Greetings everyone. This final post is a week late and I am very sorry about that. Bryce and I embarked on a 17-hour road trip behemoth last weekend so there was no time to write this blog. I drove from Santa Barbara back to Telluride in 117-degree weather and can I just say… I will never do that again. The bore starts after about 4 hours on the road and the headache comes at 6. I never realized the pain my ski coaches had to go through when we do 30-hour road trips to Oregon and Canada until now. Currently, I have the utmost respect for their labor.
Anyways, now that my internship is over, I can look at it from a holistic perspective. I am so grateful for the experience as a whole and all of the people who guided me through this summer. Even though Marine Biology is no longer something I would like to pursue in my future, the life skills and unique perspectives that I gathered from everyone I came in contact with this summer will never be forgotten.
I must thank Lora and Tom, my host parents, for their extreme generosity in inviting me into their wonderful home. Most people would resist welcoming a 17-year-old boy for 5 weeks into their quiet neighborhood home but they did not.
My final week consisted of a lot of the same stuff. On Monday, I cleaned both holding tanks and continued my efforts to learn the program RStudio. John left over the weekend to attend a botany convention in Tuscon. He did not return until Friday so most of the week I was working alone in the lab alongside Paige.
The vials from my final algae grind.
I came in early Tuesday so that we could gather poop samples from the urchin cages with the ultrafine colander. We also had to measure and weigh the urchins post-feeding session. Finally, we received useful results! Only one urchin had perished so we were back in business. Our algae samples reached their fifth day in the dehydrator so it was time to grind them.
A successful round 3 in my final week at the lab had me feeling great going into Wednesday. We started round four after I finished grinding the rest of the algae samples and cleaned the holding tanks.
The crew and I. From left to right: John(Intern from Oklahoma University), Katrina(My Mentor), Anushna(Intern from UCSB).
Thursday was my final day working in the lab. Katrina and I cut “dog bones” out of the algae for tensile testing at the materials lab and cut 50 samples of algae for the next round of dehydration. I was able to end the day releasing all of our extra urchins into the ocean for the final time.
Katrina took the interns and me out to lunch on Friday in honor of my last day. It was bittersweet having to say goodbye to such wonderful people. I am so grateful to have worked in the Miller lab this summer alongside Katrina, John, Paige, Anushna, and Bob. The experience as a whole was formative, eye-opening, and all-around fantastic.
The view of Santa Barbara from the top of Knapp’s Castle.
John and I drove up to Knapp’s Castle Friday after lunch and enjoyed the scenic views of Santa Barbara, its robust coastline, and unrivaled beauty. A view very similar yet oh so different to the one I encountered two days later in Sedona, Arizona where Bryce and I rested in the masculinity vortex and soaked up the energies from within the sacred rocks. These places of high electromagnetic radiation
The view from the Masculinity vortex in Sedona, Arizona.
occur very rarely in nature. Only 8 exist throughout the world according to human knowledge and 5 of them are in the Sedona area. This was the perfect place to refuel and recharge after an insane trip to the left coast!
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