering for the even as you speak. My schedule this semester has somehow managed to be even more jam packed than usual so I haven't really been swimming very much, only 3-4 times a week so I am really just craving some hard practices when I go to the pool, but I'm sure I'll be glad of the extra starting, diving, turning practice come Saturday morning for my first race.

A lot to do before the weekend though! Quizes, midterms, assignments, oh my!