The most rest Ive had in a while!

I am at work.

I am listening to the dulcent tones of Bethany Yarrow and her instrumental team.

I am doing data analysis in my comfy (probaby faux leather) chair.

I havent felt this relaxed in a long time! Bliss.

I could almost nod off!

Complaint

I dont often use this media to complain about work, but I have found the past hour rather amusing and I feel the need to share!

I am currently working up data carried out by some students at a University elsewhere in the United States. In the interest of anomynity, I shall keep the details to myself. But in the space of just two field sheets I have the following units, not marked, just numbers on a piece of paper: millimeters, centimeters, feet and inches. They are all in totally different places, totally unlabelled, and in fact, the millimeters are in a column labelled feet, though I know this to be a physical impossibility. So Im sitting here bitching, cursing these random people, whom I shall never meet. 1) who uses totally different units on the same piece of paper, let alone in the same day! 2) Who doesnt label the units whenever they are filling out a field form?

Ridiculous the incompetence of some people.

The moral of my story is, if you are ever writing something down, please include the units.

Apologies

I apologise. I had promised an exciting New Zealand Photo Update every day last week, but things got out of hand last week and there wasn't even time to blink and not think you were wasting precious time. There may be more time this week, but I very much doubt it... so please, be patient, there are hundreds more pictures to follow!

Where am I now? Portland, OR of course. Did you think my job would allow me to stay home for more than just a few days! Don't be silly!

I did get to work hard in the garden all day saturday and make some more tasty cinnamon raison English Muffins. My major gardening job was to turn over last years leaves and that took the best part of the day. I have sowed some fall greens and am getting ready to till up the rest of the vegetable patch for lots and lots of spinach!

Sunday we left the house at 6am. ugh. Just 5 miles from the turn off to Danny's parents house, where we were going to drop off the dogs, the engine thermometer pinged into the red and all these warning lights came on in the car. oh dear. Thankfully, we have had this problem before and so whilst we were nervous, we were not panicking! Because we have hardly been here, we have not had time to change the oil in our car and those things all happen basically to force you into changing the oil. We made it to the turn off but didnt want to drive the extra 15 minutes to their house; so we left the car parked at the gas station and they came to collect us. Brenda took the dogs home (sorry for getting you up before 7am sunday morning Brenda!) and Paul, Danny and I squeezed into Amanda's little truck and he sped us off to the airport with my legs up on the dash so he could change gears! I was set for a 6 hour lay-over in Vegas of all places, because the flight was sold out. But thankfully I was the first stand-by passenger so I got on to the same flight as Danny; even got to sit next to him!

What am I doing this week? Our newest project is on the N. Touttle River that drains the crater on Mount St. Helens. The Corps has some dams lower down and are concerned with siltation processes filling up the dams so we are considering erosion rates of the materials in the river floodplain. The work week has not begun according to plan. We shipped three packages overnight for saturday delivery through FedEx. We cannot work without these boxes and every day is planned to a T. Of course, only one of the boxes arrived, and of course, the less essential one. So the others have gone off up the mountain and I am sitting here at the hotel waiting for FedEx to get its act together and deliver my packages. Fun fun fun! How did FedEx manage to get so big when they are so unbelievably unreliable?!

Going to be sunny and comfortable in temperature today, but its supposed to rain for the entire rest of the trip, great way to take your first ever helicopter ride that you are totally worried about!

I don't just cook!

A little insight into other aspects of my life today.

Im not just a cooking, exercising, eating machine you know.

When I'm not travelling the country playing with mud, or the world for that matter, I spend eight ours a day sitting at my desk in front of my dual screen, very powerful computer. Don't ask me specs on the pooter, I just need it to work!

Believe it or not, this is the part of my job I enjoy! For the most part at least! I love organising things, even it is hundreds of thousands of numbers! And yes, colours are usually involved in the organisation process, particularly pink.

It you promise not to steal my idea, Ill tell you what I am currently spending my time on. Although it is not technically solely my idea, I have to give my boss credit here too.

The Conterminous United States is divided into Ecoregions by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). There are different levels of details, but I tend to work with Level III Ecoregions.

The approach used to compule this Ecoregion map is based on the premise that ecological regions can be identified through the analysis of the patterns and the composition of biotic and abiotic phenomena or relect differences in ecosystem quality and integrity (Wiken 1986, Omernik 1987, 1995). These phenomena include geology, physiography, vegetation, climate, soils, land use, wildlife, and hydrology (USEPA, 2007).

My home and the surrounding areas lie within Ecoregions 65, The Southeastern Plains, and 74, The Mississippi Valley Loess Plains.

On and off for the past few years, I have been organising precipitation (rainfall and snowfall) and discharge (flow of water through channels) data for the 84 ecoreigons of the US. Sad I know, but I do actually find this really interesting!

The rate of change in precipitation (calculated over the period of record) for Ecoregions 65 and 74 are 1.15 and 1.10 mm per year, respectively (I tried to put the graphs in as they are beautiful, but I cound't manage it for some reason, sorry). That means that this area gets approximately 11 cm more precipitation per year now than during the 1900s. Because I ahve also broken this data out by season (using NOAA seasonal definitions; DJF, MAM, JA, SON), I can tell you that we actually have a decrease in summer rainfall and that most of our increase in rainfall in this area has been occurring during autumn months; September, October and November. Cool, eh!?