She is napping so I, naturally, am thinking about what all I need to do this week.  I have to scan and file photos that I have been putting off for a year.  (That's right, a  year, don't judge me.)  I have to write one of two papers that will be term papers, although the first one is required in draft form only.  The other will be a bit more involved.  I will have to annotate that one.  I hate annotating about as much as plaigerism so what am I to do?  

Next week is Easter Sunday.  In one month to the day is Xyla's birthday.  She will be two.  

Yet all I can think about is home.  I have two more pay periods before I have enough leave saved to take a break.  My mom might come down for a couple of days, maybe with my grandmother.  I really wish my family got to be a bigger part of my daughter's life.  I know they do too.

Right now I am grateful that I get to roll and play with my baby as I watch her grow, and grow and grow.  I measured her yesterday and she is 34 inches.  I measured her two weeks ago at 33.  She snuck it in there.  She is sleeping in her own bed most of the time.  She is about half potty trained.  She draws what looks like words rather than pictures of things or shapes.  She has pretty much all of her baby teeth.  I love to see her smile and she smiles a lot.  She can recognize and verbalize a variety of colors and objects.  She can and does clearly tell me "yesh" she wants some thing or "noooo" she doesn't.  She is really good at taking medicine when she needs to.  I wish she didn't need to.  She takes books to bed with her.  I found her in her room reading a book of nursery rhymes yesterday.  She has recently discovered a love for Winnie the Pooh, whom she calls "poop".  'Tigger' and 'sticker sound an aweful lot alike but I can usually tell which she means.  

I think it is safe to say we are improving communication almost daily.  I am excited that I will soon be reporting the precoucious things she will come up with.  She has quite the imagination.  She still hasn't really "connected" with any specific thing.  One day she will be best friend with 'poop', then she'll take up with her pen and notebook, the following day she'll want to take her plastic chair everywhere she goes.

I really can't wait to find out what God has in store for the two of us.

Welcome to the NRCS

Have I mentioned that I am loving my job?  It affords me the ability to exercise my talents.

This gentleman was helping monitor a prescribed burn on the Otoe Missouri tribal complex water treatment pond.  In case you think otherwise, that is smoke blowing across the water.  Later in the day I shot video of the prescribed burn that I was actually there to shoot.  Since the Otoe police chief and his crew were going to help on the other fire too I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to use the still camera.

I was really excited when I got this shot.  Most of the others in this sequence weren't framed right or were a little too blurry to turn out this nice.  Prescribed fire, which begins with a fire plan, if you hold to the best practices model you will be able to increase the health of your vegetation and not be at great risk of having the fire run wild.  Prescribed fire is good for controlling certain vegetative diseases, eastern red cedar, and makes it less likely that your property will suffer damage in the event of a wild fire. Prescribed burns reduce fuel loads and increase the population of native grasses that are usually choked out by commercial grasses and agricultural crops.  These burns also return valuable nutrients to the ground.  I think the best thing I heard all day was one of the helpers as he was starting a back fire with a drip torch he said, "I get to start a fire on someone else's property in front of the police chief and the fire chief and I am not going to get into trouble.  This is the best job ever."  Of course I think he is wrong, I think I have the best job ever.

Biggest day of my life.

Today is easily the biggest day of my life.  I didn't even see it coming but it can't be denied.  Single most important significant thing I have ever heard, I heard today.  You'll have to wait just a minute while I lead into this.

You see she usually only makes it to the shelf near the sink when she climbs on stuff in the bathroom.  I don't mind leaving her there to walk out of the room for a second because if she has trouble getting down she calls to me.  I had gone into her room for just a second when I came back around the corner I saw her standing in the sink holding the jar of liquid soap and dispensing it into her hand.  I did what any mother would do.  .  . I turned the water on for her.  She wants clean hands, I will let her do what she has to do.  I ducked into the living room to pick up the camera I wanted to document this just for the fun of it.  When I returned she had abandoned the soap and was making faces into the mirror.  They told me she does this at school and it is fun to watch.  It will serve her well if she decides to take up acting.  Then she started to go through all the little bottles of shampoo, listerine, nail polish that I keep "out of reach" beside the sink.  I suppose I'll be moving those now.  She lost interest in that and did what any nearly-two would do . . . she washed her feet.

Later, after she dumped an entire cup of pop corn on the floor, unloaded all of her unused diapers out of their plastic bag, insisted on watching Winnie the Pooh for the second time and played in the general area where the dog resides . . . we were playing as I was catching up with my mom on face book.  I was typing and she grabbed my face . . . she said, "why-woah-yuuu".

Best day of my life.  Biggest day of my life.  My baby loves me.  And she can tell me.

