Finally Friday!

Time has been going by very quickly at my new job, but it is starting to weigh on me.  My coworker and I can't quite decide how we are going to work our scheduling yet.  I am ready for a day off though, now that I am on day #8.  There are still unopened boxes at home calling my name.  I am going to take tomorrow and Wednesday off this week and take a break. This morning went well.  We had our morning meeting with all of the stafff, then I headed to the ranger station.  I was hoping to redeem myself after the mistakes that I made yesterday.  I met the office person who I had not yet met at the ranger station.  She informed me that she opens the ranger station on weekdays.  We were only doing it last week while she was on vacation.  What a relief!  Now I don't have to worry about making mistakes there.  I headed to the office next and we had our Monday morning meeting with our Manager.  The rest of the day, I was in the office working on officey projects.  I made more progress on the well info and ordered a chlorine water test kit for that site.  I made some editing notes on a re-print for a campground brochure.  I also talked to my coworker about some of my projects to get his input and continued to move forward with them.
I took the opportunity this afternoon to get out of the office to lock up a building that was used for a meeting today.  The building is the Rec Center in the youth camp area.  It was our classroom during ranger academy.  I spent almost 8 hours a day in that building during my two weeks of ranger academy.  It was much less intimidating to be there today.  It is really a beautiful building.  The left side of the room has several windows that overlook a low area full of pine trees and wiregrass.


On my way out of the youth camp area, I had to stop to get a photo of a recently burned area.  It was burned almost a month ago and there is a lot of lovely green regrowth.  It comes back so quickly!  As I crouched down to get a close photo of the new green grass growing out of the charred remains of the old grass clump, I could still smell the burnt plant material.



I decided to go out to Sand Lake and down to the spring area to see what a Monday looked like in the park.  Sand Lake is the farthest into the park that the main park drive goes and the spring area is at the opposite end of the main drive.  It was really very quiet.  When I got to Sand Lake, there were no cars in the parking lot, but there were four people there.  Two were sitting down and two were looking at a kiosk, holding a map, and obviously unsure about their whereabouts.  They flagged me down and told me where they had been and where they wanted to be.  I was able to get them pointed in the right direction and they were glad that I was there.  Its always nice to help visitors.
Thought of the Day #94
There are many more palm trees here than there were 3 hours north of here at Troy.  I am looking forward to learning more about them.  Most people are surprised to learn that the majority of the palms here in Florida are not native.  The Cabbage Palm, our state tree is one of the few that is native.  Seminole Indians used the palm fronds to thatch their roofs, and wove them together to make things like baskets and hats.