This time last year

With the City Nature Challenge on iNaturalist starting tomorrow, it marks one year since I discovered this amazing resource and almost a year since I developed a thing for fungi. This time last year I wouldn't have known that Trametes was a genus of fungi and now I know the difference between Trametes and Stereum as well as many other genera and fungi categories - from gilled mushrooms, polypores, brackets, stinkhorns, jelly fungi, bird's nest, puffballs and earthstars. 

In 12 months, I have logged 495 observations with 205 confirmed different species identifications.

With this in mind, I started thinking about this time last year...

This time last year work was incredibly stressful as the factory was dealing with huge challenges with their rebuild. I hadn't had YOLO products for almost seven months, kayaks were only just coming out, and orders were queued to be fulfilled for local and international. We'd hoped that 2021 would the THE year - just as 2020 was aimed to be THE year. Come mid-April, I was sent packing for a few days by my colleagues to spend a few days away with Rusty - and no internet or mobile signal - because I was actually just so cracked and broken. I'd taken massive emotional strain.

While this year is not free of challenges, there has been a lot of progress. I keep reminding myself that start-ups take 3-5 years. We're approaching year four since launch and two of the years included COVID lockdown, no power, major factory move and rebuild, and the global shipping crisis (still ongoing). I very much feel like we're only really in year two now. That we're still here is quite something.

This time last year I was working from home, which I'd done for the bulk of the past 21 years. The office section at the factory was completed mid-June 2021 and I moved into my office around end June. My plan was to do mornings at the factory and afternoons at home. This didn't happen on the first day and it hasn't since. While I have the freedom to come and go as I wish, the bonus of being the boss, the reality is that I'm generally tied in.

I loved working from home because I got to be with Rusty and Rosy all day, every day. I do like being at the factory because I can be on top of things and I'm in the thick of the action. I also like that my files and work things are all in my office at work and not in my home, which has always been the case. I still work a lot at home at night and on weekends, but all I need is my laptop. We're a small team on the office side (different companies, related, but same space), plus there is the Adventure Base Camp kayak store with my right-hand lady Mpho. This makes for good social interactions in the day.

Thankfully, I have a 6km / 12-minute commute to work each way. As the days get shorter with the approach of winter, I'm finding my time out to be challenged. When working from home, I could quite easily be out the door at 4pm, be out with the dogs for 90 minutes and then pick up where I left off. I leave the office mostly after 16h30, get home, grab the dogs and then have an hour before it gets dark. I'm finding a disconnect (and flagging motivation) between walking out of the door at work and starting up again at home.

I miss the dogs during the day, especially my Rusty. At about 11 years young, the clock ticks and I feel like I'm missing out on so much time with her. Sometimes I take her to the factory with me and if my mom is away, I take all three dogs with me. They like the factory but it is definitely more fun for them to be home with a garden to play in and their granny to throw balls.

This time last year I was three months into working with a biokineticist to remedy my not-a-knee-injury knee injury. By this stage I'd been out of running for eight months (only walking/hiking). As I recall, I was improving in terms of muscle group balancing and strength and getting knee inflammation under better control. Not great, but better where I was mostly hiking with light trotting occasionally.

My recent experience at the chiropractor - working on my big toe joint - has changed things completely for me. I'm inflammation free for the first time 20 months! I did two parkruns in April. Port Alfred over Easter weekend was a fast and flat 26:03 for me. I'm chuffed with my time considering that it was my second 5km run both this year and for many months. 

This time last year I had not done any of the higher hiking trails nor any of the '6 Peaks'. 

Since November, I've done two >20km hikes and three (one of them twice) of the 6 Peaks. I do not yet see myself doing the 6 Peaks FKT route any time soon - more because of the downhills than the ups.  I'll see how I'm doing in six months. 

This time last year I was still relatively new at dog school. I'm still a novice, but I know more than I did a year ago. I only started Rosy with agility this year and she is loving it - it suits her temperament. Rusty passed her first assessment last year with something like 98% and she is in the advanced class.

I'm really the weak link for the dogs because I don't do enough homework with them. I'm trying to do better and succeeded yesterday in a better way to keep the dogs separate (and quiet) while I work with them one-by-one in the garden. I built some DIY jumps

This time last year my household had two dogs - Rusty and my mom's Rosy. We now have three.

