Official-type bulletin!

Friends and readers, it is high time I provide a new post on this blog. However, a recent injury has made typing a bit of a difficulty, so we will all just have to wait some more.

Hopefully, I will be able to tell you fantastic things about sudden oak death and various current events within a month or so — sooner if I could find someone to take dictation (ha!). I’m sure you’re all terribly disappointed, so to help soothe your deep emotional pain, here is a very cool enhanced MRI image of a normal shoulder.

With any luck, mine will look like this again shortly!

Upcoming changes & projects

Faithful readers! I have begun my new job on the Lower Shasta-Trinity National Forest in California. All is well in the world of silviculture, save for one thing: I do not have phone service or reliable Internet. So, I’m moving to a two-week schedule since that will be easier to swing in between evething else.

Look for upcoming posts on sudden oak death, tree physiology and maybe even the chemistry of paper milling, as well as a book review comparing various floras for the Northwest. Hooray! You know you are going to love it!

Updates and some slightly unsettling questions

What a busy few weeks! I’ve had a very strange and thought provoking experience, recently, which is mostly what I want to talk about in this post — especially if any of you can weigh in on the issue. But rather than append random updates to the end of the discussion, I’ll get them out of the way right off the top for those who are interested.

So, as far as school goes, I’ve recently begun doing watershed surveys, involving visual protocols and generating to-scale maps of a reach. It’s been fun, and more than a little wet. I want to post an update with scans once I get more done. Same goes for my silviculture class, in which a group of us are working on a restoration proposal for an area of greenspace on our campus. I’m becoming pretty comfortable with ArcGIS, too — and would heartily recommend Getting to Know ArcGIS to anyone wanting to learn this program. The book is fabulous and practical, and comes with a trial of the program suite, too — though Mac users will be out of luck.