living the high life

well how-de-do. i am so covered in dog hair that my (black) pants look blonde.
i'm dogsitting for my boss's boss's boss ... which makes her sound way more high and mighty than she is. really, she's more of an equal with my boss, but somebody has to have the administrative title. anyway, she lives in Highland Park, very close to the Garden, in a cute little house with 2 dogs that I think are much too large for the house and yard. Song and Hadley are their names, and Hadley is a big baby (1 year 0ld) with obscene amounts of energy and a tendency to jump on you and chew you, and chew up any paper or food he comes across. really, he's kind of hellish. Song, on the other hand, is an old, laid back lady who is just ecstatic any time you tell her she's a good dog and is content to sit still and enjoy life. the house is adorable, with lots of dark-stained wood and floral art and botanical books. kind of the house i'd like to have in the future. this is my third day here. it's nice and quiet (except that the Metra tracks are about 100 meters behind her house - probably why it's affordable for someone working in the field of plant conservation - but the metra only passes once an hour) and there's nowhere i know to go up here, so i have time to read, watch tv, and relax.

i spent the past 2 days monitoring a plant called Cirsium hillii, Hill's Thistle, in a much more intense manner than I usually monitor a plant. Level 1 monitoring is what we usually do, where we count the plants, record the invasive plants and other threats to the population, and record the population's location and associated species. Level 2 monitoring, which is what I did yesterday and today, involves giving permanent metal tags to individual plants and then finding them again year after year so that we can measure their leaves and monitor their health to see if they die or succeed. This involves copious amounts of paperwork, so that we have exact coordinates along x and y axes (set up using rebar stakes as endpoints, so we can have the same axes every year) to use to relocate the tags and plants. Cirsium hillii does not flower very often, so the plants we were looking at were mostly rosettes, all less than 30 cm across, flat on the ground, many buried in other vegetation, so i spent two days on my hands and knees, getting poked by sharp thistle leaves in an effort to measure them. the ungrateful wretches.

so anyway, now my still-bum knee is very achy. actually, all of me is achy. two days of kneeling can do that. i tried to fix it last night by eating avocados and pineapple (not simultaneously - in sequence) and drinking half a bottle of chilled riesling. it didn't work. i'd better eat the other half of pineapple and drink the other half bottle of wine, to see if i have better results.