I recently photographed a banana slug for a short article I was writing about banana slug slime for the Santa Cruz Hilltromper, a website for nature lovers in the area. “Okay, now turn your head to the left… down a little… actually can you crawl up this rock a bit more for me? I’d really…
Monarch butterflies always take me back to elementary school. I remember watching and waiting for weeks as bright green caterpillars munched on milkweed plants in our classroom terrarium, then wound themselves overnight into snug chrysalises. Just writing ‘chrysalis’ makes me feel like I’m 10 again and peering at the dangling little insect sleeping bags, wondering…
A beach-baked couple beat me into Togo’s a few weeks ago. The sandwich maker, a 20-something fellow who was gloomily plopping mayonnaise onto bread, muttered hello. “We’re great. We’re in Santa Cruz,” the man chirped. “But I’m not doing as well as you are, I’m sure, you live here.” Sandwich dude looked up, managed…
Last fall, our class visited the sea otter researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Sandeep summarized many neat tidbits about otters from that trip on this blog. Two items that really piqued my interest involved otter mortality. In California, many otters die from disease or shark bite. What’s going on? I tracked down the answer during…
“Water vapor is your enemy, heat is everything, and there is always another step,” says Sean. He runs a bronze foundry in Santa Cruz. Bronze casting is a messy, multi-step process that pulls beauty from chaos. And Sean is a chemist, a material engineer, and an artisan. I followed Sean’s work this week as he…
The title might be a bit of a stretch, but the punch of it approximates how astonished I was to see the sea lions of the Santa Cruz Wharf this past weekend. Before a sunset dinner on Sunday, I was dazzled by a group of sea lions resting on the horizontal structural beams that lay…
I realized there were no photos of the UC Santa Cruz campus on this blog, so I thought I’d add a few. These are photos that I snapped on my phone’s camera on my way to class in the morning. I apologize for their quality, my phone can only do so much… I never get…
