Oh, well, whatever

They can't take the sky from me. Or the bees. Or the soil. Or whatever.

Part of it is just exam week fatigue: your schedule SEEMS like it should be more open ("I'm only obligated to be somewhere for two hours tomorrow") but it really isn't (grading. All that grading.) And I'm having issues with my Directed Readings students. (The last one SHOULD be meeting with me this afternoon).

I guess my frustration is this: If what I am doing is so insignificant, why do people act as if it is so urgent? It's a corollary to the "If people don't treat me like I'm a grown-up, why the heck do I have so much responsibility dumped on my head?" rule.

Anyway. In a few minutes I'm bound for the field. Sometime I should take a photo of myself in field gear so those of you who haven't done fieldwork get an idea of what it's like. Typically, what I wear is an old t-shirt, tucked into a pair of old khakis or jeans. Khakis are a good idea in tick country because it's easier to see if you've picked up hitchhikers. And the tucking-in of the shirt is important - I tend to rely heavily on the "barrier" method to prevent ticks and chiggers from getting at my skin. I can't use DEET (makes me come out in hives) and the idea of permethrin (where you are supposed to saturate your clothes with it and then NOT TOUCH THEM AGAIN UNTIL AFTER THEY ARE DRY) scares me. So I use a hippy-dippy herbal repellant (which actually seems to work pretty well, at least against mosquitoes) and cover as much of my skin as practicable.

Along with the t-shirt (and ideally, it's one with a long hem: better for tucking in), I wear an old, thin, long-sleeved button front shirt (I have two that I liberated from my father's closet: they're old (one of them probably dates to the 1970s) and don't quite fit him any more). This protects further against bugs and also protects against sunburn and poison ivy. And I wear boot socks pulled up OVER the cuffs of my pants. It looks goony but again, it prevents chiggers from going up your pant leg and finding their favorite spots to bite.

And then I wear either tennis shoes (for lightweight fieldwork, or for teaching a field lab where I'm mostly standing around playing overseer) or field boots. And I need to get new field boots - mine are over a dozen years old and are beginning to show their age. (Though perhaps some saddle soap or neat's foot oil would renew them a bit. I should try that.)

And I add a hat to that - either a broad-brimmed sun hat or a baseball cap I have that has an extension down the back, kind of like the old French Foreign Legion hats. There's too much of a history of skin cancer in my family for me to spend much time outdoors without lots of protection....

Today's task is mainly reconnaissance; I don't have all my supplies yet. (#1 of yesterday's second post is related to that issue.) I CAN, however, catalog what is flowering and locate sites to set up and work. And if there are bees, I can do a rough count. It's kind of overcast (supposed to storm this afternoon), so I'm not sure how many bees will be out.