Etibocoke. June 18th 2012

Jonny, Me, Charles

My Co-op was at the Etobicoke Field Studies Center Just off highway 50.Charles, Jonny and myself were all part of it! My first impression of the place was, wow! right next to the heart of Toronto there is this huge biological reserve that is super diverse in both plant and animal species. I was told that over 109 deer live on the property! and although i never saw one, i always had my eyes open! The most exciting thing i found was a garter snake, it was about 1.5 feet long and when i picked it up it jolted toward my arm trying to rip it off! luckily enough i threw it away before it could sink its teeth into me.

Anyway, now to the job related things. When i arrived, i was shown around the main building by Scott, he was the maintenance guy and knew where everything was, from fire exits and extinguishers, to first aid and food. He took us out to the old wood sheds and told us we could break all 4 of them to put up a new improved one that didn't have any smelly mice in it. Destroying the old sheds was a blast, i even named the sludge hammer "the Persuader" haha it got the job done in no time! Once we had enough space to build the new shed we decided to go get the needed materials, we stopped in to a wood pickup "Drive through" at RONA, it was by far the most interesting experience I've ever had picking up wood. So then the construction started, with a little help from Scott, and Jonny's back ground of construction we got the base laid out, floor put in, side back and front walls put in, roof put on, plywood nailed in and we ended it off with a beautiful door! When we finished we were all super tired from the 2 weeks it took to finish. But most of all we were super proud of the beautiful shed that we had created.

Moving the wood into the shed was one of the two funniest memories that i will take away from this experience. As we finished building the new improved wood shed, we were told to take the left over wood from the old sheds and stack it nicely back in the new one. We used our team building skills and decided that each of us would toss a row (35-60pieces of wood) just in front of the shed, and the other two would stack them in the shed. Me and Jonny decided to get our wood throwing over with and took the first 2 of 3 rows out of the old shed, so it was Charles's time to shine! Just when he was nearing the final few cuts of wood we heard a huge scream and saw him jump back about 7 feet in two seconds! haha we asked what was wrong and he went on for about 15 minuets about how there was a scary mouse in there and he didn't feel comfortable moving the rest of the wood. The second funny thing that took place was the walky talky day. We were sent into the woods and for safety precautions we were issued a walky talky each! What our manager didn't know is that Jonny thought he was a Pilot talking into a mic, I thought i was a truckker, and Charles thought he was a director for a movie, All this just from the second we picked up our safety devises. Im sure you can find the humor in what happened for the rest of that day ;)

That was my Co-op experience at the Etobicoke Field Study Center. I wanna give a huge thanks to all of the people that made it such a wonderful time for me and to all the people that made it possible... This will probably be my last entry for a while into the Geo 2012 Blog. It has been an amazing semester and im really looking forward to the strong finish. Thanks to everyone

Willis.