I had another defining moment for my career yesterday.  They let me go up and do some ariel photography.  Most people would find the subject matter of dams to be somewhat boring but I don't care what I am taking pictures of as long as I am taking pictures.  This is a little narrative about my day.

This is the little cessna we commissioned to fly us over, intially 4, but ended up to be 7 or 8 features.  

This is semi-retired Larry Caldwell.  He is the "Old Dam Man".  He told us he was going to retire but his office is still open for business nearly every day.  He's the biggest so we stuffed him in the back seat.  Actually, you can't shoot good pictures from back there since only the front window opens while you are flying.  (That's right, open window picture shooting at 5000 feet.)

Naturally we had to have a pilot.  This man was an excellent pilot.  If I hadn't been wearing the seat belt I would have only fell out of the plane twice.  He was impressed that I didn't ralph.  Most people who shoot out of planes get queasy even when they normally wouldn't.  Has to do with the limited information your eye gets from your surroundings when you close one and force the other into the viewfinder.

This is part of the reason we do what we do at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).  It is hard to get a good idea of the true scope of erosion unless you can see this.  Water is a powerful earth mover.  People underestimate this power all the time.

In the end we landed with over 1000 pictures, many of them just versions of others.  I had my camera set to rapid fire to make sure I got the shots we needed.  Next time we take off I will have a better idea of what I need to do.  I will probably take fewer pictures but I don't think I am quite up to eliminating the rapid fire just yet.  That will come with experience.  I may get lots of practice as everyone agrees we should do this more often.

Drummond Flat Wetland Area

Cimarron River

How excited am I?

I am excited enough to post a photograph of pee on my blog that's how excited I am.  Maybe this is a little out of the ordinary.  I am sure Xyla will be angry with me when she grows up for posting this but . . . 

Considering the fact I thought it would be a major effort to get her to be ok with the concept of pee in the potty this is huge.  She has made it to the pot 4 times already and it isn't even noon yet.  I suppose I can start investing in pull-ups so that she will understand the mechanics of underpants.  I can see being able to save $50 a month in my close future.  I am beyond excited.

Her favorite hat . . .

This is a short post.  It's just to show  you her favorite hat.

On the death of my grandfather. . .

I was going to write this post so long ago.  It's been quite a while since my grandfather died.  He was the last living grandfather and none of us had seen him since I was about thirteen.  It is hard to know what to tell about him.  I remember the fall and a large wheelbarrow but that was about it.  We got a call from him when we lived in Pinedale that goes like this:

Brandy: (answering the phone) hello?  I don't know let me ask my mom.  Mom, there is a man on the phone who wants to know if I am old enough to pay taxes.

Mom:  It's your grandfather.

Brandy:  No, it's a man who wants to know if . . . 

Mom: It's your grandfather, give me the phone.

The one time he did call and just ask to speak to mom, we were all a little dumbfounded. I was 6.  I don't think we really heard from him again, that I recall, until he showed up when I was around 13.  He had been there a couple of days and baked a cake.  I don't know if it was someone's birthday, but I remember wanting to taste the icing.  I swiped a fingerful of it.  Clearly, the cake had been violated so I evened it up a bit and ran my finger in a straight line around the bottom of the cake to make it uniform.  And, no . . . I hadn't considered getting a butter knife to 'replace' the missing frosting.  

My grandfather saw it and was furious.  At first he was so angry, I was scared to tell him I had done it.  He decided that all of us kids would go to bed without supper if someone didn't fess up.  I finally did.  I went to bed without food - over some icing.  It was weird.  I know that he and my mom had a discussion about it and he was gone the next day.  Even though quite a bit has been revealed to me about who he was, that event still sits oddly with me.  I don't know what to think of the man.  I see his features that were passed through my mom, handed down to me.  

His death was really hard on my mom.  We hadn't heard from him at all since that incident.  We had heard a limited amount about him.  My mom saw him just before he passed away.  I don't know if she got to say everything that she needed to say to him.  It is weird because, though he was my grandfather, I didn't really know him.  It is hard to mourn for someone you don't know. It is hard for me to grieve for him, because I never had more than a weird feeling about him.  Perhaps this is all I can do to remember him.

  I have these few pictures of me when I was a kid.  We must have had fun at some point.  I don't remember it.  To give some perspective, I do remember that chair in the background.

But that isn't what I stopped by to write about today.  What I am writing about today is this little gem right here.

We may not look alike but I'll be darned if she isn't her mother's daughter.  I caught her doing this . . . that's right.  She refused to eat the piece I put on her plate but she had to lick the pizza in the box.  I did not send her to her room without dinner.  I made her take the piece she licked and tried to get her to eat it.  Funny thing is, once it was out of the box - she didn't want it anymore.  I love this girl.  She makes me laugh.  I want her to remember these good times when she tells her kids about me.