5-2-11

Today I came in to find...no Rich. Angie informed me that Rich was sick and wasn't going to be coming in. I knew he had to be really really sick if he wasn't coming to work, because over the time I have worked with him, I know how passionate he is about working. He has repeatedly said how he doesn't understand the concept of retiring when you can still be creating good and even tried to work when the rest of the government was looking at a furlough week. This also meant that there was most likely going to be little for me to do. I continued my project from the previous week working on sending out paperwork to all Farm Bill applicants from the past 3 years which involved sending a lot of emails. After I had exhausted that task, I helped Angie with some Conservation Plans. Normally, you map the Conservation practices on the map creating a Conservation Plan Map with generates a Conservation Plan. But because Rich is anti-computer and not a fan of GIS, he has a tendency to create Conservation plans without a map. This has now become the bane of Angie's existence when she attempts to create Conservation Plan maps from the Conservation plan. When I attempted to do so, I found it to be really difficult to work backwards and create the map from only the words found in the Conservation plan. So you end up having to draw on an assortment of paperwork found in the folder. Another recent discovery is that almost all applications require some sort of modification so I spent the rest of the time changing dates for planned actions back so that the clients had more time to develop their practices. After this, there really wasn't too much I could do to help without Rich's guidance.