My research group is getting ready to depart for a 6-week field-and-lab excursion on Catalina Island in southern California. There is a lot to do to get ready, and I'm modestly understating myself here. We show up and they give us a lab space that has benches, and outlets. Last time we had to go hunting around and rustle up enough chairs. This means that we need to bring absolutely everything we might possibly need, and a bunch of stuff that we imagine needing in our dreams. It is sort of like remembering to bring a jacket on a cold evening, except scaled up to galactic proportions (or at least a modest municipality). If you bust a shoe, you have to go back to the mainland.
The Boss is in Europe. Other researchers are in Alaska, Australia, and so on: everyone is traveling or far away. I've been trotting around for weeks with a clipboard and pen, packing tape, Sharpies, looking for all the world like a harried camp counselor who lost her canoe paddle. The Boss doesn't believe in lists, but I do, so I've been generating lists like nobody's business. Finally, it is all starting to come together into a coherent initiative.
We drive away in 7 days.
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