Spent most of the afternoon in the field, doing prairie sampling (well, actually prairie-wetland sampling: all the rain this spring has made all kinds of crazy stuff - Fimbristylis and Juncus marginatus and things like that - come up)

Dang, I forget how much I MISS that kind of fieldwork. Work where you know what you're doing, where you can correctly identify ~90% of the species involved, where you don't feel a little bit like you're groping in the dark (like I do with the lichen work because I really cannot reliably identify the lichens in the field at this point).

It's kind of like finding old friends again - "Oh, Polygala, I know that's you!" or "Here's Cacalia plantaginifolia again!"

We (a colleague is helping me) got about half the site sampled today (the difficult, diverse half). We're going to meet tomorrow morning and do the rest. It's a good day's work; you feel like you've actually DONE something with your time when you're done.

I've been picking away at various projects; I pulled out the Greek pullover yesterday and picked up where I left off. I'm also still working happily away on the crocheted blanket - it grows slowly but it is good "while I'm waiting for the oven to preheat" or "while I'm watching for the local weather to come on the newscast" work - for times when you have "just a few minutes" and don't feel like messing with something that requires you to do shaping or remember increases or decreases or things like that.