I’m leaving this morning for Florida for a couple of days. Unfortunately not to a nice sandy beach or the exotic Everglades — Gainesville is just about in the middle of the north end of the peninsula.
I’m spending two days at the University of Florida at a meeting about databasing plant specimens. I’ve written some programs at Arizona State University (ASU) that help automate the process and have been invited to Gainesville to share learnings with other herbaria.
Gisele thought about coming with me, but there wouldn’t be much for her to do while I was in meetings all day. If it was on the beach, that would be a different story.
Back home Wednesday, but then going down to the university in Tucson on Thursday with Les to discuss another program I’ve written that helps quantify how plants share similar environments — really just a database query that looks for relationships between geographic coordinates of specimens.
Hooking up with Les has been one of the best parts of retirement — getting to work on interesting projects with no stressful timelines or demands. The pay’s not great, though!