Portland gardners have redeemed themselves

It seems that perhaps I was a little hasty in my judgment of Portland gardeners. Their spring is just over a month behind ours. I drove around a lot today for work and more people in the suburbs have cherry trees and dogwoods in bloom and pretty coloured azaleas and rhododendrons. Good job gardeners! I still really miss my beauty though. I know the slugs are just feasting on my hostas out back. grrrrr!

Uneventful day really, in a very eventful week. The week begun with flying to Portland, on my own. Yes the government is a silly establishment that made us all fly separately to make sure we got the cheapest flights possible. Oh well. Monday morning the truck was dead, so we had to go buy jumper cables (yes I know, I thought we would be intelligent enough to have some stashed in the truck too). It rained all day and probably due to the fact that the streams round here are urban streams, the creek rose rapidly. So rapidly that we had to pack up shop pronto and get on out, rather than have to pick me up downstream somewhere, wrapped around a tree. Tuesday I started to wonder if two of the instruments really even worked so there was much conversing with work, oh and there were major storms at home. Wednesday we went to look at the stream we intend to test (bare in mind that we have previously obtained permission from all land owners) when an irate lady in a dressing gown starts screaming at me from her house on the hill. She jumped in her suburban and drove down the driveway where I had run to meet her to apologise for the miscommunication within our ranks, I thought we had permission to be there. Lots of apologising later, her facial expressions changed and she remembered giving permission in October. Phew. It was so windy that day that one of our tents (remember it rains all day and thats not nice to stand around in for hours on end) blew over and crashed into the opposite bank getting totally smashed in the process. Oh, and wednesday nothing worked. As a result I had to send the guys all back to the same site today to try again and we shipped two instruments off to their manufacturer for calibration. ugh.

Thankfully today was resonably uneventful. I found us four more cute little streams to work in next week, so the going should be good.

Now, pool then food!