Final Week of the School Year

 The final week of science camp has passed, and a month of summer prep/summer camp looms. After that, I have two full (unpaid) months off and then we're starting up at our old Cupertino site which will be our home away from home for the next couple of school years. 

My strategy of gradually taking my belongings home over the last couple of weeks paid off, leaving my desk table looking pretty bare by the time Friday rolled around. 

Mental Image

After six or seven years of almost daily use my 150-600mm camera lens has finally started having some annoying hiccups, and while it languishes in the shop awaiting an estimate, I've been slowly adjusting to not having the ability to photograph wildlife. It actually hasn't been as frustrating as I thought it would be, although I'm definitely not taking any longish trips to attempt seeing any "lifers" because one of my underlying goals is to photograph every bird I've reported on eBird. Hard to do with an iPhone or small lens. Sorry Scissor-tailed Flycatcher, I won't be visiting you this week.  

At work, I've had a couple of nice non-camera-oriented moments with a female Pileated Woodpecker. The first and best one was when I'd taken a hike before the night hike to assess a fallen tangle of poison oak vines. Enjoying the evening light on the way back to camp, I heard some loud taps coming from a nearby tree, and after a few minutes found the woodpecker pecking and using her long woodpecker tongue to reel in insects like some sort of avian angler. The male occasionally called in the distance, and each time she cocked her head to listen before returning to her task. If I had had my camera, I would have been focused on trying to get a decent shot. I probably would have failed too, since although I could see her well though my binoculars, a good look doesn't always (or even often) translate to a good photo. This moment was definitely better as a memory than an image.

Horizons

A shift in my work routine is on the horizon. I feel like a sailor looking at an ominous red sky without knowing whether it's dawn or dusk. We've gone through a number of impactful situations at work over the years, many of them arriving unexpectedly, dropped into our laps by weather, pandemic, or human fallibility. The current one is due to the expected but long-delayed renovation project which probably would have been quite as delayed if it hadn't been for the unexpected events mentioned above. Long story short, the functionaries at the upper end of the power structure initially decided it would be best to simply lay us all off for a couple of years during construction, leaving it up to us to rally and find a workaround. The workaround we advocated for and eventually made reality is to shift to the site we used to lease pre-pandemic. This means that the coming week is my last week of working a science camp program at our main site, with two weeks of summer prep and two weeks of summer camp programs to follow. Ridiculous that they decided to cut our summer programming short, especially after initially giving us the go-ahead to sign people up through July. 

This has put me in a reflective mood. On the one hand, I'm excited to reacquaint myself with the set of hiking trails and the oak woodland habitat surrounding the other site. On the other hand, I'll miss the projects, routines, and amenities that we're temporarily leaving behind. I'm going to attempt to become more of a minimalist too, since my workstation usually looks like the result of an avalanche.