Hello,
Hope all is well and that the arrival of December brought with it some Christmas spirit. Wherever in the world you might find yourself.

This might be a post with more text than photos. Sometimes it is nice to not carry around a camera everywhere. It allows you to see the world through both eyes, without always looking for the best light or composition. Instead you get to see a photo of me and my dear siblings who are coming to visit in just about two weeks now, and I couldn’t be more excited.

All is well in San Diego. The past two weeks we’ve had a total of three rainy days. It’s been surging down the streets and we’ve had flash flood warnings go out over the mobile network. A little bit of rain here has the same effect of a proper winter storm with lots of snow has back home. You’re excused for being late to class and the teachers will say ”thank you for braving the weather and coming to class”. I can’t help to find it amusing, but I get that it’s all about what you’re used to and what your infrastructure is built to handle. But the sun is back out now, and the thermometer shows 20°C and order has been restored. We’re officially done with all lectures for this quarter and what’s left now is just ”finals week”. I’m taking final exams in all my three courses at the end of this week and I thus have a couple of days to cram in a bunch of oceanography related things in my head.

Here are some slightly useless but potentially interesting facts I’ve learned in school recently (but that are unlikely to appear on an exam):

– We can prove that there have been parasitic lifeforms in the ocean for about as long as there have been other marine animals by findings of tapeworm eggs in fossilised shark poop.

– El Nino (”the boy” in Spanish) has its name from it appearing around Christmas when we celebrate the arrival of Jesus. This year the likelihood that we get to see and El Nino event is about 80% based on slightly elevated surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific.

– Scandinavia has produced a considerable number of prominent oceanographers and physicists. I have tried to teach my Oceanography professor to say ”Ekman” with the emphasis on the ”e”, but I’m not making much progress. They prefer to put the emphasis on the ”k” and say ”Äkkmann” (if you know Swedish you’ll hear the fun in this). Anyways, Ekman used to be a professor at Lund University and came up with a bunch of really important solutions describing how the wind and Coriolis forces puts the ocean into motion. Rossby gave name to planetary waves and Bjerknes and Sverdrup (Norwegians) came up with equations describing mass, energy and momentum balances in the ocean and interactions with the atmosphere.

– The man who came up with dividing fluid motion over an object into boundary layers, and thus solved fluid mechanics problems unsolved since Newton, his name was Prandtl and he had to marry his PhD-supervisors daughter, which was customary at the time.

(I did warn you the facts were slightly useless… Unless they can remind you of the vastness of the world and the fact that there is something to nerd out about for everyone out there. Curiosity keeps your mind young.)

Other exciting things that has happened recently include me officially becoming a volunteer at Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. That means that I pretty much every week get to go there and help out with a little bit of everything. It could be anything from teaching kids visiting the aquarium about how penguins regulate their body temperature, all while gluing cotton balls on to pictures of penguins (there was ”penguin fluff” glued all over the place and myself afterwards), or walking around the aquarium a late night when a big pharmaceutical company have their Christmas party, and tell people the story about the turtle with a 3D-printed shell and show the swell star eggs where you see the baby sharks moving through the shell.

On the weekends the public can book a birthday party at the aquarium, and I’ve helped out at a couple of those. The first one was something of a culture shock, for sure. I had no idea that a birthday party for a six year old could be turned into such a big deal. There’s snacks, drinks, pizza, cake, presents, admission and a guided tour of the aquarium for all the kids AND their parents, special interactive activities like petting the juvenile horn sharks and giftbags for all the guests. When I was a kid you ate cake and went to the park to play a game when there was a birthday party (but maybe that’s just me getting old…). I was already a little overwhelmed, and add to that a fire alarm that went off due to an overheated bagel in the microwave in the staff kitchen, and having to keep track of 15 six year olds on a sugar high (and their parents) as the whole aquarium was evacuated, and all 300+ visitors stood outside waiting for the fire brigade to say it was okay to go back in, and you have all the necessary ingredients for a memorably Saturday… But I am enjoying my time at the aquarium, and I get to walk around and look at things as much as I want after my shifts. Here are some pictures, from the top: a leafy seadragon, California Moray Eel, and a giant octopus. 

Now it’s also officially December which mean that I cannot protest the Christmas music any longer (I do have a limit for how many times in a day I can listen to Jingle Bells without going crazy). In the ÅÄÖ – Sorority House we’ve been drinking ”glögg”, baked (Swedish) saffron buns and gingerbread, attended a Christmas party with reindeer horns/Christmas trees on our heads, assembled gingerbread houses (yes, plural on that one) and decorated the house with hand cut paper snowflakes.
We also had a diverse group of people over for a ”Swedish Christmas potluck” where everyone had to bring something. IKEA supplied the pickled herring and meatballs and there was eggs, potatoes, salmon, cheese and cabbage. Not too shabby. But to be completely honest, now I feel pretty done with Christmas, at least for a little while…

Time to go back to studying. As always, thank you for reading.