So, I'm whittling away at the backlog.

Still coding my observations from last summer onto the data entry forms. With a deadline of getting caught up by the end of the month. Fairly mundane stuff. Taking lines and lines of numbers from my daily planner, and transcribing those numbers onto other lines on the small data forms. Interrupted by looking up the habitat codes I couldn't remember out there in the field (burned limber pine is 99.56... I remember it now), and using the digitized maps to find UTMs for the observations where I didn't bother taking a GPS reading.

A tedium interrupted as I reread some of my other, non-datum notes from those days. Right now, I'm on the notes for this day.

Been trying to get these WOFs (Wildlife Observation Forms... pronounced "woofs") done for days, if not weeks, but it's hard to work on your lap (all flat surfaces in the office are occupied, maily by piles of papers). And the computer is sitting there as a fair distraction, since there is always work waiting to be done on it (like reading and printing the season justifications for sage grouse this morning).

So, since we finally cleared the tree out of the dining room, I took my lunch hour and brought the pieces of the dining room table up from the basement, and reassembled it.

Easy to put together. Six screws, and four bolts. With one screw left over. No idea where that goes, since the wife took the thing apart in the first place. Heavy wood, though. A bit of a struggle up the stairs. A fine table given to us by a former neighbor in one of the final stages before their divorce. Whether to purge the house of unpleasant memories, or just to spite the soon to be ex-wife, I do not know.

But it's a nice table. Certainly one of the best pieces of furniture we own.

And a great place to work, facing out the alcove windows, working in bright sunlight (or at least as bright as it gets in the winter at this latitude). Lots of room for books, papers, elbows and a coffee cup.

'Course, with the eldest son here, it also means I'm trying to concentrate on copying numbers while listening to episode after episode of Evangelion. Don't know how much more of that I can take.

And occasionally have to talk to the dove. He is thrilled to have company in his room, so coos often.

It would be rude not to coo back.