It's Been Awhile

What with all the travel and training and lack of internet in my apartment as yet, blogging is likely to be light for another month or so. Anyway, a short update.

I spent the entirety of last week in Olathe, KS mentoring with the two hort agents there. I also spent one day at the KS Turf conference. It was a good week. I appreciated the opportunity to see another program and learn how things work there. One of the agents there was relatively new, so she had good insights into getting started and being the new agent. It is also going to be nice, because our background complement well, so she can help me with turf stuff, and I'll help her with fruit and veg.

I spent the three days this week in my home office. I spent the better part of one day going around to different places in the county with the other agent so I could see things and meet people. I'm starting to develop ideas for programming in the spring garden series, the HUGE garden show, and classes for farmers. The advice that I think is sound, but that I'll have a hard time following is to pick one or two things and really focus on them and use them multiple times in different contexts for the entire year.

I definitely am planning on working up a presentation and class on salad greens, which is a pretty wide topic that can be narrowed down and focused for numerous audiences. Anyway, I'm going to be at 3 days of orientation at KSU next week, so that will have to wait for later.

Yes, It is Too Late to Plant Grass

I am now officially one week into the new job. I spent the first day doing training at the KSU, learning about benefits, "professional scheduling," and signing paperwork. The rest of the week I spent in my home office, getting to know some of the ropes.

The biggest challenge so far, and I think in general for the next several months, will be adjusting to a different climate zone. I have learned that it is generally too late to plant grass seed, but sod is still okay. It is also fine to plant peonies, trees, and shrubs yet. To my northern Wisconsin mind, you don't plant anything in November, except maybe snowmen. It was 65 here the day that it was snowing up there, this past week.

Anyway, I'm starting to get the feel of the office, and I mostly know my way around. I know the people on the Ag end of the building, and I'm getting a start on the FACS (Family and Consumer Sciences) end. Tuesday I got to/had to sit in on 9 hours of Pesticide Recertification Training for Ornamentals and Turfgrass professionals. Several of the speakers were really good, others weren't. I got to meet the state turfgrass specialist, who is also an ISU alum. The last speaker of the day gave a really interesting talk about an injection procedure he helped develop to protect Scotch Pine trees from Pine Wilt.

I've also gotten my start in answering phone calls from various people. So far it hasn't been too bad, although one guy calling with a lawn issue gave me a bit of a work out last week. But that is a story for another post.

My next couple weeks are going to be kind of crazy, since I'll be in a county 3 hours away from Wichita for mentoring all of next week. Then I'll be back in Wichita for 3 days before Thanksgiving. Then I'll be back at KSU for more training the week after Thanksgiving. I'll be home for another week at that point, then at KSU for another week of training/mentoring.

Web Safari

1. Adoro Te Devote has a great post this week entitled, "What do You Seek When You Dream of Happiness?" about how our lives ultimately make the most sense through Jesus.

2. Steven provided this informative link about How To Build a Lego Trebuchet.

3. Rachel brought this site to my attention, where you can answer vocabulary questions correctly and various companies will donate 10 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program. Not that I'm necessarily giving unqualified support to the UNWFP, but the vocab is fun, and donating rice doesn't hurt anyone. Certainly there are better ways to fight world hunger, but I see nothing wrong with having wealthy American companies donate rice to hungry people.

4. Scot McKnight is blogging through the book unChristian, and he is looking at Ch. 6 which discusses the impressions that Christians are "sheltered and irrelevant."

5. Hallowed Ground has some really nice paintings and pictures posted...I particularly like the last one in the post.

6. This 10 page article in the New York Times Magazine, entitled "The Evangelical Crackup" looks at the shifts that are taking place in the way that Evangelicals interact with politics, particularly on a national level.

7. In Illinois, apparently boys are consistently falling behind girls in testing and achievement at school. There are debates over whether it is because of changes to the tests or to the education in general.