To make up for my lack of photos yesterday, I went out and got the cranes in action, a panorama of the stormy Sandias, and Rosencrantz and Diné snuggled up on the bed.

We think we finally got Laurie’s thesis submitted and all the forms in. There always seems to be one more form that we should have noticed on an obscure page of the Office of Graduate Studies (OGS) website. We spent most of yesterday putting the final touches on the thesis and then submitted it to the Lobo Vault by filling out online forms and uploading a PDF of the thesis (that’s how one submits theses and dissertations these days).

Not long after we submitted her thesis, Laurie got an email saying we forgot to put the “Thesis Approval” form in the front matter, page i, of the thesis. We had to find, download the form and fill it out; but when I put the PDF in the front matter of her thesis, it messed up the page numbering. The LaTeX stylesheet we are required to use for the thesis had a place for plain text where the thesis approval is supposed to go, but no associated tags for inserting a pdf or adding any formatting tags in that area of the script. After spending 3 hours dinking around with formatting options, going through the stylesheet’s code, and reading all the documentation on the OGS website, I finally gave up and had Laurie email OGS and ask if we could just copy the contents of the thesis approval and let it be in plain text on page i. After getting approval, we resubmitted her thesis, and we are now hoping everything is in place.

With the overcast skies drizzling rain on and off most of the afternoon, I noticed the cranes stayed in the cornfield along Dixon Road when I went out to get kitty food. After I got home and unloaded the car, I went back out with telephoto lenses and got as close to the cranes as I could before they took flight.  The photos are low contrast because of the low light from the cloud cover and, in some of the photos, the birds blend into the background; however, with the various shots of the cranes in flight and a few where they are walking around, mostly watching me, I believe you get a pretty good idea of what Sandhill Cranes look like on the ground and in flight.