I'm headed to Oregon on Friday to make a big leap of progress on wrapping up this PhD. Two friends that have been amazingly supportive are offering not only a little bit of fun (shhh... don't tell Mike I might go walk on the beach and watch birds) but assistance to get my review paper into draft form so that I can try to convince NAU that I'm going to finish. This is a huge thing for me on two fronts: One is that I will be leaving my kids for two nights and I'm hoping it will go smoothly. They'll be with Mike, so it's not like I'm abandoning them (and I'm not particularly worried about THEM), but I'm always a mom and I'm going to miss them. Second, I'm going to need to change my thinking cap... since I'm usually juggling meals, asking if everyone's gone to the bathroom, and negotiating for toys... I now need to focus, and act like someone who has a career job! I remember the first field season of my PhD... which was an extreme drought year in Flagstaff. It was so bad, that the Forest Service ultimately closed the forest to the public and to researchers because of the high danger of fire. We were half way through the field season, so to deal with some of the stress of potentially losing all of our field data by not being able to finish following our birds through their nesting attempts, we had a party (I know, a little counter-intuitive, but it was a difficult time and we needed to lighten up a bit). At this party we built some amazing hats that we hoped we could use to channel the data we needed from the birds that we were no longer able to observe. How I wish I had my hat now...
P.S. We were ultimately allowed to follow the nests we already had, just not allowed to spend enough time to find new ones... just in case you were worried for me and my data set! :)
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