Day 1 of training

I survived.

Barely.

A long day.  I was at the site at 7:20 am, 40 minutes before class started.  I had to wander around the outside of the building until I found someone inside who could let me in.  I got the room ready before anyone arrived.  I also stopped on the way at a grocery store and bought some snacks and goodies for people to munch on.  Also some healthy food.

I was suppose to have 15 people attend the class.  14 showed up.  The 15th (and missing) person was another person trained in taking fingerprints.  Darn!  That meant I had to do it.

Fingerprinting had me wishing my Uncle Larry was here. Uncle Larry I need you!!!!  Fingerprinting the old fashioned (pre-digital) way is hard.  Especially when people do not have the flexibility to roll their arm and fingers to get a full print.  I had a number of "re-dos".   The other experienced person who took fingerprints was confident going into the fingerprint session but had as much or more trouble than I.

It took well over two hours for us to fingerprint the nine new-hire people, and we finished the last person right at 4:30 pm when we had to leave the building.

Another challenge we had was our ink pads were pretty dry.  Almost always the problem in the past has been too much ink.  We had trouble getting enough ink.  I even called the Columbia Falls police department to see if I could borrow an extra fingerprint ink pad of theirs.  Nope.   One of my team found that the ranger station we were training at had an extra ink pad that we could use.  Imagine that!  I would have never guessed.

The fingerprints have been Fed Ex'd and it will be interesting to find out how good or bad of a job I did.

Another challenge was the ranger station mistakenly double booked the room all four days we had it.  I just fit all of my team into the room and now, a few hours into my class, the station manager was asking me to squeeze into half the room so they could close the divider and let the other group use half the room.

What?!

I looked at the room with the building manager and asked how I could do that?  I supposed I could put all the tables together and everyone would have to walk sideways when moving about the tables to reach a door as there was no space left.

She said she would think about it and when we took our lunch break in an hour we would rearrange the room.

*sigh*

But a short time later, as I was lecturing, she slid a sheet under the door telling me "never mind".  I could have all of the room all week.

*whew*  Another crisis averted.

After having an early breakfast I never ate until 7 pm after I got home.   I had to verify and sign all the documents the people filled out in the morning.  Pages and pages.  I also had to verify their id documents, either a passport or two other forms of id such as a driver's license and social security card.  It took me all lunch hour to do so between the questions people asked me.

One woman brought me back a Burger King cheeseburger but I had no time to eat it.  I microwaved it to warm it back up after I got home.

Due to the time it took to fingerprint people the other people waiting to be fingerprinted had to wait.  Some more patiently than others.

Organized chaos at time.  Manged insanity at others.  With boring paperwork and dull reading mixed in.

Showtime tomorrow

It starts tomorrow.  My census job. 8 am.  I have to be ready as I am teaching the four day class.

I have an incentive to teach the class well as the students will be working for me for about the next month gathering census information from the households who did not return their census questionnaire.

My team is suppose to be 18 people but I am already down to 14.  Two people changed their minds and didn't want the job, one person because she is now homeless.  One person accepted but then had to drop out a couple days later because their vehicle broke down and they didn't have money to fix the transmission.  One person was from way out of my area and should have been assigned closer to their home.  I got him transferred but that was a challenge due to the census bureaucracy.

But I'll get the job done in my large district even with only 14 people.

My one concern tomorrow is fingerprinting.  Everyone working for the census must be fingerprinted by two different people on the first day else they cannot work for the census.  I was trained on how to take a person's fingerprints but I don't think I am very good at it.  I wish I could have been able to practice on more people.  Who I need is my uncle Larry but he lives in a different state.  He is a retired police detective and I bet he is an expert at fingerprinting.

In addition to preparing to teach the class I have been still trapping pocket gophers and gophers.  Today I got the last pocket gopher I know of in my neighbor's property.  I must have trapped 45 or more pocket gophers from his land.  I imagine there are still just as many over there.

And today I finally caught the regular gopher in my middle pasture. I am positive this is the guy I have trying to trap since last Summer.  Once he opened up all those holes mid week when it got to 80 degrees, I have been trying to get him.  He had been avoiding the traps for the most part thought I did find two sprung traps and nothing in them a few days ago.  He would dig new holes to avoid the traps.  But he slipped up and I caught him.  Hopefully this is the last one, but I doubt I could be so lucky.

That makes 69 pocket gophers and 1 regular gopher so far this year.

Harrow and snow

The harrow work on my hayfield and pastures are done for this year.  This year I drug the harrow across all of the pastures, and not part of them like other years.  If I had more time I would have drug the harrow across some pasture areas more times in an effort to smooth out the bumps, but that will have to wait until another year.  I also drug the harrow across my neighbor's field to break up cow pies and knock down dead weeds.

