Why a Blog?

Here it is Friday the 13th - an auspicious day to start blogging for the first time in my life.

I had the great good fortune to discover the Carden area in 2007.  I had been searching for a house, planning to move back to the Lake Simcoe area after spending 15 years in the Ottawa area.  Given the proximity to the GTA, the more southerly locations were priced well outside my limit so I began searching a little further afield.  On my first drive up Victoria Road (County Rd. 35), I couldn’t help but notice the signs indicating that the area was an Important Birding Area.  Cool, I thought.  A little further north, a wild turkey crossed the road in front of my car.  Very cool, I thought.  Eventually I did buy the house that I saw that day and life in Carden began for me in May 2008.

I’ve been living in Carden for a few years now and enjoyed some very extraordinary events.  Hopefully I will be able to entertain you with the stories of these experiences.  Maybe I'll be posting daily, maybe not.  I haven't decided just how much time I want to commit to this new project.

And so to start:

Thursday morning started well with the blue jays yelling from the trees, telling me to get up and give them their peanuts.  Why was this so wonderful?  I've been wakened by blue jays pretty much every day for the nearly four years that I've lived in the house so why was Thursday so special?

I had stayed away overnight on Saturday, not returning home until noon on Sunday and I had missed the morning feeding - not for the first time since I moved here.  For some reason, this time the blue jays took great offence with my offence.

They did not come by for their late feeding on Sunday.  They didn't come by for their morning feeding on Monday.  They refused to rouse me with their raucous demands on Tuesday.  They refused to entertain me with their antics on Wednesday.  I was beginning to think they would never return.  While that would greatly reduce the bird feed bill but it would also remove a very enjoyable part of my day.

So when the raucous demands returned on Thursday, I was very relieved....and very entertained.

They seem to have forgiven me