Meeting Day, Rainy Days

Once again unseasonably cold and rainy on Monday.

Monday is one of our days off, but it seems to have become meeting day. Being the first monday of the month, there is a morning meeting for all of the staff, including volunteers. The intent is to bring us all up to date on what is happening and to discuss safety issues. It does provide a look into what is going on on the refuge.

On monday afternoon, there is the weekly volunteers meeting. We don't have to go if we are planning to be elsewhere, but if we are around it is recommended that we attend. With a morning meeting as well, we were around. The big item was that one of the other volunteer couples was leaving earlier than expected for health reasons. This meant a shakeup in the schedule for the visitor center coverage as they were visitor center volunteers. The visitor center is only open Thursday-Sunday due to the shortage of staff and now it is even shorter.

They were able to change the schedule so that one of the volunteers who had been doing maintenance would work in the visitor center with the remaining visitor center volunteer Thursday-Saturday and local volunteers, the Texas Master Naturalists,  would supply two people for Sundays through March, reducing the staff by one each day. After that....?

Needless to say, we mostly hung around all day and did random chores waiting for the next meeting.

Tuesday wasn't much better, another cold rainy day. There weren't any outdoor opportunities today, so we completed the cataloging of papers and books in the biology library. We attempted to help Jennie, the SCA volunteer with her scanning efforts, but it wasn't very successful. She is trying to cherry-pick the documents to be scanned due to a lack of time and our assessment of what is worth scanning was probably too broad. Oh well...we may end up doing some local scanning on future rainy days to make up some of the difference between what she got to and what they'd like to have available online here.