I spent the holiday weekend working on Antarctic data collection down in San Diego at Scripps Institution of Oceanography with Paul Dayton and his graduate student, Shannon. If you remember, I was in Antarctica with Paul and just LOVE this guy because he is an amazing scientist and a super fun person. Shannon and I had never met before, but we had chatted a lot over email when I occasionally helped with data collection from all the photos divers or SCINI took under the ice. This was supposed to be, and it was, a long weekend of measuring Antarctic sponges, bryozoans and other neat marine critters in the photographs. Maybe not the most awesome sounding weekend to many - but we had fun! Plus, it was fun to see Paul's office which is loaded with many plastic pigs (he is sort of obsessed with pigs), the ancient SCUBA gear he used (pictured above), artifacts from various expeditions to Antarctica, voodoo dolls, books galore, and animals - of course. Paul loves animals. I liked the three pet cuttlefish the best because they were so smart and totally gorgeous.
Although I was there to help out Paul, I really spent the vast majority of my time with Shannon (I was, essentially, helping her too because now she has less photos to deal with!). We had a great time together! One afternoon we walked out onto the pier at Scripps to take in the gorgeous low light and I grabbed a few shots of the lab and the beach.
The sun!!
We were even treated to some far off views of dolphins. Ahhhh..... don't look too hard, they are not in this shot.
The best treat of the pier walk was the osprey that was used to people hanging out on the pier. We had to walk by him/her to get to the end of the pier and some work Shannon needed to do for her job, but this bird really didn't seem to mind. I was thrilled to get so close without seeming to bother it - although it checked me out as much as I checked it out.
I crashed at Shannon's great place with her husband and son each night. Shannon, basically, took a total stranger (me) into her life for the weekend and I think we had a darn good time with it. I loved her family, cats, bunny, waffles, and wine!
And in case you get the idea that I only played - here is a shot of some of the stuff we were doing. This is a photo that was taken by SCINI (the cool robot that could go deeper than divers in Antarctica). If you look really closely there are two red dots from lasers in the photo; we know those lasers are 10 cm apart. So using some neat software, we can set the scale using those lasers and then measure everything we want to measure in the photo. This allows us to calculate percent cover of sponges, bryozoans, or whatever Paul wants us to measure! The three big white things in this photo are a cool sponge species while the perfect round circles are a different sponge species. All the lines drawn into the photo are the lines I drew to gather measurement data from the photo. I'll shut up now in case you are bored but I think this is neat stuff!
Here are the photos from the weekend:
https://plus.google.com/photos/111221596171793333099/albums/5698671635140890113?banner=pwa
I flew back to Seattle last night and left the land of flip-flops and palm trees and came back to snow! Whoa! I wasn't expecting that in soggy Washington. To make things even more fun, I had a snow day from work today! Washingtonians don't really know what to do when it snows because it is such a rare occurrence on the coast. So everything shuts down, including my office. An inch of snow here is equal to about a foot of snow in places like New England. Panic! AH! No really, they only have one plow or no plows for many towns, so the roads are typically quite crappy. Jay and I barely made it up the hill to our house last night. Good thing we had chains in our trunk for our tires - just in case. I'll end with a photo of Cranberry Lake - a short walk right from our house. Happy snow!!
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