Greg and Kat's blog

Yesterday I worked at home because most of the day was taken up by getting the car, going to the Department of Motor Vehicles and changing the title of the car, and going to the mechanics’ to get an estimate of how much it would be to do the “maintenance” stuff to the car. Adam, the lab’s tech, called in the afternoon and said that squirrels had chewed off the plastic bottom of one of the feeders (same location as the missing bottom). Time to retrofit all of the feeders with metal tops and bottoms. Live and learn. Damn squirrels!

Today was my first early “field” day. I woke up at 4:00 am, said goodbye to Greg, who left for Vancouver to move us in to our new place and to attend a meeting, and got to school by 5:00 am. It was still dark. Perfect lighting for watching what sorts of critters come to my feeders at sunrise. I got all of my gear, put on my Lee Valley bug shirt, and got to the place where my feeders were placed by 5:15. It was still dark enough that I had to use my trusty headlamp to find the trees that my feeders were hanging from.

Found the tree, no feeders. After about 15-30 minutes of crashing around in the dark, I located two of my feeders. The wires they were hanging from had snapped, and they were lying on the ground. Adam, the tech, had hung the third feeder, and while I thought I knew where it was, I wasn’t able to find it. I looked on the ground around where I thought it was in case its wires had also snapped, but found nothing. Screw it – it’s dead to me. So I propped up the two feeders I had on the ground and sat and watched to see whether anything would attempt to feed from them on the ground. By 6:45 there were only robins (who I don’t even think eat seed) and one male cardinal. Lesson #2 for the day, use rope instead of wire to hang the feeders.
By 7:00 I gave up. I packed up all of my stuff, including the 2 feeders and returned to the lab where I would fix those feeders as well as the 2 bottomless ones. Upon returning to the lab, I noticed that I was kind of itchy. Not poison ivy (thank goodness) but 12 bug bites (3 on legs, 1 on neck, 2 on fingers, 5 on arms, and 1 just above my left eyebrow). The ones on my legs, neck, fingers, and face were not covered by the $35 bug shirt I got from Lee Valley, but the 5 arms ones were!!! Lesson #3: try wearing long-sleeved shirt AND bug shirt and see what happens. Lesson #4: Bug shirts – too good to be true. OR I’m just
super attractive to biting insects. Either way, I’m itchy!!!!

Put rope onto two of the feeders and went back out with Adam around 8:30. Turns out I was looking in the wrong spot for the 3rd feeder. It was still up. Will see how long the wire lasts. Will bring more rope out tomorrow and fix it then. With my luck HOFI’s were probably swarming that feeder, and I didn’t even know it. Put the other two up. This is when I may have gotten the leg bites as I had changed to capris, and the bites are on the part of my legs that were exposed. My own fault.

So tomorrow I will try again to see hat is coming to my feeders. Hopefully we can start trying to trap next week. This weekend will be spent eating/drinking things out of cans so that I can collect enough to make tops and bottoms for all 5 feeders.

Otherwise, life is just dandy.

I’m beginning to hate squirrels. There are now 4 feeders up to attact HOFIs. There would have been 5, but the bottom of the only one that was up during the weekend “fell out” sometime between noon yesterday (when the tech saw it) and 9 am today.I’m not really sure how it came out as it was wedged in pretty good. Tried to find it in the pile of dead leaves and new growth (and possibly poison ivy, but only kicked around with my shoe) at the base of the tree. The bottom is gone. Probably carried away by one of the squirrels as a “take-out box” full of yummy seeds. Interestingly, there were no seeds on the ground (although the feeder was getting a little low anyways). So I now have to drink a liter of water in order to cut the bottom off of a water bottle to use as a base. All of the other bottoms are now zip-tied on. Damn squirrels.
Upon checking my potter traps today I came across a squirrel happily munching on seeds. Dammit! Those weren’t for you! Anyways, I’ve since taken the seed out of those traps (no need to waste seed feeding a fat squirrel). May put the seed back once I get more birds into the aviary that may attract more birds in. Not really sure yet.
Am now reading the most boring book ever – “Practical Liquid Chromatography”. I think I actually dozed off for a few seconds. Luckily I didn’t drool! I sure hope the technique is alot more exciting than reading about it is.

p.s. We have a lead on another car. It’s currently at the mechanic’s getting inspected. Trying not to get hopes up though – just in case. Greg said any mention of the car had to be in “p.s.” form so as to not jinx it.

After the last two days of car shopping hell we’ve decided to enter into a whole new kind of hell. For some strange reason Greg suggested that we go to the Walmart Supercenter today. Greg! The guy who whenever I say “we have to go to Walmart” in Vancouver tries to run away and hide and then is a grump the entire time we’re in there.

