Recap of August 2024 Discussion
This month's picture is Mel Barkalow operating a knuckleboom - who says only boys get to play with the big toys?
This month in the US we focus on workers' rights and we also focus on recovery from substance abuse and mental health trauma. As a group, we often focus on those things on the individual scale, dealing with work related trauma, finding a new job, learning new skills, and just all around working to improve our lives and the lives around us.
But before we get there, here's a recap of what we discussed in August:
We had some new people in August, so we talked about where we work and the types of jobs we have. For a lot of us, we regularly say "I didn't know that was a job" and get a spark of interest for our next career move.
We discussed local weather and dealing with storm damage. Hurricane storm work can be especially grueling because the humidity is high and there often isn't power, so you're sweltering all night and working all day.
We talked about what we did for Summer Vacation, assuming we had one, and upcoming travel plans.
ISA is celebrating their centennial year and they had a special celebration at their annual conference.
We were bummed that so many great speakers were booked opposite of each other.
There was an awesome presentation on the history of women in tree climbing championships and from there we went to a networking reception.
Some women felt disappointed that the reception was on the tradeshow floor and was so spread out, which made networking and making connections harder than in years past.
We discussed the accommodations in place at the ISA Conference - wordly for instantaneous translations, for example.
There was a QR code to take you to the wordly for each room, but it was not displayed on the screens, instead you had to look for the sheet of paper in the back.
There were also more food options for folks with dietary restrictions than in the past. A nice change.
TreesROI will be doing more testing this fall. We're looking forward to the finished product.
We discussed figuring out how to set up a kickstarter for out of print books - particularly some of the books by Andrew Koeser that were university press books.
We discussed the tree climbing championship schedules, Legends of the Geezers is coming up quick. But also, we're looking forward to the the International Tree Climbing Championship in Savannah in October. They're looking for volunteers, so check it out.
We also discussed how difficult it can be to recognize folks in real life (IRL) after only having met them in zoom or other virtual spaces. I'm sure we've all had the experience of meeting someone and one of you saying "I didn't realize you were so tall!"
Finally we ended the night discussing root grafting and learning to ID roots by species. A fun challenge for the folks who are no longer challenged by winter tree ID.
