Shipwreck

Los Roques, Venezuela (Dec 11, 2004)

The last few days have been quite hectic. Tomorrow I am leaving for a conference in San Diego (205th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society) where I am presenting a “poster” (in these huge meetings with thousands of participants most of the presentations are in the form of large posters that are hanged in a special room during a “poster session”). The only problem is that the analysis I am going to present was not ready, so I had to work around the clock in the last few days to finish the job and make the poster. I managed to finish it yesterday at midnight but I couldn’t print it because the large poster printer is locked during the night in the computer room at my institute. Fortunately there is always somebody at the help-desk during the weekends, so I managed to print it this morning. Every time I say that I should not end up rushing things at the last minute, but I really don’t know what I could have done different as I worked quite intensely since I came back from Venezuela (I even worked on Jan 1st).

Today had been snowing all day (more than snow we got a lot of that ugly mixture of snow, ice and rain called “wintry mix”). Trying to console myself (looking forward to the more decent weather of San Diego, even though I heard that it has been raining a lot in California), I posted a photo I took at Los Roques that didn’t make it for the Venezuela travel diary. It is a shipwreck I found on a strip of sand connecting the islands of Madrizqui and Cayo Pirata. The boat was completely eaten by the elements, with the exception of the rusted metal skeleton, semi submerged in the coral rich sand.