Trust: It's a Work in Progress: Crazy Semester Update!

This semester may possibly be one of the most stressful of my college career to date. In addition to typical stresses that come with attending classes, I have the lamentable issue of my classes and schedule not working out as planned. Does that sound familiar, something not going as I planned? Hehe, oh well, I guess this is just going to be a life long lesson for me!

In spite of my best efforts to leave blocks of time open for the field work I knew would come this Spring, my classes and work managed to spread themselves across the week in a rather lackadaisical manner. I also took on a TA position that I thought would involve minimal time and investment only to be proven wrong. Add to the mix the majority of my class presentations and projects being due before Spring Break AND starting treatments on part of my project and designing the irrigation system for another part, in addition to all the maintenance involved in life and school and you have my crazy semester!

Fortunately, I am on the tail end of this time, but it is the reason you haven't been hearing much from me on a consistent basis! Some neat updates through all this I would like to share are:

1.) I have part of my project laid out and labeled!
Part of my project involves mature trees in an already established orchard. Last week I was able to track down old field plots so I could identify and tag the trees we will be using. I went back to this orchard this week and was amazed at the difference in the trees in just a week! They were all leafed out and almost done blooming this week when they had just been in the throes of blooming last week! See example below...

Week one with busy bees...

Week two with lots of leaves!

2.) During this time I have been learning a lot about peach trees, their flower anatomy and fertilization. I found out that peach buds usually come in sets of threes in the spring, (one flower bud, then a vegetative bud, then another flower bud) BUT you can find all kinds of variations if you look closely enough!

This one has a crazy FOUR flower buds!

This one is typical with a blind node at the bottom.

On this one a flower bud died.

Nodes are the places where we find the buds and new growth, 'Blind nodes' means that node doesn't have any viable buds for new growth and not because they died or got knocked off but usually because the plant was growing too quickly to make any! Sometimes we see dead buds and they can happen for lots of reasons like too much could in the winter, a cold snap in the spring, or something wrong with the bud to start with. For my project I am going to count the different types of node on several branches per tree.

3.) I am giving my proposal presentation next week!!! This shouldn't stress me out too much because proposals can change. But it is really intimidating because professors from the whole department often show up to these so you are not just presenting before your class! I finally finished all the slide details last night and am now practicing over and over so I will hopefully not need notes while I present. The good thing about this is it gets me thinking about how I need to set up my dissertation and where I can start writing over the summer.

Counting peach buds in the lab!

4.)There is a lot more bureaucracy at UF than there was at WKU! Since Chris is working under one of the committee chairs in the department he has be privy to a lot of discussions and changes that are being attempted around the university and especially in our department. He has been involved in decisions about tenure and promotion for the professors, health care decisions for Graduate students and Post Doc assistants and family leave to name a few of the big ones. Through this I have learned a lot of the benefits of working at such a large university (namely the deep pockets!), but it is much harder to get things changed when you have so many more hoops to jump through.

5.) We have some neat little parks really close to our apartment!!! Just in the last twp weeks we have discovered two parks with nice nature trails within walking distance of our apartment! Both of these are connected with what is called the Biven's Arm Outflow and all of the water from them runs to or through Payne's Prairie, a nature preserve close to us that has wild pigs, buffalo, horses and of course alligators. In the first little park we found I got to see a live armadillo!!! I specify live because we see lots of dead ones on the side of the road. We found the second one the last Sunday and got to take a longer walk on it today. It has a great deck out into a marshy area and we used it for our picnic!