Bella, a maltese who originally was my mom's neighbour's dog in Parys, came to live with us in September. My mom would often babysit Bella. She went to a new home prior to my move to George. Then, middle of last year, her owner came down with serious covid, was in and out of hospital and her family took her two dogs to an SPCA. This poor woman! She died shortly after Bella was rescued by my mom from the SPCA. Bella has become quite the little trail dog.

This time last year I didn't own a drill, sander or jigsaw.

I now own these powertools and I know how to use them. In February, I did my first furniture DIY when I built a kitchen cabinet - with two sliding drawers - from repurposed pallet planks. Designing, sanding, measuring, cutting, painting, assembling, screwing - all on my own. It came out really well and was a good learning project. I have a bunch of other projects I'd like to do and now I have more confidence to do them. I've subsequently started an online course on furniture design and construction for beginners (making slow progress).

This time last year I was living in a house that irritated me. Six weeks after arriving in George, I moved into a house that I would rent for the next 13 months. It was actually a really sweet house with an excellent kitchen and a heavenly shower. But, the house had a number of issues that drove me crazy. When it rained, water would pour out of the back retaining wall, carrying silt from the embankment across the paving outside the kitchen. Water would continue to trickle across the paving for weeks with ongoing light showers. Mud, wet, dogs and nearly-white tiles inside. I swept a lot and cleaned floors a lot. The circuit board in the garage (yeah, I turn my geyser on and off) and the short and steep driveway that had visitors laying down rubber. I don't miss these.

At the end of January, we moved into a lovely house not far from the first. It is an older house with less fancy kitchen and bathroom but it has solid bones. The living area is bigger (previous living area was the size of a matchbox) and the back garden is enormous - it was the spacious, simple garden that won me over. And my landlady is really sweet. The dogs love the garden.

This time last year I wasn't into open water swimming (for no other reason than just that I wasn't into it). 

Since December, I've done a bunch of casual open water swims, I joined a friendly masters swimming club and I put in some pool sessions in March. This past weekend I participated in my first 1-mile swim event.

It often feels like I'm one step forward and two steps back so it is good to look back on this time last year to see how things change and that they do change to put life into perspective.

Altra Lone Peak 6 trail shoes

Almost two weeks ago I took the plunge and bought a new pair of trail shoes. Now that I'm on the mend, with thanks to three chiropractor sessions, I'm getting back into the regular running game - and not just trotting and hiking.

Needing more toebox room, I decided to try Altra.

I've never gone for them before purely because of their puffy sole. I was in very tactile, almost racing-flat trail shoes for many years. As my big-toe joint needs some TLC and the Altra has a wide toe box, these ticked the boxes.

I've gone for the Altra Lone Peak 6, in the ladies, which is almost the first - if not the first for me to be in a women's trail shoe. They fit perfectly from the start and are feeling really good.

I ran the Port Alfred parkrun in them last weekend and I've enjoyed three short runs in them this past week.

As much as I was delighted to get the shoes, as I told my chiro, I felt like I needed to go home and have a little cry about the money spent. New shoes are exceedingly and, dare I say, prohibitively expensive. Running is not a cheap sport.

I hope that this is going to be my best purchase this year and that me and these Lone Stars will enjoy many hundreds of kilometres together.

Big fungi find today and City Nature Challenge 2022

It has been slow on the fungi-finding front these past few months with occasional sightings of interesting things - above the normal split gills, cinnabar brackets and the like, which are present year-round.

Today, I scored.

We did a Vagabond social outpaddle this morning on the Touws River in Wilderness. The top end of the river connects with the Half-Collared Kingfisher Trail, which I've done twice. Near the kayak stop, I remembered seeing jelly fungi in the area, so I went to take a look.

OMG! So many wood ear fungus. An explosion. Magnificent. In the same spot there were a number of other fungi, most of which I knew or recognised.

Then, this evening I took the dogs out. The overcast morning had turned into a magnificent afternoon - cool and clear. We took a trail up through the forest and all along this one I found hundreds of fungi. I have never before seen so many individuals. The abundance was incredible. They looked to mostly be pine ring (Lactarius deliciosa), which is edible. I'm not 100% sure of the identification but it is the most likely. 

Further up I found one of my favourites - sticky bun (I love the dough-like texture of the cap) and then more and more others. The poor dogs had to be patient.

