Digital Foundation

Today I was out in the world. It was easily the most time I’ve spent outside the house since March 11 when all this global pandemic began. There cautionary measures observed but it felt really good to be back out in the mix of things. I planned this day with a couple of colleagues last week and the weather turned out sensational. We met out at my old research farm, which has a very different look and feel now. Our plan was to get some photographs and videos from some of our experimental trials so we could eventually edit these into an informative update to customers who aren’t able to join us in person. And boy did we ever!

Can you tell the difference between these two plots? I sure can, very interesting results early on. I’m actually being serious. So I spent some time collecting still photos of the plots and some short stationary videos using my sweet tripod. It was my first day in the field for the year and I was bad at lunches during the best of times. It also being the day before my fortnightly grocery trip, you can guess easily that my lunch was pretty awful. We had some discussion before and each of us thought we’d have the worst lunch. I believe I won. I brought four wieners and four slices of white bread, aka welfare buns. One colleague gave me a run for it, he didn’t have bread but brought two hot dog buns and ate them as is rather than bread. Could we have made a swap to get what we really needed? Who knows?! The real star of the day wasn’t lunch, it was the drone.

We borrowed a drone and a licensed pilot from another team for the day. It was his maiden voyage and I can comfortably say that he is a natural. We learned as a group along the way but in the end, we captured some fantastic video clips and overhead shots of the plots. It is going to be up to us to weave them together “in post” to make a concise, informative video. But the afternoon was still relatively young and I was halfway to the next town over. Why is that relevant you ask? Maybe I’ll share more on that tomorrow. Once I returned home I sparked up my work unit and rattled off a couple hours of effort to clear up my inbox. It was a light email day, only thirty or so new ones to mop up. The evening was much quieter, watered the flowers and had the exact same dinner as the previous evening. I posted another entry in the journey of Theodore Complete in the Archive section too. That journey was shared on Reddit and brought a pile of people to the site so must be interesting. That’s where we ended up though, posting about the day right up until bedtime.