January 22-26:
I did my Cardinal Points, Daily Hug and hiking every day.
G7, Push & Pull, and my current Program and Challenges were skipped.
I'm going to do some extra planking over the next four days in order to still complete Plank Hero within 30 days. I also plan to double up on Standing Abs. So I'll finish that one just one day late. I don't think I'll try to do any catching up on Total Body Strength, as I've too many other things I need to focus on this week. But we'll see how things go.
I did not run this past week at all (it was brutally too cold out for most of the week) or even do my alt cardio or indoor HIIT. Hiking mileage was also shorter than usual due to the weather. Total mileage for the week was 47.5 km -- but 14 km of that happened on Sunday!
The weather here this weekend was not too bad for being outside. (It was cold, but just normal January-in-Ontario cold.) Saturday I did not schedule things well enough to get out for a long hike. But Sunday Shelby and I did our 11km hike up the north branch of the TVP in the afternoon, then our 3km hike through the Village in the evening.
Our afternoon hike was wonderful! We saw all the regulars:
Canada Geese,
Mallards (including the big
Pekin),
American Gizzard Shad (still not as thick as before the flood, but still a good number alive and well, congregating together in their little alcove. A good number of mallards and geese have been congregating in the same area too. But interestingly not the mergansers, of which we have been seeing both
Hooded Mergansers and
Common Mergansers on the Thames this winter, and indeed saw both species again this day. I suspect the shad's inlet is providing them with protection not only in the form of warmth, but also, perhaps counter-intuitively, due to its being shallow water.
Canada Geese are grain and seed eaters. So not a threat to the shad. Mallards are omnivorous, but they eat vegetation and invertebrates. So the shad are safe from them too. But mergansers? Mergansers are fish eaters! The shad may be too large for the little Hoodies. (I'm not sure on this.) But Common Mergansers will definitely eat shad. So why am I seeing them hunting out on the open river, 20 metres away from an inlet that is so thick with a tasty lunch? I wonder if this is because mergansers are "diving ducks".
Unlike "dabbling ducks" (such as Mallards) which float around on the surface of a body of water and stick only their heads and necks under water to feed, diving ducks submerge completely and swim underwater in pursuit of their prey. It may be that this feeding mechanism is simply unavailable to them in water as shallow as the shad's inlet. [I did see one female Common Merganser lurking near the very edge of the inlet the day we were first able to access the foot bridge again after the flood, when the water level was still quite high. But unlike the Mallards, who swim in closer when they see a human hanging out on the bridge (even a human who has a large dog with her--city Mallards are quite habituated to being hand fed by humans), the merganser swam away when it saw me and Shelby. Since the water level has lowered again, however, the mergansers appear to be entirely ignoring this huge school of shad.] I will try to find out if the folks at Cornell have any further data on this topic.
There are also
Herring Gulls and
Bald Eagles in the area (both of which we saw on Sunday as well). But as they hunt from the sky, the vegetation overhanging the shad's inlet may be providing protection from them.
Also seen on this hike: a male
Northern Cardinal who chirped happily for us, a small flock of
Black-capped Chickadees, our ever-present
Eastern Grey Squirrels and a friend!
I know, I know: Shelby has a great many friends. Everyone who she meets is Shelby's friend. But I am more selective in who I designate a friend, and this person is an actual friend of mine as well. He lives up in the northwest end of the city, and typically does not do long hikes like Shelby and I do. So he's not someone we expect to just bump into out on the trails. So it was a very happy coincidence to run into him down by the river forks, also out enjoying the favourable weather with another friend of his who lives in the downtown area.
So all in all, it was a great hike! But by the time we got back home, I'd had enough of being outside in the cold. So a run did not happen, in spite of the temperature having been warm enough to do one.
Our evening hike was just through our neighbourhood, where many houses still have their Christmas lights on, providing welcome displays of colour and cheer amidst the bleak midwinter. So that was a nice way to end our day.
The day had begun well too, with getting up at 6AM for gaming with
@'rin and
@sleep_twitch . So a great day overall!
Other stuff this past week:
Writing:
Writing was mostly correspondence. I wrote personal correspondence every day, and spent a good bit of time on it. Nothing that's going to help my bottom line as a fiction writer. But it was important to do. Actual fiction content creation last week was only one hour, split over three days. I also did some market research and attended the open office hour for my online writing group, DreamCasters.
Artwork:
Artwork was sketching. Done three days this past week.
French:
I maintained my daily French study streak with reading or Fluenz every day. I also put in a request at my local library branch to try to get the English translation of the first volume in the Les Rois Maudits (The Accursed Kings) series which
@PetiteSheWolf recommended via interlibrary loan. My library has the whole series in the original French, but only two of the books in English translation. I don't think my French language skills are yet up to reading such books without an English translation to compare them to. So I'm hoping interlibrary loan will find book 1 for me.
Scheduling Habits:
These were shaky at the beginning of the week but improved towards the weekend. I earned three stars for each on Sunday.
Cumulative Habit Scores:
SOOT: 10
GBOT: 17
Gaming Rules: 11
I did not zero my GR score, even though I did do some solo gaming last week, and I did not meet my writing content creation target for the week. The gaming was not the reason for the shortfall. So I'm allowing my daily scores for the week to stand.
Streaks:
Consecutive days of working out: 140
Consecutive days of French study: 1532
from
The Sonoran Desert
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for the hugs, the doc, and Shelby's registration 
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