The activity was hard on my harrow sections.  In the beginning I had two good sections and a decent part of the third section.  By the end of the work one of the two sections was bent and the third section was down to a few small pieces.

The start... and the end.

It snowed one day while I was working.  At times it was snowing so hard my previous track was already covered when I came around again.

Why they are called pocket gophers

Here are some photos of a pocket gopher I trapped recently.  You can see it had plant roots stuffed in its cheeks.

Not much in the way of eyes and ears.

I have eliminated almost all of the pocket gophers from my hayfield and pastures.   Or I think so.  They are in the midst of raising babies right now so they are not as active in tunneling and creating new dirt mounds. I had harrowed my hayfield and pastures so I can see the new mounds fairly easily.  Only one mound appeared after I harrowed and I put a trap on it Wednesday.

Since the activity is low on my property I have been trapping them off my neighbor's property.  His land is so covered with dirt mounds it is terrible.  Non-stop hills. I have trapped around forty pocket gophers off his land and am near done.  It is much harder to tell where the pocket gophers are on his land due to all the dirt mounds.  So even though I had almost covered his entire field I imagine I have trapped half or less of what lives there.   The good thing is by trapping the pocket gophers there I am making room for the new pocket gophers on his land rather than they cross the road and move into my property.

I also trapped my first "mom".  One pocket gophers had teats for nursing.  This is the first time I have seen teats on a pocket gopher.  No, I have no photo of this.

Including the pocket gophers I have trapped on my neighbor's land my total is 65 trapped so far this year.

Gophers again

Wednesday afternoon I found signs of gophers in my pasture.  Freshly dug holes. Dang!   All Spring I have been watching for signs of gophers and did not see any.  That is, until the temperature warmed up to 80 degrees the past few days.

So I got my traps out.  I set 14 traps as that was all I had stakes and markers for.  I will find stakes and markers for the last three traps.  I could have set all 17 traps but I instead filled in the remaining holes.

And here I had hopes the final gopher(s) I was trying to catch last year moved on or expired after I had trapped all the rest of them.

The white milk plastic jugs are the markers.

If you look closely in the following photo you can see some of the stakes I had put into the ground to mark tree stump locations.

Geese wakeup call

Over the weekend a couple geese decided to wake me up.  Each day around 7 am they would stand outside my bedroom and honk loudly.  And I mean.. loudly!

The first day I rolled over and went back to sleep.  The second morning I looked outside to see one goose standing outside my window furiously honking towards the house.  When I started to move away from the window the goose flew up and landed on the roof over the bedroom and began walking around and honking making a loud racket.

After a bit I went outside to find the goose walking on one of the house peaks.  It flew off when it saw me and went over to join another goose in the hayfield.  It then stood there looking at me and honking.  As I moved about the yard it would watch me.

What?!

I thought it perhaps it was getting revenge for me walking down by the river and their home.  But I tend to avoid areas I think they are at as I believe it is nesting season.

Maybe they were trying to tell me that Timmy needed help.  He had fallen down a well or something.

Then I heard the sounds of wild turkeys in the direction of the river.  Ah... they wanted me to chase the other birds away.

Nope.  You got to sort it out among yourselves.

After a bit they started to wander around the hayfield and the last I saw of them they were walking towards the river.

The past few mornings they have left me alone.

Roll of maps

The other night I mentioned I had 65 maps to help me cover my area for the census.  Here are photos showing how large the roll of maps are.

Still here

Quick post to let you know I'm still around.  I haven't posted lately for several reasons:

1. I upgraded my internet connection from dial up to DSL and was out of commission for over a week in early April as I made the switch.
   
   
2. I was busy getting my hayfield and pasture (and my neighbor's pasture) harrowed. I also burnt my ditches and helped my neighbor burn the part of his field that couldn't be harrowed.
   
   
3. I had a full week of class for census work.  The Census hired and trained me to be a crew leader for the next phase of the census: Non-Response FollowUp.
   
   I will be in charge of a team of 18 people who in May will go to the addresses that did not return their census questionnaire and get the information about those addresses in order to complete the census accurately. Yup... easily the hardest task in the entire census procedure.
   
   I was assigned the largest and most difficult district in our county (and part of the next county).  My area starts at the Canadian border and goes south past the north end of Flathead Lake..  My area is at least three to four times physically larger than the remaining seven districts combined.
   
   I haven't determined its length but I expect my area is over 100 miles long. I have large maps to help me find the addresses. 65 maps in fact. If I tried to hang all the maps on all the walls in my house I wouldn't have enough walls.
   
   If you look at the data on the official census web site (http://2010.census.gov/2010census/take10map/)... right now Montana has a return rate of 65%.  Flathead County has a return rate of 58%.  My area has two sections and their return rates are 26% and 37%.  Like I said - and my bosses said - I have the most difficult areas in our district.
   
   But I am up for the challenge!