This has been a bad week for personal time. It’s been a good week, I suppose, for my engineering career. Monday afternoon the double presentation I made to the site tours of the Arkansas Floodplain Managers Association convention went well. I received many comments on it. This was despite the fact that, at the construction site below the viewing platform, they had decided to jack-hammer out some rock that day, and I had to just about shout my talk.

Then I went to the last day and a half of the AFMA convention in nearby Springdale, arriving back in the office just a few minutes ago. That convention went okay, but I found much of the discussion was over my head. Not the basic floodplain issues; in fact I knew those quite well. But today it was all about digital flood maps and tying them in with various GIS tools, about raster and tif and png, about layers and changing characteristics. It was all more than I could listen to.

Then, as the convention ended, my main client asked me to attend a follow-up session this afternoon and tomorrow here in Bentonville, a session about cities joining/qualifying for the Community Rating System, a relatively new FEMA program designed to reward cities that do a good job at managing floodplains within their jurisdiction.

That’s the curve ball today. I had hoped to spend two glorious hours this afternoon archiving projects. Then I hoped to spend another two hours writing some difficult specifications. I guess the best I can do on those is to tackle them on Friday. But, I may be leaving the office early on Friday to go to a family wedding on Saturday in Pratt, Kansas–a little too far to make it a long day trip.

And I need to write only one more article at Suite101.com to begin earning a 10 percent bonus. Instead of averaging 30 cents a day I’ll earn 33 cents a day. The good part of being unable to write that 50th article is I don’t have to decide where to spend the money.