It’s been an odd week of various disappointments. On Monday Worth A Dam got a large donation from someone we didn’t know, which happens occasionally and was nice because I was thinking about money we would lose by not having a festival and deposits we can’t get back.
But when I looked at the checks more closely I realized that even though it was made out to Worth A Dam it was actually a donation for Jakob Shockey and the newly formed Beaver Coalition and they mistaken thought that was part of Worth A Dam and sent us the check. So of course I had to contact Jakob and give the money back.
(Damn my Catholic upbringing. Sigh.)
Then I was contacted by a reporter working on a story for the National Wildlife Federation on beavers and climate change and she wanted to include something about Martinez and could she please talk to our BIOLOGIST? Not the boring old psychologist who was on the front lines and maintains the website and has been involved since year dot. Didn’t we have a BIOLOGIST who was qualified to speak of these matters?
I hrmphed to myself for a while then politely told her that I was the person she wanted to talk to and had been involved with the issue since the beginning. Even though I wasn’t a biologist. And figured she’d go away and we’d never speak.
She ended up calling yesterday and we had a nice, unbiological discussion.
Then at the end of the day the grad student from Humboldt who was doing his Thesis on the Martinez Beavers wrote to say that because of the pandemic he would NOT be coming to Martinez this summer and could not come read gazette archives or come to the festival if indeed there was one. Which seemed pretty much par for the week.
The thesis will still happen. We ultimately figured out workarounds for the articles and his research will still happen, but given the week I had, it seems strangely typical. I’m starting to feel like a beaver advocate manque.
And if you don’t know that word go look it up, What else have you got to do?
