Queen of the Highway

I absolutely love this song by Bat For Lashes.  The song and video are supposed to be about the relationship between her life as a performer and as a “normal person.”  But I think much of it resonates well with anyone who has to travel a lot, for their career or otherwise.

This week was the last of traveling to the Valles Caldera this field season.  I’m not all that sad about it.  It will still be there next year.  Next week I will be going down to Luna, which is somewhere south of here, out in the boonies of New Mexico.  I am not terribly excited about driving 4 hours (both ways) with my boss.  Two and a half already felt like an eternity.  Or coming back from the field on Friday instead of Thursday.  I therefore plan on enjoying the long weekend immensely. 

I feel like I complain a lot about work on here.  I really do like my job.  It’s what I wanted to do and I love being outside.  There’s just SO MUCH field work.  I wish there was more of a balance.  When I was first interviewed for the position, I was told that the field season went from May-August.  But after a couple weeks of working, I found out that it actually goes through November.  That’s a really long time to be out and away from home, working 10-11 hour days, for most of the week.  I can do this for a while, but I don’t think I want to make my entire career out of it.  There will be a point when I will want to move up and move on, and at that point, I’m sure I’ll look back on these days longingly.  The grass is always greener…

Plight of the Navigator

My boss had to go somewhere this week so Dan and I had to wing it in the Caldera ourselves.  Which meant that I, being the superior, had to know and decide what to do.  Now, anyone who knows me knows that I can barely find a place much less decide what to do when I get there.  Dan, who later described me as a “hesitant” driver, was tired from driving 15 hours from California that morning.  So I drove.  And I got lost.  But yay!  We finally made it!  Like 3 hours later.

So.  Armed with a list of sites, a topo map, many aerial photos, and a GPS, we set out to find some good spots.  Some places we had been to and others we hadn’t.  And since we had been to a lot of places, what with my impeccable sense of direction, I could not remember for the life of me where any of them were.  In the end, we managed to find three good (I think) sites to dig soil pits and describe the trees and do some other stuff at.  Despite steep hills, rain, and a couple wrong turns, things went pretty smoothly those first couple days. 

Then, we came to the last day, which consisted of a mile hike (uphill, with backpacks and shovels) and digging in the most evillest clay ever.  Dan broke it up with the sharp shooter because it is too heavy for me, and I was supposed to dig.  The first horizon wasn’t too bad.  Nice, soft granular soil.  The most annoying thing was OCD Dan over there in the peanut gallery: “You’re holding the shovel wrong.”  “Breathe in through your nose.”  “Stop stepping on the soil, you’re compacting it.”  Blah blah blah.  Seriously.  But I suppose I wasn’t perfect either.  I whined, complained, did a horrible job at digging.  Especially when we got to the clay.  We ended up not being able to dig it out, so Dan broke it up into pieces and I picked them up and threw them out. 

All in all, I think it went well.  We got some stuff done and I think Dan and I bonded.  He taught me some interesting things about Spanish and flies and I made stupid comments that made him laugh.  He did some funny things too, like drive off the side of the road multiple times to pick up flowers for his girlfriend.  He was looking for a mariposa lily, which is very pretty, but he never did find one.  It was cute.  I wish I had a boy who looked for flowers for me.  Maybe some day.

Life of a traveling soil scientist

I am back from my third week of field work.  It’s actually starting to go well and I am learning a lot of new things.  Steve, my boss, who is a self-admitted impatient person, has been pretty good at not making me feel like a complete idiot, although I still sometimes do.  I am not very good at digging, because, well, I’m a girl.  But I am always right or very close with picking out soil horizons.  Soil description is always hard but I think I am getting better at figuring out texture, structure and color are not too hard (except that girls see color different than guys so my co-workers never agree with me- Steve always seems to agree with Dan, who is color blind), and I’m slowly learning how to figure out percent rock fragments.  I cannot see clay films or bridging worth a darn though.  Everyone says it looks like wax; I have no idea what they are talking about.  Plant description is tough.  All of the grasses look exactly the same to me.  And trying to calculate canopy cover is hard because I am not good with spatially-based math. I like using the clinometer to measure tree heights and slope percents.  Tree ages are tedious but not too bad, except I am not strong enough to core the trees by myself.  Counting tree size classes and coarse woody material is somewhat of a pain but pretty much a no-brainer.  I guess that’s about all I do besides filling out some paperwork using taxonomy and the TEUI and TES handbooks.  Lots of fun stuff.  I can’t really complain because I work in a really awesome spot and being outside is so much better than sitting in the office trying not to fall asleep.  But it is hard to be away so much.  When I’m out in the field, I miss my couch and my bed and my computer.  And I miss sleeping in and being clean for a whole day at a time.  Weekends are great but I always feel so far behind with household chores that I usually never get done on the weekends anyway.  I’ve been pretty busy in past weekends but I don’t really have any plans for this one.  Maybe I’ll actually get some stuff done.  Like laundry.

What your tax dollars are paying for

My kickin’ new backpack, that’s what!

But, oh yeah, I can’t get it yet because REI is being dumb and won’t let me come pick it up if it’s paid for by someone else’s credit card.  Something lame about credit card fraud… I dunno.  So I think I’m just going to get it online or something.

My weekly hotel stays and per diem are also all paid.  I get like $49 for food per day, which I barely even use because I have this weird thing with restaurants and I usually end up eating not much or only raw vegetables if I can get away with it.  But I am always STARVING at lunchtime.  This past week I ate almost an entire block of cheese in two days.  MMMM… cheese.  So I guess I could say the money goes towards my groceries too.

PLUS!  Our entire office building got brand new computers this week.  I set mine up today and it took me allllll day to get it to work.  I even had to stay an hour later than I was planning.  Guess that means an hour off for me next week!  And the computer is huge.  It has a 300 GB hard drive or something ridiculous like that.  Man it is heavy!