Busy as a bee

Well, I finally made it to lunch and I'm blogging from work. Shhhh...don't tell anyone. Remember my last post (I love 3-day weekends!)? They are great for that extra day of doing something besides work. Now its Wednesday and I'm up to my eyeballs in work. But don't worry, I'm not asking for that extra day back. I'll just muddle my way through it all today.

For those of you that don't know what I do, I'm a research scientist at the Illinois Natural History Survey. My official title is the state survey coordinator of the Illinois Cooperative Agriculture Pest Survey Program. In simpler terms, I coordinate surveys for invasive and exotic insects, weeds, and plant pathogens. I work the Illinois Department of Agriculture and USDA-APHIS-PPQ to identify pests that are a threat to be introduced to the state of Illinois and could have a detrimental affect on our agriculture, forests, and urban areas (just to give a few examples). Then, once they are identified, I have to go look for them. We've been working on getting a website up and running and part of that also includes my other blog Pest Alerts and Updates from the Illinois Cooperative Agriculture Pest Survey Program. This blog is mostly used to pass relevant news, fact sheets, and resources on to the public. The website has a ways to go, but feel free to check out the blog to keep up to date with invasives in Illinois. My annual CAPS report is due soon, so I'm busy summarizing everything I've done in the past year for surveys as well as data entry. One bonus of this is that I won't have to redo too much when it come time to turn in my annual report for the Survey.

Anyway, back to my original venting...I'm currently one of the co-chairs of the annual meeting of the North Central branch of the Entomological Society (think people who study insects). Yesterday we had 2 symposia drop out and almost a third today. But instead, with the help of my former advisor, we will be taking over lining up speakers and talks. I won't bore you with all the details, but let's just say we're running out of time and the deadline was last week. So, I've been on the phone all morning begging for assistance. And it looks like this will be most of my afternoon as well.

The good news today....we get to pick up our wedding proofs and digital images this afternoon after work. We've been able to see the images online for awhile now, but I'm very excited to have them in my hands and start choosing photos for our album. I LOVE our photos. I can't wait to share some of them with you! We're also heading to church tonight for bible study. Sometime I'm going to share some of what we're covering, but that's another post. Which reminds me, I better get some reading done before I start making those phone calls again.