As I've said before, I like the summer schedule: four days of fairly intense teaching, but then you get Fridays off.

It's not quite 8:45 and I've already been out to my field site and counted all the developing, eaten, and non-developing pods on the milkweed plants (65 plants at one site and 40 at another).

I've said before that I enjoy that kind of work - oh, I sort of groan about it before I go out, I feel a sense of dread stepping out of the car ("it's going to be HOT. And there are BUGS. and I have sixty-five plants to find and count....") but once I get into it - once I get into whatever I'm doing, I'm happy. It's kind of nice to have one focus, one goal (find and count milkweeds) for a little while.

I'm waiting on the GIS program to (slowly; it's an old computer) open the file I need. And then it's time to play with the figures. I feel a little bit of dread about this too but I hope once I get into it, I start enjoying it and get some work done.

I pulled out the rather-long-stalled Jaywalker sock last night - I got up to and started on the heel flap. And I realized that I had inadvertently grabbed a pair of size 2 needles rather than the size 1s it called for - but I still have gauge (pretty much) and maybe this will obviate some of the problems with tightness of the finished socks that some people have talked about.

I knit on it while watching part of a "marathon" of "My Name is Earl*." Normally it is not the kind of show I would like - the humor (some of it at least) borders a bit on crude for me. But you know - there is a fundamental sweetness (if it's not too strange to say that) about the show. And some of the jokes really are pretty funny - almost Simpsons funny. (One of my favorite episodes was when Earl taught an ESL class - to "make up" for having teased someone with an accent in the past. At first he thought the only English his students were learning was "My name is Earl." For some reason (either I forget why or it was an inexplicable reason), he also taught them directions to where he lived. And then, at the end, when some angry person showed up and was going to hurt Earl, one by one, the students showed up. And each said (IIRC) as they walked in "My name is Earl." And at the end, Earl made some comment about how they were Karma's Army. Which made me laugh.)

(*If you've not seen it, the basic promise is this: Earl and his friends/brother (I'm not sure of the relationships in the show, I'm not really a regular viewer) did a lot of Bad Stuff in the past. And Earl, after winning the lottery, gets hit by a car. While in the hospital, he hears something on the tv about karma, and decides that it's a sign - that he has to "fix" the things he did that were Bad. And so each week, he tries to "cross something off his list." Usually there are either unintended consequences or something strange happens. It's an odd show - it's crude and yet funny and has, as I said, an underlying sweetness.)