i'm back!!

Hey everyone - hope you had a great holiday season! I really enjoyed being home - it was both relaxing and packed full of visits and projects. I believe it was gray and rainy nearly every day I was home except for one brilliant Saturday. It was such a lovely day that Cameron and I headed outdoors with our friends Elly, Deven and Raiko, as well as our two four-legged critters. A joy as always, Miso chose to roll in some choice stuff and make our stroll a pungent one.

The rivers in Oregon are rockin' and rollin'. Exciting! Nothing turns my head quite like a flooding river. You just gotta love those rain-on-snow events for making life real. And even though it is rainy and gray, I do miss the Pacific Northwest.

Of course, I am not about to complain about the lucky couple of days we had here in Oxford (60's and sunny! beautiful!!). Even though the weather has turned back to winter, I do like having some sunshine in the morning. It certainly makes it easier to get up and go!

As for work - some unfortunate leaking has postponed the beginning of my flume runs, but hopefully tomorrow I will be up and running. I've installed the "plants" (all 800 of them), which in the short testing I've done, appear to be doing what I had hoped they would do. Installing them didn't take all that long, but I managed to wear holes in my fingers and thumbs. Fortunately for you, instead of providing a photo of my "injuries", I have included one of the installed "plants". They are made of acrylic and bend like a sapling should. Hopefully this all works out well! Over the next couple of weeks I will find out if my carefully laid plans will pan out or whether I will need to do some tweaking. Tweaking will definitely set me behind schedule...so please everyone, cross your fingers for me!