Final flight of Porch Family Robinsons

Well, the robins have flown the coop. Er, nest.

They grew up so fast! It was difficult to get good pictures, what will all the parental protection and all. Here a couple of enthusiastic week-old beaks. The opening of the door always prompted them to pop up - like *I* was the one serving them dinner.



Last Friday, we left the house in the morning to take the car into the shop. Three of the four birds were perched on the edge of the nest, looking rather expectant. And also, puffy. Like this:



(This pic was actually taken a little later, when I realized it was probably my last chance to capture them.)

Anyway, I had gone to the end of the porch for some reason, and as I came back toward the nest and approached the stairs (below the nest), there was a sudden furious flutter, swoosh, and SPLAT! as one of the little ones took flight, while simultaneously letting go a copious volume of shit. Which missed me by inches. (He landed across the street in the neighbour's driveway, and disappeared shortly thereafter.)

I snapped the picture above when we got back, and sometime later in the morning, these two fellas took off, unwitnessed by us. The last one was finally perched in solitude on the edge of the nest, and took flight when I came out with some laundry to hang. Bye bye birdie!

And we were left with a silent, friendly porch, and a mountain of bird crap under the nest to clean up. Which, naturally, we are still trying to get around to doing.

Lament for lazy sandwich making

My very favourite lunch to bring to work is an avocado, cheese and spinach sandwich. (With variations, such as chard, peppers, cucumbers, or tomato.) Sweetie McPie makes my sandwich every morning, and I look forward to eating it every day.

Today, my sandwich had a wee bit of unexpected crunch to it. Later, I received this email from my early-morning-sandwich-making honey:

If your spinach was too gritty
and it made your sandwich shitty
I profess my guilt
'twas I who built
who, each item felt,
and viewed (eyes askew)
and knew
that our leafy favourite
was replete with grit,
the farmer's very land
all clay and sand,
amongst the verdant treat
'twas I who did complete
your luncheon
for you to munch on,
not grind, as gravel chewing swine
might do,
noooooo.
I turned a blind eye to dirt
this morning and now
my lunch hour of mourning,
filled with worry borne of dawn's hurry
that my lover's sweet saliva has
become a slurry.

Luckily, I'm not too fussy. My sammy was as delicious as ever. And I always appreciate a bit of extra roughage.

Under siege

Ok, I know that less than 8 hours have passed since I promised to not to talk about the robins, but man! It's a war zone out there.

I'm trying to set up for a work out in the backyard (yes G, your Olympic bar is very very handy!) but I'm under attack! From the moment I stepped outside the door -- and moved quickly to the other end of the porch -- Papa Robin started stalking and swoop-bombing me. (Swoop-bombing is a less aggressive form of dive-bombing. You probably didn't know; I made it up.)

It's going to rain soon, I'm getting hungry, and I need to get some squats and chin-ups in! I'm going to try a different approach (literally - from the front door and through the driveway...) Wish me luck!

Better than TV

We now have four robin chicks living on the lamp outside our back door. Hull Family Robins are providing us with endless entertainment at all times of the day.

Mama and Papa Robin are so busy, constantly swooping in with bugs and worms. The instant they approach the nest, four little heads supporting enormous open beaks pop up waggling wildly, fighting to be the "tallest" to get the treat. It's awesome.

I'm hoping to be able to get a picture, but we've been doing our best to appear uninterested in the nest, just in case this matter to the parents. It doesn't help at all that they built it in the once place on our property that gets the MOST traffic. But they seem unperturbed so far -- if a parent is on the nest, it will swoop away when we open the door, but will return as soon as we're six feet away.

Actually, they're pretty feisty little fellas, those robins. This morning I was out on the porch, and suddenly, on the path between our neighbour's house and ours a black squirrel comes dashing out with Mama Robin totally attacking him. It was like a catfight. Only, with different animals. Squirrel shook her off near the road, but she stalked him across the street and down the neighbour's driveway. Curious. I suspect a tussle over a certain tasty buggy morsel. (Although, apparently robins are more into fruit than worms! Including tomatoes... I'll have to move my cherry tomatoes when they begin to ripen - they are currently sitting right beside the robin's nest!)

