We finished up the third site today. (We have five to do - two sites left, two weeks left in June. I like how that is working out.).
This was an interesting site; the place we sampled Monday was awful (crawling bent double under greenbriar - "nature's barbed wire" as I remarked that day - and dealing with dense vegetation). Tuesday was an improvement. Today, we were in a very open area (I suspect it of flooding regularly - most of the trees there seemed older, as in "established before the lake filled in 1948" older). We found a bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa), which surprised but pleased me because it's an "old friend" from Illinois forests. (We have some of the same species down here, but not many. I think this is the first bur oak I've seen in my sampling since I've lived here).
So we got done. Punted on going to see another area the invasive-species biologist excitedly told us about yesterday, because when we asked how to get there, we found out it was an hour's round trip (!)
So for the rest of the week, it's back to sorting through the soil samples I gathered BEFORE all of this started, and looking for the soil invertebrates. (I did one sample this morning while waiting on people to arrive for us to drive down to the site. I can do at most 3 samples in a day, because after that my eyes "go" from looking at the brightly-lit sample through the 'scope, so it's hard making time to get these done...I can't just knock them all out in a single long day like I could with some things.)
I'm also wondering if part of my malaise means I should start a new project...have something new to get excited about. I don't know. I really "should" start the right front of Potter, with all its dreaded "work as for left front BUT reverse shaping and DON'T FORGET TO PUT IN THE BUTTONHOLES" bit. Or try to finish the Miss Marple shawl (I knit on that a bit last night, wound up attaching the final ball of yarn. It's going to be very close whether or not I have enough (and if I was unlucky and this last ball turns out to be one of those wonky, few-yards-short balls that you sometimes get from Noro, I will not have enough).
(The joke in that case is "knit faster so you don't run out of yarn." Heh. Sometimes I do wish the world operated on Gracie Allen logic a little more than it does.)
I have three balls of the KnitPicks' "Chroma" sockweight yarn in the color called "Pegasus" (heh...bought before the current fondness for the MLP cartoons). I want to make some kind of a swoopy shawl out of it...it's a striping yarn, so I don't want the pattern to be too complex, or to be one of those picture-pattern shawls. So I don't know. I've still not run across anything that appeals. I picture a triangular shawl, but I wouldn't be averse to a rectangular one. I keep looking in my stitch dictionaries to see if there's something I could "plug in to" an existing triangular shawl pattern to have my "own" lace design in there. Maybe a leaf-lace? Or a feathery looking lace, seeing as the yarn is called "Pegasus"? (I know there's a feather pattern somewhere. I will have to find it. That might be what to do.)
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Speaking of invasive species...strangely, I had just read a British murder mystery where water hemlock was the poison, when I learned that a friend who farms in very southern KY noted a plant she hadn't seen before in a pasture. She took it to the county agent, who said he didn't know what it was but not to worry. She persisted in her research and found that it was water hemlock, poisonous to cattle (who will eat it if there's nothing else to eat). I live in Middle TN and now have this plant in my yard. Should I be worried?
What exactly do you do when you sample a plot? Are you taking soil samples, plant samples? What are you looking for?
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