The island of Oahu has been my home for almost 12 years. In the middle of August, I set out on a journey that would keep me away from my island home for the longest I have ever left her since I moved here. I was worried and nervous and bundle of the best first world problem I had ever had. I didn’t want to leave an awesome place where I was doing awesome things to go on a potentially awesome trip and do more awesome things. It was a weird headspace of all of that being realized as I readied myself to leave.
The first two weeks of the trip were work related. I traveled with my boss and my labmates to the Smithsonian Marine Station at Fort Pierce, Florida and ran a week-long workshop on cryopreservation. Then we took the folks from the workshop to Key Largo to cryopreserve sperm from the Coral Restoration Foundation’s nursery.
As work trips go, this one was quite special. First of all, it may be my last science work trip. If you aren’t aware, I am in the midst of a long career transition, but by June of next year (at the latest), I will be teaching yoga full time. Secondly though, it was one of the only work trips we’ve ever gone on where pretty much nothing (at least Science-wise) went wrong. I was amazed. I have had my share of absolute craziness on work trips in the past (maybe I’ll get into that someday, but not right now). In any case, I was very pleased with how everything went.
We trained people from all over the world in how to do cryopreservation. We had participants from Florida, South Carolina, Mexico, France, Australia. We even had a Swiss girl who worked in Qatar and a Kiwi guy (who was the biggest, most wonderful hobbit I’ve ever met) who worked in Cambodia. It was incredible. Everyone who participated was wonderful and interested and contributed in the group in really great ways.
My boss and I have an agreement that we sort out really good food on our trips. A long time ago, she went on a trip without me and had an awful time with a serious lack of good food and awful lodging, so after that, she’s had me arrange food on all our trips. The first half of this trip during the workshop in Fort Pierce, I may have arranged the best food we have ever had. I had an amazing sandwich shop make us these incredible gourmet sandwiches every day for lunch. Each evening, I had a different local restaurant make food for dinner. We ate like kings. Italian one night, Thai food another, Cuban food and BBQ just to name a few. It was great, but maybe I shouldn’t have done the first week like that because it set the bar pretty high (and it was not upheld in the keys, but we don’t need to get into that).
The second half of the work trip, we headed down to Key Largo. Ken Nedimyer started an off-shore coral nursery in the 90’s as part of his daughter’s 4-H project. It has since grown into an incredible organization called the Coral Restoration Foundation. The nursery has some coral genets (meaning coral that are genetically identical) that no longer exist in the wild. It was exciting to cryopreserve sperm form these corals and others in the nursery to bank down for future generations to work with. While the sperm was not the greatest, likely due to high ocean temperatures causing stress and bleaching the last few years, we were able to bank a lot and the material that wasn’t the greatest was banked for dna reference sampling also. The Florida Aquarium headed up the collections part of the trip and it was nice meeting people from Flordia and all over that were there for the work.
Highlights of the trip…
…having Claire along and watching her handle everything really well. She is who we are hiring to replace me as lab manager and it was exciting to get that going and feel like she is going to do as great a job as I imagined she would.
…just getting to know my labmates a bit better and really enjoying their sense of humor and character. I had been my boss’ only employee for about 11 years. We now have 2 post-docs, a grad student and my replacement. It’s so nice to have a bigger lab that is compenent and finally feel like leaving to teach yoga makes sense and the lab will be in good hands.
…talking with Jess from Switzerland/Qatar about free diving, yoga and life.
…early morning breakfast with Sam from New Zealand/Cambodia and having him try Southern biscuits and gravy for the first time ever. Not to mention, breaking my 3 year long gluten fast and finding I had no ill-health repercussions and having some biscuits and gravy myself.
…and while we are mentioning gluten…having sourdough bread sandwiches during the first week. When you haven’t had a sandwich in 3 years, they really are one of the best things ever!
…oh, and having our liquid nitrogen tank delivered by a drunk, shirtless good ol’ boy off the back of his pickup truck just him and his buddy, no lift, no dolly. Then having Sam and Jon roll the thing into the elevator and all the way down the wrong balcony hallway, then back to the elevator and into the condo we were using as a lab. Absolute craziness.
Small (or large) rant about the trip…
…I found out where all the styrofoam companies send their styrofoam now. Florida. It’s disgusting. Every where we went they had styrofoam big plates, styrofoam small plates and styrofoam cups. Not to mention the plastic cutlery. And if you tried to oppose, they would act offended and try to reason with you that “but you can just throw this away, it’s so much easier than washing a plate.” OMG. I wanted to cry the whole time.
Watch this space for part 2 of my post about my epic trip. It’s coming, I promise. There’s just…”so much to say, so much to say, so much to say, so much to say.” 😉
Aloha, love and namaste-
-Gin
