I tend to view professional development opportunities with a slight degree of suspicion.   “So, you think I should take time away from my cram-packed schedule to attend an all-day session with an ambitious and somewhat ambiguous title like Managing Multiple Priorities?  I’m barely staying on top of things as it is, and besides, ain’t nobody got time for that.”  However, if I have learned anything from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, it is that effective people make time to plan ahead and work on developing good habits.  So, I signed up for Friday’s training.

Through a combination of humorous personal anecdotes, hands-on activities, and straightforward wisdom, our trainer, Sally O’Boyle of Fred Pryor Seminars, guided us from a general assessment of our time management challenges to series of actionable steps to remedy our personal management pitfalls.  For me, the lessons on priority-setting and procrastination were especially helpful.  Rather than go into too much detail there, here are a few tips from which we all can benefit:

My husband, Bill, and I live here in Lexington and have a 24 year old daughter, Courtney.  We also have a 9 year old Chocolate Lab, Sammi, who thinks she is 2 and keeps us on our toes.  I am originally from Lexington, but was transplanted to Charlotte in 1981 thanks to IBM.  I returned to Lexington after my freshman year of college in 1989 to spend the summer with my grandmother.  I fell in love with Lexington and didn’t return to North Carolina, and decided to establish my residency before continuing my education.  During that year, I became a mom and had to put my college off for a while. 

Natural selection is most familiar with respect to Darwinian evolution. However, though some biologists will argue that selection acts only on genes, this is a very narrow and restricted view. Selection operates on a variety of environmental phenomena, and at a variety of scales. In hydrology and geomorphology, the principle of gradient selection dictates that the most efficient flow paths are preferred over less efficient ones, and that these paths tend to be reinforced. That’s why water flows organize themselves into channels (more efficient than diffuse flows), and channels into networks. The principle of resistance selection in geomorphology is simply that more resistant features will persist while less resistant ones will be removed more quickly. Thus geomorphic processes select for certain forms and features and against others. Among others, Gerald Nanson, Rowl Twidale, and Luna Leopold have written on selection in geomorphology, and Henry Lin, among others, in hydrology.

Principle of gradient selection at work--Board Camp Creek, Arkansas

I grew up in Middlesboro, KY. The town is as far south and east in the state that you can go, situated on the KY, TN and VA border. I met my husband Bill while performing in the local community theater. We moved to Lexington to attend UK in 2002. We love it so much, we stayed. I graduated from UK with a BA in English in 2005. We welcomed our first child into the world this past April.

Before working as a full time employee here, I was a manager at for a residential property leasing company. I’ll never forget the day I decided to apply for a job at UK. It was a beautiful day in September, blue sky and the sun shining brightly. I was driving through campus thinking, I’d really like to be back here, this is where I need to be. A few weeks later, I was hired! After six years, I still believe that this was the best decision I could have made.

What do you do in your spare time? Between a seven month old, Piper, and a nine year old English Springer Spaniel, Blaze, I don’t have much spare time. Evenings and weekends are spent with our little family. I wouldn’t have it any other way!

I was born in Johnson City, Tennessee and moved to Kentucky my 3^rd grade year. I have 4 half siblings (2 sisters and 2 brothers) and I am the oldest of the 5. I started working for UK in the summer of 1999 as a STEPS employee after graduating high school a year early. I graduated with a BS in Family in Consumer Sciences in the 2006 from the University of Kentucky.   

1. What do you do in your spare time?

I have a 9 year daughter name Kianti who speaks Spanish as her second language and is in competitive gymnastics. I have volunteered with/ for CASA which is a Court Appointed Special Advocate for abused and neglected children in Fayette County for past few years.

2. Are you a cat person or a dog person (or do you like another species entirely)?

Although I am not an animal lover….my daughter and her father are…so we have two beautiful pit bulls…that are the sweetest things ever. We have 2 fish tanks and every now and then we have turtles that my daughter finds wandering outside.

Recently published in Earth Surface Processes & Landforms: Anastamosing Channels in the Lower Neches River Valley, Texas. The abstract is below: 

Active and semi-active anastomosing Holocene channels upstream of the delta in the lower valley of the meandering Neches River in southeast Texas represent several morphologically distinct and hydrologically independent channel systems. These appear to have a common origin as multi-thread crevasse channels strongly influenced by antecedent morphology. Levee breaching leads to steeper cross-valley flows toward floodplain basins associated with Pleistocene meander scars, creating multi-thread channels that persist due to additional tributary contributions and ground water inputs. Results are consistent with the notion of plural systems where main channels, tributaries, and sub-channels may have different morphologies and hydrogeomorphic functions. The adjacent Trinity and Sabine Rivers have similar environmental controls, yet the Trinity lacks evidence of extensive anastomosing channels on its floodplain, and those of the Sabine appear to be of different origin. The paper highlights the effects of geographical and historical contingency and hydrological idiosyncrasy.

I recently watched an episode of the Syfy Channel’s post-apocalyptic zombie show Z-Nation. The human survivors were making their way across the U.S. Midwest when a massive tornado spun up, picking up zombies and flinging them all over the place.

“Is that what I think it is?” asks one character, observing the oncoming cyclone of the undead. “It ain’t sharks,” says his companion. This is, of course, a reference to the infamous “Sharknado” movie in which a tornado at sea (technically a waterspout, I reckon) sucks up a bunch of sharks and blows them into Los Angeles. Sharknado is, by all accounts, a thoroughly ridiculous movie with no scientific validity.

The tornado in the background is just about to suck up these flesh-eating freaks from beyond the grave to form an un-deadly Z-nado!

This movie poster tells you all you need to know. 

Hot off the press, our (myself, Dan Marion, Chad Yocum, Stephanie Mehlhope, and Jeff Olson) study of geomorphic impacts of a tornado blowdown event. You can get a copy here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jonathan_Phillips4/publications

The abstract is below:

Geomorphological Impacts of a tornado disturbance in a subtropical forest.

Last month the climatologist Justin Maxwell from Indiana University gave an interesting talk at our department about drought-busting tropical cyclones. In his talk, and in conversations before and after with our physical geography crew, he had some interesting things to say about climate teleconnections involving mainly sea surface temperature and pressure patterns such as ENSO, NAO, etc. If teleconnections and the various acronyms are unfamiliar, check out the National Climatic Data Center’s teleconnections page: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/teleconnections/

I got a few e-mails last week about fluvial geomorphology—not because of anything I have done, or any current issues or unresolved questions in that field. No, it was because a character in the irreverent Comedy Central show South Park was identified on the show as a fluvial geomorphologist. Apparently that gives us a measure of popular culture street cred.

South Park character Randy Marsh, in his pop singer Lorde disguise.

An actual geomorphologist named Randy (R. Schaetzl, Department of Geography, Michigan State University).