Camping at Wakonda State Park was our RV shakedown cruise. We took the first weekend of my spring break. We didn't find anything major wrong with the motorhome this time, though we did head home a day early because of the threat of rain (which never actually appeared). We walked the dogs a lot, and had the entire park largely to ourselves. I took a couple of long skateboard trips with the sisters. One I recorded with the helmet cam. Not much interesting happened, but I need to edit it down to the best bits to make it worth watching. Savannah came over for a bike ride. We saw the huge flock of snow geese on Agate lake. When they saw us they got up and moved to the other side of the lake. One morning I had to get up early to walk the dogs and I a nice sunrise was in progress. The sunset the night before had been disappointing, so I got the camera out and shot the heck out of it. Some geese even flew by to add interest to my images. I put one of the images on my CafePress site so people can buy a poster of it if they want. Our realtor came out and we signed the contract on our rental house. Yay! It is sold.
We had the Sisters groomed, and this time I had the groomer do them in a style more like the official show pattern, except that they were clipped, not hand-stripped, of course. We had let them go a long time. Their hair doesn't grow very fast, but they were looking more scruffy than I'd ever seen them. I love their new look.
We walked the St. Patrick's Day parade in Quincy with the Kennel Club. I had them pull me on the skateboard. Some of the children found it amusing. One boy said, "Can you do a flip?" I said, "Absolutely not." I was happy to get through the parade without falling down. It rained on us a bit, but not too badly.
Since we came home a day early, I was able to work on the RV and put it away fairly quickly. I rearranged the stuff in the big garage at our Jamison place so I could fit my truck in it. With a bit of time on my hands, I was able to finish off my Bar Jump instructable. It was very quickly picked up and featured on the front page of the Instructables.com web site. I have a lot of fun putting these together. I've done four in the dog agility genre. I bought a 55-gallon drum so I can make the chute obstacle next. Once I had the bar jump done I put it in the back yard and photographed all the dogs jumping it.
I made a bracket for attaching my action camera to a dog. Isabel has been the only camera dog so far. I'm writing an instructable on it, but haven't quite finished it off.
We had planned to go camping over Easter break, but there was a lot of rain in the forecast and we canceled. It turned out only one day was rainy. You just can't second guess the weather.
My Plant Field Biology class is in full swing, and we have been lucky to enjoy an early spring. Warm weather has coaxed a lot of wildflowers out ahead of schedule. We had one nice outing to Siloam Springs State Park, where my friends Jan and Mark guided us and pointed out several new species.
I was interviewed by the local TV news about monarch butterflies. I never saw the segment. Hope I didn't say anything stupid. There is a brief story online here.
I published a paper this past month in Journal of Thermal Biology. The study came from work we did in Ruby back in 2009. We still have a lot of data from that time. I believe you can watch the 5-minute slide presentation that I made for the paper, as well as read the abstract and highlights here.
I finally finished editing the video of Miss Kitty running through the snow while I cross-country skied.
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