Wow, ok

I know that I have not updated this in well over a year. I went through a lot of changes.

• I got out of a bad relationship. Technically I was homeless for a while, but I got my own place to live in April.
• I had a lot of schoolwork. Currently I’m about halfway through a bachelor’s degree in teaching earth science.
• I worked a lot. Often I’d put in 6-day, 60+ hour weeks, and I didn’t have a lot of time to go out and take pictures.
• This past summer was really bad for asthma and migraines, so I didn’t venture outside much.

I don’t handle the cold well, and there is little for me to do in winter, so I did not update  this past winter. Furthermore, on January 1st of this year, I slipped and fell. What I first thought was a sprained ankle (see the entry about the Branch Snake for one of my adventures involving sprains) turned out to be a bimalleolar fracture. I’m still healing from that, and today is a particularly troublesome day.

Still, it appears that this year will be my most productive year yet as far as naturalist work goes. For the third year in a row, I intend to help with a Natural Resource Foundation field trip at Nitschke Mounds. Once again, I will be providing plant identification along the trail. Around that same time, I will be assisting in a plant cataloging project. Dodge County is historically understudied, so I offered to help a researcher locate plant species. Another project starting this year is placing wild edibles around Dodge County Parks. The pilot site will be Harnischfeger Park. The plan is to put fruit trees and berry bushes around the park, so people can pick food as they hike along the trails. The final project is a prairie restoration with a 4H club at Astico. This has been a pet project idea of mine for years, but it looks like this year it might finally come to fruition.

The researcher I have been communicating with suggested a site for plant identification. As a result, I have been able to identify previously unknown plants in photographs I had taken. Now I’ll be able to update with more content, more frequently, with correctly identified plants, provided my ankle fractures are properly healed :).