Something I never realized - the robins totally sleep at night. When we come home in the evening, there's Mama (or Papa! We've definitely witnessed two adult birds tending the brood) snuggled on top of the babies, apparently keeping watch. But we approach, open the door and go inside and she doesn't move a muscle - totally dead to the world asleep.

Even if we had cable, I think our fascination with the addition to the household would remain unabated. But I suspect, dear reader, that your fascination with this topic has likely waned -- if you've even read this far -- and so I will leave it at that. (Unless something really exciting happens! Like another squirrel-fight! Or First Flight of the Hatchlings!)

What's the colour of a busy summer?

Scarlett.

I spent this past weekend in Toronto, playing at the women's provincial championships for ultimate - playing for a spot at the Canadian Ultimate Championships in Calgary.

We managed to pull it off, and won the final Ontario spot in the women's division. I'll spare the details, but by the end Saturday pool play, things were looking grim. Sunday morning, we managed to pull out all the stops, and gave the rival team a serious shit-kicking.

Joining a competitive team was not something I necessarily planned for this summer. I always like to attend Nationals (and have lucked into picking up with teams in two of the past three years), but because I'm not able to commit to bi-weekly practices and many tournaments, I never go to tryouts and instead enjoy league play and pick-up teams for tournaments during the summer.

But after having done a bit more focused training over the winter, I've been playing with a little more confidence, and have been enjoying the frisbee so much more this summer than in the past couple years. When I heard that Scarlett (the women's competitive B team in Ottawa) was looking to round out their relatively short (as in numbers, not height) roster with a few more players, I couldn't resist enquiring. Things worked out, the captain graciously agreed to let me practice only once a week... and now I'm going to Calgary with a group of awesome ladies. (And McPie is attending too, with a Masters team.)

So, now I'm up to three nights a week of frisbee for the next month or so, and that makes all the other days that much squeezier. I'm SO not complaining - I get to do even more of something I love, have an excuse to go on a fabulous vacation with my hubby, get to stay in shape while doing it... And I still have a couple of days a week that I can use to catch up on (or prepare ahead for) all the things that can fall by the wayside when we're out of the house most nights of the week.

Oh, and! The second biggest highlight of the day! On the drive home from Toronto, we rewarded ourselves on our victory by stopping at the Big Apple for pie. What a crazy, kitschy place. But good pie, and plenty of it. I even brought one home for supper. It went well with the steak and caesar salad that McPie had ready and waiting...

First harvest

Nature watered the garden while we were away at the cottage for a week, and we arrived home to a bushy green bounty. I don't think I can adequately express how pleased I am to have successfully grown something edible in my very own backyard. Not just edible, but delicious and plentiful enough to feed multiple people!

To celebrate, we invited a friend for dinner to share the harvest on Sunday night.

I picked enough chard to make a big salad with leftovers for several more (it's sweet and tender enough to eat without cooking). Leafminers left the leaves scarred, but they are still healthy enough, and delicious. We picked all the beans that were fully grown, and it was plenty for three people. The beans were a little past their sweet and tender prime, but still tasted garden fresh.

McPie tested the carrots by pulling up one, which turned out to be four (I didn't really spread my seeds well), and they were only bite-sized. We'll have to wait several more weeks for backyard carrots.

We rounded out the Harvest Dinner with some local fare from the market: duck breast and new carrots. Reading the Globe and Mail earlier in the day, Lucy Waverman's article about duck breast with cherry sauce in honour of the cherries appearing in farmers markets got us all excited. Alas, local cherries weren't available in our market yet; however, we were too set on our plan to veer from it... So we settled for Washington cherries, but felt that since our salad and beans came from a mere twenty feet from our kitchen (and the carrots and duck not much further), our karma was still in balance.

It was our first time cooking duck, but we will definitely do it more often as a treat. It was easy and delicious.

Other updates:

It is a robin in the nest after all, and she's spending a lot of time in the nest so we assume there are eggs. Other than our usual comings and goings, we're leaving the nest be... But McPie suspects that either he or Mother Bird will have a heart attack one of these days, from startling each other whenever the door is opened. Every time we step out the door, she flies frantically to a branch of the nearby maple, and watches us suspiciously.

The tomato plants still only have flowers, but the plants look healthy. My fingers are crossed and my hopes are high.