A Meeting with the Robot

Spent yesterday under a robotic knife.  Don't know if it had a knife.

 Surgery was #2 in the morning, so I was home by noon.  It took most of the afternoon for the happy gas side effects to wear off.  No nausea and the discomfort was minimal.  Even now after the first night, it feels more like I just did 50 situps.  

I have a bunch of Rx to take now.  Trying to get on a reasonable 6 hour schedule.  Things have to be taken with food, so I'm having an early breakfast.  My appetite hasn't been affected and there are no restrictions.  Sleeping on my back is new and difficult for me, but we have new adjustable beds, which helps immeasurably.  

We now return to our regularly scheduled botanical blog.  

This week the U.S. National Phenological Network held its first Local Phenological Leader (LPL) conference.  It's been a virtual event, handled very well by the USA-NPN staff with Zoom.  On Day 1 I was the lead-off speaker for their first Local Phenology Showcase session.  It went well and I'll post the link to their recordings when they become available.  

I met several other citizen scientists from the Southwest:  our own Sheila Conneen was online, Grace Burford from Prescott, Colleen Kaufman from the BioPark (but not part of our team), and Sylvan Kaufman from the Leonora Curtin Wetlands up in Santa Fe.  More on this in the next post.  

My surgical recovery is keeping me away from observations this Monday, but that's not such a bad thing with a serious bit of weather blowing in later today and bitter cold temperatures expected after that.  

In other news, USA-NPN Director Theresa Crimmins will be visiting Albuquerque in a few weeks.  I plan on being available on February 12th to assist Judith Phillips with a tour of our Cottonwood Gallery observation sites.  More on this in February.  

And speaking of February, on the 11th down at the Valle de Oro National Wildlife Refuge we will be having the annual NM Rare Plants Technical Council meeting.  This is always a very deep in the woods meeting of like-minded plant taxonomists, ecologists, and field botanists.  I count myself as a bit of all three and this meeting keeps me in touch with important plant conservation topics covering the entire state.  It's an eclectic group of old and new professionals from across every state and federal agency.  University herbarium staff, National Park Service biologists, and state Fish & Wildlife are among them.  More on this in February, too.