Senior Survival '08

Every year the Senior Class goes on a "survival weekend" at the beginning of the year to bond together. This year Andrew is one of the Senior Class sponsors so I tagged along for the weekend. I missed the first day due to work, which also happened to be the day that Andrew broke his nose playing Ultimate Frisbee. His nose and face was still looking pretty bad when I arrived a few hours later and I didn't even think to get some pictures of it. But here are a few of my favourites from the weekend. The trip was to the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon.

Pennsylvania Grand Canyon


Lookout


Waterfall Excursion


Self Portrait


Senior Class of 2009

Finger Lakes Triathlon

After spending two days at Caprine Outing we went and did a triathlon Sunday morning!
We both did ok considering we hadn't done much training. As Andrew often says, we didn't die :)

You can see some pictures of me here and Andrew here, and our friend Tim here, courtesy of Brightroom Photography.

The Finger Lakes Triathlon supports the Mary M. Gooley Hemophilia Center. We've done this race for a number of years. It was actually my first triathlon and is still one of my favourites. The course is straightforward and well marked. The only complaint I have ever had about this race is it has the worst spectators. They just stand there, if you get a clap you're doing well. Very unlike the other local races that have specatators that clap, cheer, yell, set up extra water stations, hoses if it's hot, cow bells, air horns etc.

Caprine Outing

I don't have any pictures to go with this post but here's the summary of what we did this weekend (Sept. 19-20).
Every other year Cornell sponsors a Caprine Outing. They rent out a girl scout camp and people sign up to come for the weekend to participate in all-about-goat workshops. The first night we had a potluck dinner with all kinds of goat products cooked in. The workshop we participated in was on different goat dairy setups presented by Carol Delaney from University of Vermont. The biggest thing I took away from her presentations was the best information is in French and from Quebec and France, with Quebec having a very strong up and coming industry that is trying lots of new things.
The next day we participated in a bunch of different workshops on nutrition, pasture management, parasite management (worms are REALLY interesting!) and a few other things (they had other more "fun" workshops like how to make goats milk fudge, a variety of cheeses, soap making, goat packing, felting etc). We ended the day by taking an intensive artificial insemination class. It was pretty interesting and now we know how to do it, we just haven't decided if we're going to invest in all the equipment yet. Maybe when we get a bit bigger.

The Pinery

We finally got together with the gang for a big camping trip in Ontario at The Pinery. It was a really nice campground and I think we should meet there again and try for better weather. We got rained on most of the weekend, luckily we had lots of tarps and made a tarp village to be able to hang out and play games. Not such great weather for camp fires. Andrew and I picked up Deb on the way and were the first to get there, we wandered down at the beach for a bit.

Saturday it rained most of the day so we went to the nature center, watched a movie on wolves and now we've all decided that we want to go camping next time in Algonquin park and try to see wolves, or at least hear them. Then David shared that is where his cottage is, so we're going to forgo camping and go there, "thanks David" :). We found some great mittens that Erika and David modeled for us. These are so you can walk in the cold with your sweetie and still hold hands.

Saturday night we decided we were not going to let the rain deter us any longer and off to the beach we went.

The water was VERY cold.

Extremities were tingling.

Andrew and Corey...being Andrew and Corey.

The remainder of our tarp village. The other tarp over the picnic table on the left was already taken down.

Oh and how could I forget, we had an extra visitor most of the weekend. He first appeared right around when Erika and Joe arrived. Joe said, "I think a cat just brushed up against me." We all kind of laughed at him, and then Erika started yelling "Get off me" from the back seat of the truck. It wasn't a cat, but a raccoon trying to climb up her leg and into the truck. He hung out at our campsite most of the weekend, randomly showing up underneath someones chair. We tried to scare him off, chase him off, throw stuff at him, finally squirting him with water did the trick. But then he got his revenge by getting into the cooler and pulling out the sausage package and dragging it into the woods and eating them, WHILE WE WERE ALL STILL SITTING THERE!!! Some how he got into the cooler in silence and dragged it out, because we made sure to put the coolers in the trunk at night once we knew he was around.
[Photo courtesy of Joe Frey]