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blizzard warnings - 13:52 , 03 October 2013

heelerless - 21:32 , 18 August 2013

Red Coat Inn in Fort McLeod - 11:38 , 23 June 2013

rushing into the waters - 09:53 , 21 June 2013

choosing a spot - 17:43 , 27 April 2013

30 August 2006 - 23:02

chokecherry wine

Just a few brief notes from yesterday's meeting:

Knew we were meeting in University Town, but I didn't actually look at the agenda to find out where we were meeting until the night before.

In youngest son's dorm dining room.

Yep, two days after we drop him off at university, I'm back for two days of meetings in the same building.

He was unimpressed. Managed a polite "Thanks for stopping by" as I visited his room after the day's meeting was done, costing him a flag in an online game of capture the flag.

At least he managed to get worried when the wife noticed it was nearing midnight and I wasn't home yet. Perhaps I should have called and told her I decided to stay for the banquet...

This was an annual meeting of professional wildlife biologists, but at a level higher in the organization than I've attended for, what, ten years? Close to 150 attending, with representation from Kansas, Nebraska, both Dakotas, Manitoba, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah.

And Washington DC, of course. Oh, yeah. And Portugal.

Really.

Couldn't survey the whole room, but I counted 8 females out of the front 50 in the room.

First meeting I've ever been to with dual powerpoint projectors. Yes, I remember the fancy slide shows with two projectors and screens, with the audience's attention bouncing back and forth from right to left.

A fad that fortunately did not last.

But this was identical projections to the left and right of the speaker. Nice for the wide room, but a little redundant since the screens were less than a meter from each other. And they weren't synchronized electronically. Speaker controlled the one on our left, and an attendant manually switched images on the right screen to match. Usually well, but sometimes distractingly late.

And really awkward when the speaker went backwards for something they forgot to mention on a previous slide.

Didn't work with laser pointers, either. Almost all speakers just pointed at the screen on their right, so the right side of the room had to guess what was being highlighted.

Kudos to the one and only speaker who went back and forth, highlighting her points on both screens. But it was distracting and delaying.

Only had one powerpoint failure. Suspect she saved her presentation in "auto advance" mode, because one machine would not wait for her to keep up. Having the second, manual screen was quite helpful for her talk.

Especially looked forward to a presentation on lichen toxicity. The same old Xanthoparmelia chlorochroa that killed all our elk two years ago (I'm too tired to link... check most entries in Feb & March of 2004).

Basically, what she learned was... the lichen we had on our winter range that winter was more toxic than the same lichen collected in the same place two years later. And the same species of lichen collected in other places in 2005.

Not all lichens are created equal. And, apparently, lichen toxicity does not stay the same.

Which is exactly what our toxicology expert said two years ago.

One of the graduate student researchers could not find clip art of a snowshoe hare for his presentation. Not wanting to look dumb by slipping in a picture of the wrong species of rabbit, like cottontail or jackrabbit, he used...

The Easter bunny.

Really.

Stayed to after ten o'clock because of the awards and auction after the banquet (with a 100-mile drive home thereafter, followed by a return trip this morning).

Is $40 too much to pay for a bottle of homemade chokecherry wine?

I've picked chokecherries, and tried to squeeze the juice out of those pitty fruit.

I don't think so.

Nor did the wife.

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