I have a lot of things running through my head with all the road and boat time I'm putting in these days, so bear with me.
First and foremost, I've made a small start at a photo-selling type of website! You can find that at <http://floundergirlphotography.smugmug.com/> I'm still trying to make the time to go through a bunch of photos and get them uploaded. I think I've decided that I'm going to stick with this site (I still have 11 days on my free trial), I just need to wait until I get paid to actually pay for sticking with it :) I think it's going to be a very fun resource for me and I don't expect that I'll be selling a lot of photos, but it'll be fun to be able to share with people anyway. I have yet to figure out the actually marketing function of the site, but I think that may have to wait until I'm an actual "subscriber" or whatever that makes me.
The "strawberries" part of this post is mostly just me yearning for fruits to do things with (it must be spring!). I think Puk has some figs in the freezer that I want to try to make jam with. I have blackberries in Andrew's freezer that we intended to try making wine with, but we'll see if that happens. Also, there was a fellow on the corner by my church yesterday selling flats of strawberries for twelve dollars. I'm thinking about buying one and freezing some for various uses and also making jam. I want jam! I'm not going to be able to handle not canning things this summer :P I also want to hit up a farmers market soon and see if I can get my hands on any rhubarb. SPRING!
Our sea lion "friends" are still around Bonneville Dam, but my job description has developed a little bit more. Now, not only are we observing tagging and branding, hazing them down the river, and watching for fish kills, but we're also working with acoustic receivers. This just means that we're putting a piece of equipment out with and anchor, plenty of rope, a bouy, and crab floats to keep track of the sea lions that have been tagged. When a sea lion swims near one of the receivers, the identification number and time are recorded. So we're responsible for downloading this data every week. Yesterday we downloaded the data for the dozen (actually only eleven, one has disappeared) by Bonneville Dam and today we went down to "the estuary" to download data from the 15 or so we put out there. Our estuary days end up being long ones (I put in about 12 hours today). It's fun getting to go to the coast and be on "big water," though, so I really can't complain much (except for the soreness in my shoulders and back).
I could probably think of more things to share if I really wanted to, but I think I'll let you all be for now. I had a girl-friend comment recently that I write long posts. I already knew that :D
Oh, one last comment that I forgot. Within the last week or so, I've gotten a couple encouraging comments on the old blog that I wrote while on Svalbard (http://floundergirl07.livejournal.com/). I didn't expect at all for that to suddenly materialize again, but I'm really grateful to my mystery fans, because sometimes I feel like I'm just typing for myself (which isn't such a bad thing) or that maybe I'm the only one that's really enthralled by my thoughts and musings :P It's nice to know that my ramblings are somehow appreciated (by more than my patronizing family and friends).
