Behind!

I know I am so far behind with this blog that it'll be impossible to catch up! We've been through the process of interviewing and hiring seasonal employees. We have three returning and three new. One returning will be a park tech this year, which will take a lot of daily planning away from my supervisor and I...things like who is doing what for the day, and projects to be completed. Another is a Park Aid 2, who will also help with the day-to-day assignments and projects. Two seasonals have already started, another started yesterday, and the last new person starts on Monday. There is a lot of training and paperwork to do, including reading the Seasonal Orientation Manual I wrote up last year. It's got everything I wish I had known when I started at the park!

Saturday was our annual Easter egg hunt, hosted by the South Valley Volunteer Fire Department. We estimated around 250 vehicles with around 750 people! I think it's the biggest one we've ever had! Other parks, like Spring Mountain Ranch, said theirs was huge too. We did almost have a fight after two drivers almost got into an accident while entering the park. Our park supervisor is great at calming people down and making them really think. She also knew the person, so that had to help. I was in the fee booth most of the day, so I cleaned it out, wiped down the counters, and got it *almost* ready for the season. It still needs to be de-winterized and really cleaned, but for that day it worked fine...except that there was no restroom!

I met with another park interpreter and our personnel analyst to go over seasonal paperwork. I had been using a lot of old forms and not getting everything filled out right. It helped to go over all the forms and hear why they were needed. I'm going back Monday for information on hiring new seasonals. Even though I've already done all the new employees' paperwork, it won't hurt, and hopefully we can go over it again before the new season starts next year!

It had been getting warm and flowers are starting to come out, until it snowed yesterday and froze overnight! I need to get out on the Deadman's Creek trail again to see what has bloomed already. We do have some early-blooming flowers that I may have missed already...

One of my favorite wildflowers is Desert Peach. It has already started blooming in a few places in Dayton and around Washoe.

Another of my favorites is Phlox.

 

I am behind in another way too, not just my blog! I started looking for books on the Great Basin, which covers most of Nevada and Utah, and parts of California, Oregon, and Idaho. I was looking for "nature writing" types of books. I just finished Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin and realized that when we moved from Moab to Yerington, I had just stopped reading and researching native plants, local history, and local nature writers. I've been here almost five years now (really, 4 and a 1/2), and I'm just now starting to look for these books at the library and thrift stores. I think that I had gotten to know Moab and the Colorado River, and the plants, history, etc. so well, that when we moved into a new area, I didn't know where to start. The stress with the new job(s), and moving distracted me for a long time. Now I feel like I need to catch up on 4 years of reading Now.

 

I looked at the library and saw that most of the books I want to at least look at are in the reference section and can't be checked out, so that will be good for me to be at the library without many distractions after work for a while, spending time reading about our new-ish area. I'm working on an outline now for a plant program at Dayton this Saturday, so I'm reading a lot about the Great Basin and its plants, especially riparian and upland scrub plants. I'm going to start at the library tonight and tomorrow night to hopefully get a good start and an idea of where I want to focus for now. I'm sad it's taken me this long to get back into reading but I also have been able to learn about the parks themselves and explore a new area, so when I read these books, I'll have a much better picture in my mind than I might have at the beginning!