It is possible that you haven't heard much from me lately...

[thanate]

Last Sunday (easter) my parents came up & my mother and I went to the aquarium (which was horribly crowded) while my father and grauwulf wandered through the Torsk (which was not.)

Monday was more or less normal; Tuesday's master naturalist class started an hour earlier than usual, as the first speaker had to teach a class in the early afternoon. On Wednesday I headed out ridiculously early to drive down to a Nature Conservancy property on the eastern shore for two days of replanting atlantic white cedars & short-leaved pine in cleared bits of an old loblolly pine plantation.

This morning I got up early to go fetch pond plants from Wicklein Water Gardens, as they kindly let me e-mail a plant list and go pick them up, instead of dealing with shipping. Now I need to get the wet ones into the pond, and then (if my head hasn't exploded or anything-- spending a couple days in pine woods seems to have set me back in trying to adjust to the oak pollen) I have a free ticket to the craft fair in Gaithersburg this weekend. I've also got the lawn to mow (since we once again have a working mower, after the one I bought last year met with an unfortunate construction-related accident) and a story I'd like to poke at again before sending it to Sword & Sorceress, which just re-opened submissions.

Tomorrow there's a local stream clean-up, and then on Sunday there's the farmer's market, and then aanna_t is in DC, so I'll be driving down to go hang out with her & her children for Sunday and/or Monday, TBD.

Then Tuesday is master naturalist again, and Wednesday is the first field trip day for that, and Thursday I will actually be there for my scheduled aquarium day.

Friday (a week from today) I think I will spend asleep. We'll see.

Comments

[ivy]

Are you finding the master naturalist classes to be worthwhile? I'm still jealous, in that good supportive sense. [grin] The white cedar replanting also sounds awesome. (You don't know of anything like that in Louisiana, do you? Still looking for this year's volunteering.) How did you find the program?

Whoa, water gardens. That's ambition -- I've never tried gardening like that!

[thanate.livejournal.com]

It is fairly cool, though a little bit frustrating in a few ways. Most of those are just a function of the MD program being so new; they haven't quite worked out the kinks yet, either of the statewide stuff or in this particular site's class. There are a lot of the modules where I feel like I'm not learning much at all just because every topic gets a 3 hour segment, usually with some kind of walk in the woods component as part of it, and so for things I've run into before there's too much to cover before it gets up beyond my previous experience. But on the things I don't know much about, it is a good intro.

The cedars are through the aquarium's conservation team, so I'm afraid I don't know much about things in other areas. I know MD has one person who organizes all the plant diversity & restoration stuff for their properties in the state-- possibly it might be worth looking into whether such a person exists for the area you'd like to work in, and see if they've got anything you can join?

So far my water garden has small plants and several thousand mosquito wigglers. There was a tiny diving beetle today, though, so I have some hope for increased predation soon.