I think he wants to get the true Walmart Supercenter experience. It is, after all, the Sunday of Memorial Day long weekend. I personally think he’s biting off a bit more than he can chew, but we’ll see. $5 says that by the middle of the store he’s curled into the fetal position.

Then I think we’re going to see X-men. Good day for me. We’ll see how Greg does…

I’m NOT the owner of a 1996 Corolla. I am the owner of nothing. The car didn’t pass the state inspection (I guess Greg’s dad was right). Although, I’m a little fuzzy on how it got a good inspection for the mechanic we took it to. We saw the list that the state inspection goes through and it didn’t seem all that complicated, and I thought it covered all of those. Anyways, in the end, we went to Raleigh again and didn’t come back with a car of our own.
Bah! Have $$! Why won’t somebody let us buy their decent yet somewhat cheap car?!?!?!

We ended up going to the local Toyota dealership to look at their used cars, but they were all over $10,000, which is too much for a “car I only want for when I’m in NC.” The sales guy also mentioned that for only $3000-4000 more we could get a new Corolla. But I don’t want a new car!!! I’m planning on transporting birds in this car. Not good for new upholstry. I think Greg’s sold on trying to get a newer used car for around $8000-10000, but I’m not totally convinced yet. We’ll see.
We did go to the state farmer’s market. It’s a permanent fixture with dedicated buildings open every day but Sunday. Took some pictures.

Tired now. I give up. This place is too difficult!

I have finally become an adult. I own my own car! I know Greg and I have a car back in Vancouver, but I’ve always thought of that car as Greg’s. Mostly because he bought it and he drives it. But this time, “we” bought the car for me! When I say “we” I mean Greg because I haven’t actually received a pay check yet (I get paid at the end of the month).

Car shopping was an experience. We drove to Raleigh where Greg had already checked out some used car dealers. We went to the one that had 3 Corollas on the lot. 1 was a stick-shift, which Greg didn’t notice the first time, the second one the sales guy said had been in a recent accident, and the third we test drove and took to an independent mechanic for a used car inspection. It’s a 1996 Corolla that is the same color as the Corolla in Vancouver. The inspection came back fairly good, so we went in search of somewhere with an internet connection to get a “carfax” report on the car. Finally found a Radioshack where Greg talked the salesguy into letting him use the computers there to get our carfax report.

The next thing we know, the report says: WARNING! or ALERT! or something equally as ominous. The car has been “rebuilt”. Crap! So we have no clue what this really means. So, we drive back to the mechanic and talk to the woman who said that the engine and all of that stuff was okay and looked like the original. So, they thought it may have just been the body work. Hmmm… what exactly does this mean!!!

So we did the only thing we could think of. We called Greg’s dad. He said he would touch it. But, we thought… the mechanics were amazed that it had been rebuilt and seemed quite sure that the car was fine with only a small amount of maintenance work. Crap!

Then we did the next thing we could think of. We called Oli. I think knowing that Oli changed his own brake pads made me feel a bit better if he said it was probably okay. Plus, we pretty much knew we wanted to just bite the bullet and get the car, so we were looking for someone to confirm what we felt. Since this car only has to last at most 3 years, we figured it would be fine.

Back the the dealer. We talked them down the price of the maintenance repairs. We probably could have gotten $100-200 more, but meh. At this point both of us were exhausted.

We have to go back to Raleigh and pick up the car today because by the time we bought it and the dealer changed the tires (it needed new tires), the state inspection places were closed. Dealers in this state can’t sell a car without it passing the state inspection, so it’s being brought to the inspection place this morning, and then we pick it up.

Next obstacle – me driving it back to Chapel Hill from Raleigh. Call everyone you know in the Chapel Hill-Raleigh area and tell them not to be on the street this afternoon! Too stressful!

Update (Greg, 05/27): Not! More to come.

Everywhere I look I now see House Finches (HOFIs). And today, I finally did it. I put up my first feeder in a wooded area. I’m a field biologist! Actually, I carried the feeder out and had the lab’s tech, Adam, put up the feeder. Ah, I love being a post-doc (being short doesn’t hurt as I couldn’t actually reach the branch that the feeder is on!).Hopefully it’s still there tomorrow morning.

I’m extremely jealous of Greg getting to go home. I’m actually extremely jealous that Greg gets to pack up our place (you all should know about my love of putting things into boxes and containers by now!). I’m sure Greg isn’t thrilled about packing, though. Kinda funny how that works out. Too bad I can’t somehow catch birds here and still go home in June. For anyone that ends up helping Greg pack, make sure he doesn’t toss any of my stuff!!!! If the banister rails were still there, then yes, he could have tossed those, but luckily I got rid of those already! Now I’m down to the stuff I really want, so nothing goes!

