A recent history of my life in photos

Boston has a lot of US History.  There are a lot of statues of Paul Revere.  I even saw his grave.

I found the nearest ship... 

...also the nearest penguins.

The Williams-Mystic reunion started out on a boat, so you know it was an awesome weekend.

Here is Jim Carlton auctioning a narwhal puppet.

Back to California, here we are in Golden Gate Park watching The Head and the Heart at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.

And then The Head an the Heart were at Sophia's in Davis.

Then I went to Colorado to visit Grant, Colin, and Lauren, and apparently some penguins at the Denver zoo.

We went on the Coors tour.  Golden was lovely.

We toured SLAC in Palo Alto and got a crash course in particle physics.

The Baylands Preserve was nearby and pretty.

The Giants won the Wold Series and San Francisco went crazy.  I was there and very happy.

Amy and I were both historical figures (in a way) for Halloween.  We also made a devil-chicken scarecrow.

Our pumpkins! Can you guess which two are mine?

Penguins again

On top of the many, many pictures I took of the penguins, I also took a couple of videos.  I was so close to them!  I wanted to just scoop one up and take it home.

And here's a link to another video I took: http://youtu.be/HqUgFLgoGeM

Penguins and Me!

Penguins!!!

I was going to post a picture, but the cord I brought for my camera only lets me download all pictures at once and I don't have enough battery left in my computer as the power converter I brought does not work so I can't charge up my computer until the ship.

Anyway, today I got to see penguins! Lots and lots of African penguins.  I even swam near them and sat on the same rock as them.  It was amazing.  They are super adorable and they waddle and are really fast swimmers.  The penguin colony was in Simonstown, an adorable coastal city about an hour's train ride away from Cape Town.  I could have watched the penguins forever!

We just finished dinner at a nice Ethiopian restaurant that served us food in a traditional way (a bunch of dishes on a platter which you eat by scooping it up with a special bread thing made from a specific flour.  It was all really tasty.

Tomorrow we're taking a Gondola up to Table Mountain to hike.  I'm pretty tired from all the walking and swimming and sun and food today, so good night!

Straight floatin' on a boat on the deep blue sea

In a little less than three months, I will be on a boat.  Specifically the R/V Melville:

"During a career now in its fourth decade, Melville has cruised over almost all the World's oceans in the pursuit of scientific knowledge."

And why, you might ask?  Well a fellow Carleton AND Williams-Mystic alum is getting her PhD in marine geology at OSU and her lab needed volunteers for a dredging and mapping cruise of the coast of- get this- South Africa!  So at the start of February 2012, I will be flying to Cape Town and embarking on a two month research cruise, all expenses paid.  Hooray for science funding!

Among other things, I'm ridiculously excited to:

1. be on a ship (on the ocean!)
2. do geology again
3. see penguins in the wild (or at least I hope we're in Cape Town long enough for me to do so).

There will undoubtably be more blog posts on this topic as the trip gets closer and I get more information, so stay tuned!  I might have to change the name to A is for the Atlantic!