As it has been almost every year for the past quarter century, this is the time for writing the annual reports for my herds. As I explained to the friend who pulled his truck up alongside the heeler sisters and I as we made our noon sojourn to the post office today...

Once the weather turns nice, I get stuck inside writing reports.

Good news is, the deer and elk reports are done. Even the new step, added this year, of converting them to pdf files.

Which is an interesting, if not typical change. The idea was to finally enjoy the true benefits of the electronic age, and not waste paper and expense printing up paper copies of these reports. Just PDF them, ship them in, and we're done.

'Course, the folks making that decision forgot that there are bosses who have to review these reports, looking for typographic and grammatical errors (of which my deer and elk reports had an embarrassingly high supply). And this they cannot do in the Adobe electronic form. I mean, my boss could mark his corrections in red grease pencil on his monitor, but it'd be kinda hard for me to read them from 127 miles away, much less figure out which goes where.

So, he has to have paper copies. Anyway.

But the PDF format is cool, and the software works slick, so I'm content. We at least save some trees by skipping the final print phase.

That leaves the pronghorn reports, which are by far most of the work this year, but I'm well on the way with those.

In other news, I've got another elk telemetry flight scheduled for Wednesday. Perhaps will find out if our wayward cow has gotten herself to Steamboat yet.

And I had antelope flights set for this Saturday and Sunday.

Pilot called today.

They're ahead of schedule. Should be here in town, ready for us to fly, on...

You guessed it. Wednesday.

Bad enough I'm going to have to fly, but in two planes at once?

Fortunately game wardens are volunteering all over the place, so we should be okay. And I may even be able to reduce the number of hours I actually have to spend in a plane.

And thinking about all my office hours in the past few weeks, I looked at where I was last year at this time: