Have to love what you do.

Friday we did a pre-dawn at Lucky Hills/Walnut Gulch, which means we got out to our work site at 4:30am in order to take measurements on water potential in the plants before sunrise (i.e. we had 30 minutes to do 15 measurements). Erin and I did a few measurements and then realized the N2 was leaking really bad, so we switched the casing on the plant, in hopes the smaller casing would have less leakage. It worked, but we lost a significant amount of time on it. Russ and Eric said today they didn't think it would affect the numbers very much, but we are doing another pre-dawn at a different site (Santa Rita) this week and then next week are attempting Lucky Hills again to see if anything changed since the first rainfall. Pre-dawns aren't too bad, it definitely messes with your sleep schedule, but the actual measurements are kind of interesting so I can't complain and once a week isn't so bad. We did however also have to take leaf area measures and count stems and clip samples to take back to the lab. Once the sun rose we put on 5 sensors on the tar bush and got resistance ratings. I'm sure we would not have made it out there if there hadn't been 3 people as 30minutes is a lot to accomplish pre-dawns and sampling.

Today we spent time measuring leaf area on the samples we clipped Friday using another LI-COR insturment. The only tricky part was that the tar bush and creosote bush have leaves that were sticky and thus sticked to themselves and the conveyor belt of the insturment. Letting them air dry a bit made the whole process a little better. We did not measure any leaves from white thorn acacia since it had none.

Another thing Erin and I both noticed today was how much the people who work at ARS seem to dislike their job. Maybe it was just something in the air today, but many people were talking about how they can't wait to move out onto the next best thing. It's kind of scary how many people end up in jobs they hate and the most common reason seems to be for the money, especially in today's economy. I think that its important to like what you do at work since you spend so much time on it. Of course it also helps to like the people you work with, but as I have seen first hand with the Penn State Vegetation Management that doesn't necessarily equate to being happy in the workplace and often that lack of happiness is brought home to the personal life. I sincerely hope that I never have to be in a job I hate...