Weeks 10+11 Fall 2025 - Department Meeting(s), GE committee, TLF MS, Chapter 3 Adv GIS Book

Whoa, getting behind in posting this sabbatical blog/journal. This post covers the last week of October and first week of November (through the following weekend). 

I attended two department meetings in a row, one in person and the second over TEAMs. The motivation was just to touch base and being 1/3 of the way through the sabbatical I also wanted to light a motivational fire for myself. It worked. I was amazed by the nitty gritty details of the two meetings and how frustrating all the little things can be, especially when they have so little to do with teaching or research. Most things at meeting seem to have to do with service and/or administration which is mostly satisfying the ideas of others outside of the department and even the University. Anyway, I am pretty convinced that most of that stuff is to keep faculty away from doing anything academic. It's basically a war against knowledge coming down from above. So mission accomplished, I need to relish this time where those thoughts don't need to frustrate me on the daily! Name the frustrations:

*The department has to refile and re-establish an advisory committee. Apparently the administration lost the paperwork that we initially filed and rather than finding it (electronically it is available) they want it redone on a new form. My interpretation, they just don't want to pay someone to translate the old information into a new desired format, pass the work down to departments. 

*Outreach things poorly communicated from the College per usual. Always overlapping with Earth Science events because they don't really take the time to ask what the overlaps are. 

*New system for reserving vehicles will be through an App. As it is we have been losing the personalized service through time, now we will be required to use an app which will probably create more questions than it addresses, but might allow the University to hire one less employee. Also, no fleet services will not add any suitable vehicles for off road travel to the field, those vehicles were sold during the pandemic and are not coming back, duh cause they are like 50-100K each now. Should have held on to them, who made that decision? Bottom line, we have to utilized enterprise which is okay, but again, we'll be using a middle man through an App, so I am sure that will go smoothly. 

*USHE has redefined our workload as ICH, no ICHE, GCHE, or ACHE will be used any more. Instructional faculty will teach 12 Instructional Contact Hours, but now the University is tasked with defining what instructional contact hours will be. Let's reinvent the wheel. There is an opportunity with this one, but mostly, it feels like an exercise that will be a ton of committee time to eventually tell us things are about the same as they were before (OR actually you all will need to do more work for less pay). 

*There were other things, but I'll stop there. 

GE committee: Well we pretty much finished redrafting the committee bylaws and discussing, importantly, how various aspects of the committee will work moving forward. Now we will see what happens since the associated provost that was helping the committee has just left UVU and we will likely get some new direction from someone else, hopefully things hold with some continuity, but maybe it will result in some new questions and new work! Yay. 

TLF MS: I received feedback from all of my coauthors on the Thousand Lake fault manuscript. I am nearly through addressing everyone's edits. The comments were thorough and were very helpful. We also decided to submit the paper to Geosphere, so I need to reformat the manuscript. This will be work for the coming week. I have hopes of submitting it this week ahead or the week after. 

Chapter 3 (Watersheds and Landcover) of the Advanced GIS textbook: I wrote a complete draft of chapter three over the past two weeks and made to video tutorial series covering watershed analyses and land cover change. I also shared the course with Dr. Olson who will teach it next semester. 

I