The annual City Nature Challenge 2022 on iNaturalist comes up from 29 April to 2 May and marks one year since I discovered iNaturalist and almost a year since I discovered the world of fungi, which are abundant here on my doorstep in the forests around George. I've learned an incredible amount this past year and I know that I've barely covered an ice crystal in an iceberg of what there is still to learn. 

For the City Nature Challenge, I'll log observations of items other than fungi and aim to expand my species count and my general knowledge of what is out here. I'll be aiming to find items that I've never seen before so that I have fresh species identifications on my iNaturalist log.

The iNaturalist app is great for quickly uploading from your phone. I like to use the browser version on my laptop when I'm searching to identifications.

The City Natural Challenge is a global initiative. There are many regions in Southern Africa that participate so become a citizen scientist and hop on board.

Of course, observations can be logged throughout the year, and not just in this one week. But take care... It is addictive (in a good way, of course).

First Open Water Swim event

This morning I participated in my first Open Water Swim event - a one-mile distance in the Swartvlei lake in Sedgefield.

I started doing a bit of swimming in December when my friend Marcelle and I would paddle out to a quiet spot at the dam, swim a bit more than a kilometer and then paddle back. We had about three such outings over the Xmas / New Year period and it was awesome.

In mid February, it must have been, I discovered the Fish Eagles Masters Swimming club here in George when I went with Carine to a casual open water swim at the dam. I did about 1km, enjoying the experience and swimming for the first time with a swim buoy towing behind me.

My mom expressed an interest in swimming so we joined the club at the end of February and we went together to a bunch of sessions at a nearby school pool on Friday and Saturday afternoons. My attendance was good for a few weeks but now I haven't been since late March - a combination of working late, rainy afternoons, other commitments and being away.

When a note about this event popped up on the club group - a fundraising swim in nearby Sedgefield, it looked like an opportunity not to be missed. I'm glad that Carine gave me a nudge to commit to it as she was planning to go along too.

I hadn't done anything that could really be called training, but I'm a decent swimmer, I'm generally fit and I figure that 1.6km open water is easier than 1km in the pool with tumble turns (I still think it is).

It was a small group of swimmers - not more than 100 - stood on a beach at Pine Lake Marina on this slightly chilly and overcast Saturday morning. I don't have a swimming wetsuit so it was to be straight swimming cozzie for me.

At first, the water was quite numbing and it took my breath away. I had to focus on my breathing as I started off in the shallow water. I liked seeing the grasses and creature holes in the sand as these passed beneath me. It took a while for the water to get deeper.

The route was a triangle - clockwise from the beach to a buoy, then the hypotenuse across to the second buoy and then back to the beach.

I felt very much on my own. I caught some swimmers and then only occasionally saw the aquamarine-coloured cap of another lady on the secon and third legs. 

I'm not that practiced at keeping an eye on where I'm going. My technique is not too bad. This time I was looking for the kick splashes of the swimmers ahead until I could see the buoy clearly. 

My friend Mark, who was swimming just behind and to the side somewhere of me apparently, said I did zig-zag a bit (I thought I'd been mostly on track). 

What I did find is that I would zone out, enjoying the meditational feeling of being in the dark water with regular metronomic strokes. Mid-stroke, I would look to see where I was going and then I'd swim normally. I had to keep reminding myself because I would think, "Ok, next one" and then miss it because I was just so connected to the swimming. I certainly left some of the intervals too long before taking another peek at my destination. It doesn't help that aquamarine cap was a bit offtrack - she definitely went too wide and I had one eye on her off to my side on that second leg.

I almost felt like I was swimming better as the distance climbed. Smooth, relaxed and enjoying it.

Back on the beach at the finish, children from the children's home for which the event was a fundraiser handed me a medal and they were cheering swimmers as they emerged from the water. Very sweet.

Coming out of the water, I wasn't that cold. The brisk temperature proved to be not as bad as I'd expected and I seem to have retained sufficient heat. At the finish there was a hot drinks vendor and pancake vendor (thank you Gerrie for the pancakes). A quick change into warm clothes, hello to some club members and other friends who were there and then we were off home to George. Back by 11am - a good morning out.

My shoulders feel like they've worked but otherwise no adverse effects. It will be interesting to see if and where I'm stiff tomorrow.

I'll definitely do other swim events but, with winter now on the way, I think I'll be waiting for the new summer to kick in.