Wheel turns

Back to the office. I'm here two days a week now, come hell or high water (I can move days around but cannot go below 2 days in the office per week, so if I take vacation or something I need to be sure every remaining day is in-office, etc).

Below three days in the office per week they've asked us to return equipment like monitors, so my monitor is sitting here on my desk beside my laptop where I dropped it off at Christmas. I'm supposed to have returned it and not be using it. I may hook it up anyhow, and a keyboard: using a laptop all day even just two days per week is going to dry my wrists in short order. I suspect as soon as I hook it up they'll sweep down and take it away, as they did my previous second monitor, because the government runs on fairness and optics and if someone is using an extra piece of equipment then that's Bad (although the folks two towns over all have two monitors doing the same work, because they made a case when we had extra funding, but that's Perfectly Reasonable).

The top folks have made noises about setting up hotdesking stations, but that likely won't happen here soon -- the office was at roughly 50% capacity before the pandemic, there's no reason for anyone to share a cubicle. I'm certainly in contravention of the ergonomics assessment right now, which is another thing that's supposed to be walked through online, signed, signed by the supervisor, and filed.

There's a lot of bureaucracy here, did I mention?

Anyhow, here I am. It's snowing again, another April snow. The lake out the window is still iced over; it's giving way back by the bridge on the other side of town but we need a good wind to shake the whole thing loose. My colleague, who tracks this and does a betting pool on it every year, says the earliest ice-out was April 11 and the latest May 15 since he's been tracking.

I'm still kind of amazed that such a substantial body of water, 70km long, can freeze. I'm amazed by so many things in the north. Everything from the surprisingly comfortable `

Sitting at their feet

People who have been plant breeding a long time, conventional breeding, have such a beautiful sweep of thought. Their words reveal a focus on relevance without loss of nuance. They work at many scales at once. Their process acknowledges and reaches for the unknown and works with curiosity and respect to slowly reveal that unknown, in the process raising so many answers and so many questions.

To live in a time when I can learn from so many of these people, when they write and speek freely and I can hear their words...

it's a privilege, yes, but it's also such a deep joy. What beautiful minds, where discipline is not confining but instead a scaffold that allows curiosity to climb to such heights.