Back to School

Well, I'm back to sitting indoors all day long. I like grad school more than undergrad because I actually have a pseudo-office with a desk where I can keep all those horribly heavy books, and my computer, on which I can fritter away a good amount of time on sites such as this! It's great! haha. Anyway, this semester though, I'm ironically taking an undergrad invertebrate biology class from 8 AM to noon tuesdays and thursdays. I spent 3 hours today drawing sand dollars and sea stars (which was kinda fun actually). I think it's going to turn into my replacement art class, except for all that studying stuff, blah! Other than that I'm taking one of those grad seminars that runs for 3 hours once a week right through dinner where you're expected to discuss literature intelligently while running on the chips and soda you had around lunch time. I'm also teaching, yes, me, changing lives, sculpting the scientists of tomorrow, haha, well it's not quite that glamorous. I'm teaching those intro BIO labs that everyone just wants to get through as fast as possible in order to graduate with a lab credit. These kids don't even know how to use the metric side of a ruler, let alone make a wetmount slide and focus it under a compound scope. It's pretty interesting sometimes... Well that's me, there's a few more meetings here and there that take up more time, and whatever time is left, is spent contemplating the significance of my thesis and how to correct the mistakes I undoubtedly already made. Hope you had a good summer and good luck moving into the fall :)

This is Jackie and Kylla standing on the road I run on, that runs from the lab to town, the wrigley marine science center is behind them in the distance. The apartments we live in are in the far upper right hand corner. The ocean is down to the left, sorry you can't see it. 

This is Spike, he has lived outside my apartment at Catalina for the last week and a half and he's now caught 3 nasty flies. He's my personal bug catcher. :) 

One day left....

So I think this is the longest amount of time I've spent straight living on Catalina Island. I've actually started to appreciate it's beauty and serenity. I went for a few runs along the dirt road that runs from the lab to town, it over looks the Pacific and on very very clear days you can almost see the port of LA 32 miles away. I forgot how wonderful it is to run with no one else around; no cars, no homeless people, no stares, no SMOG! Now if I can only keep my 23 year old knees from falling apart I'll keep doing it. There are a few strange draw backs to spending all your time on this island and underwater:

-You have fairly permanent sunglass lines
-You name the spiders (see pic)
-Your nails grow really fast
-Your skin peels off and itches
-You always think you smell neoprene and pee
-You wear your t-shirts 2 or 3 times (3 or 4 times) and that's perfectly normal

I'm sure I'll come up with more later, but, I'm leaving tomorrow after I give a stupid presentation that I'm not looking forward to. blah! However, I do get to bore a group of 14 year old girls that have to come and watch, hahaha. I mean, hopefully I'll be able to sculpt them into little marine biologists too :)

I just thought this was a beautiful view of the shallow Catalina island kelp forest, the larger algae is Macrocystis kelp and the bright green is sea grass, the rest is macroalage that I could I.D. for you, but I'm sure you don't really care.

Isn't this an adorable juvenile? It's a baby Garibaldi. It reminds me of being in the tropics because of it's bright colors. I'm not sure how it survives, other than it seems to like to hang out among sea urchin spines. By the way, it took me soo long to get this picture, so you better like it.

This is the adult version of the previous fish pictured, it is also the California state fish, the Garibaldi. When he grows up he's not so cute because he's such a territorial bastard! I was surrounded by about 7 of them today because I started taking samples from their precious algae. weirdos!

I am cross-eyed

ugh... I looked under a dissecting scope for 4 hours today and now I feel ill. This is a little morbid. I fed my little strawberry anemones some sea monkeys and then I cut them open to see if I could see the monkeys inside, weird huh? I felt a little bad....

How many dives have you made?

Me? I've made 210.... and I've spent 82.5 hours underwater just since I've been in California (since last August)

Now, let me ask you something.... does it make sense that my boyfriend who has 14 dives total under his belt should get master diver status before me? No not really :) But, what can I do. I didn't get to take the fancy schmancy dive course that he gets to take. So I'm just going to grin and bare it and fork over the $500 bucks when I feel like paying for a card I already know I have in my mind. The dive shops never believe me though, silly. haha.

So I'm still at Catalina wasting away. My back hurts from diving so shallow. Some people say diving shallow can make you paralyzed, I'm hoping that's an urban legend. eek!

Hope you all watched the Olympic show tonight :)

Goodnight all.

These are my anemones - Corynactis californica (the strawberry anemone) 

This is Bird Rock - my nemesis 

This is the giant surfboard Kylla and I used in Waikiki, O'ahu! I loved it! 

Catalina Island

has sun (sometimes), waves (most of the time), deer, fleas, and no tv :)

So it's been a crazy summer and I think I've spent more time traveling than I have at home. Let's see, I came to Catalina to set up my project in June, then went to Wilmington for the 4th of July, came back to Catalina, then went to O'ahu for 10 days at the end of July to help my professor with his research, and now I'm back at Catalina. I see JP for a couple days at a time now and then, especially since he's just as busy! (see his Blog)

Anyway, I'm stuck on this island until next week sometime only to come back and watch JP go to Catalina for the weekend to finish his dive class, funny huh? I bug him a lot about all the things he's doing in his scientific diving course, but just because I'm a nerd and find it all so interesting. If I had the time, I'd take the course too!

So on the island, I pretty much spend my days diving at Bird Rock ( named because of the gigantic amount of bird crap covering it's surface - see picture). Underwater I count and measure tiny anemones (see pic) in permanent squares I made by hammering nails in as markers. This is all very tedious. Sometimes I feel like I'm going a little crazy underwater!

So when I'm not underwater - did I mention I've spent 80 hours underwater just since I've been in California?? - I'm attaching anemones to little plexiglas squares for analysis, or reading, or trying to figure out how to beg, borrow, and steal enough money to get through the next year and a half living in LA! I've decided that marine scientists, especially students, were never designed to live among the stars. Natural selection is attempting to take hold and push us out.

So that's all for now - updates soon to come I hope.