I’m on the road to start catching birds. Tonight I’m going to try to find natural colored rope (as opposed to the fluorescent blue stuff we have now). Then tomorrow I’m going to come in early, set my traps, and cross my fingers! Anyone know if a squirrel can fit into a Potter trap? That’s my one fear now – squirrels getting into my trap and eating my birds. However, Dana said that the only squirrel that got in to one of their traps came in through the top. So, I have to make sure that’s totally secure. I think their heads are too big to fit into the funnel parts. I think!

We’re also attempting to buy a car. It’s just another process that is slowly driving Greg insane. All of the cars are either bought by the time we call (which is usually on the same day the ads were posted) or bought before we’ve had time to see the car. So, Greg is slowly developing an anurism while I’m worrying that I’ll be left here alone and stranded without a vehicle. I guess I still have my bike, but I’ve got a couple of late nights in the next couple of weeks (HPLC optimization) so I’d rather drive home than try to bike home if it’s starting to get dark. So, cross you fingers and do a little car dance for us!

I just took a 2 hour walk around the UNC Campus.

I walked by the gym, through the campus cemetary (will take pictures on the next excursion, I promise!), around the cemetary, to Battle Park (a wooded park managed by the UNC Botanical Gardens), and through what is called “Forest Theater”, which is a stone amphitheater set in the woods that I think is included in Battle Park. I saw lots of cardinals (yes, Oli, I will take pictures next time!), starlings, robins, Eastern bluebirds, some sort of wren, Carolina, probably, the local thrasher (don’t remember which one that is at the moment), brown, maybe, northern mockingbirds, what I think was a red-headed woodpecker, a female eastern rufous-sided towhee, and … wait for it… HOUSE FINCHES!!!! They exist!!! I spotted a pair flying from out of a shrub into a tree at the edge of the cemetary. Then I saw about 4 more males and two more females hopping around in the grass and around headstones in the cemetary. On my walk back I cut through the woods near the university’s stadium and saw another pair. The stadium is pretty much right next to the Biology buildings! Yippee!

On another positive note, I got clearance from the director of the university’s grounds department to hang feeders and traps in the wooded areas. I just have to tell them where the feeders will be, they draw them on some map, and then present that to the groundskeeping guys so they don’t disturb them, or so that they can inform me when they have to do maintenance nearby. This is great!

So, I think I’ll be hanging some feeders on Monday. Have to still contact the grounds guys, so I think this weekend may be out of the question, but we’ll see how fast they get back to me.

Now all I need is a car so I can get here after dusk and before sunrise!

That’s what I hope my birds will be soon. Since I haven’t seen a bird in any of my traps, I decided to make new ones. Funnel traps, they’re called. I got specs from Dana, but didn’t have any materials.

So, off to the hardware store. Had to have greg help with this one as I wasn’t totally sure how to go about building these things. I had Greg meet me at the hardware store. He travelled by bike, me by bus. The local hardware store is great! They had everything and had very helpful people. We also went to the grocery store to pick up sunflower seeds (a 10 lb. bag). After making our purchases, we had to somehow get them to school. Since greg had his bike, we piled the seed bag over the middle bar, and greg balanced the roll of chicken wire between the handle bars, and off we went – walking along the bike trail to school. It wasn’t actually that far, and the weather was nice today, so it wasn’t too bad. For pictures see the gallery.

The build started out with paper models (so as to not waste the precious chicken wire). And, by the end we ended up with two funnel traps complete with 4 doors each! Not bad for an afternoon’s work.

We finally left school around 7:00. I realised I had been at school for over 12 hours. Can’t complain though. Spent most of the morning blogging as I was waiting to see whether any birds would use my old traps. They didn’t. Now I get to sleep in tomorrow! Yippee!

Treated Greg to Japanese dinner for all of his help. “Treated” is funny because I haven’t gotten paid yet, and Greg actually paid my last credit card bill! Hee! Hee! Anyways, there’s a nice sushi place just down the road from the apartment! We braved the sushi combo, and it wasn’t bad. Will update tomorrow if badness kicks in tonight!

Almost forgot. Saw my first NC roach today. Had to wake up at 5:30 to get to school to set up traps (it was already light by the time I got to school, but I was on the first bus in!). Was brushing my teeth when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move. There it was, in the bathtub. A large cockroach. I figured I’d try to fling it into the toilet and flush it. Got a piece of cardboard and leaned in the scoop it up, and it scuttled out of the way with the speed of a hummingbird! Crap! Now what! I could squish it! I grabbed the heaviest thing I could find, a CLR bottle from under the sink. I hit it with what I thought was a lot of force. Nope, still alive looking like nothing happened. Dammit! It was now getting late and I had to catch my bus. So, what did I do? I left it in the bathtub and left a note for Greg that it was in there so he wouldn’t inadvertently join it in the tub! Apparently he was able to squish it with the CLR bottle. Bug spray is being added to the shopping list.