Dave's Life Scrapbook

This is me at a very young age. I always wanted to be a magician.

Years and years pass by ... most often taking the road less traveled

At last, I feel like I am starting to experience the world. Growing up in Massachusetts in a suburban neighborhood, I spent much of my days photographing what was around me on film and DSLR. The days of loading film into the developing tank in absolute darkness and mixing it with developer, stop, then fixer, were some I'll never forget

I would longboard down to the local pond and farm and capture the scenery,

Then life began to happen, and I moved to Amherst to go to college. I learned science and found magic along the way just in everyday things.

Wait a second, is that a 4 leaf clover?? No. It is 2 four leaf clovers. The odds of finding one is 1 in 10,000, so this event was 1 in 10 million. Lucky I say to stumble upon these in the field near the Renaissance house.

And somehow 4 years went by and I got a degree in Chemical Engineering, a feat I never thought I would be able to achieve.

Even better, the universe deemed my skill great enough to move up in the ranks to California, to study the subject for a PhD!

This is just 20 minutes from the school, in Santa Barbara. I've only been here a few months here and still feels like a dream. Weather is ~23centigrade year round so it seems. How is it quasi static I'll never know...

One of my first few weeks there I took a drive to Solvang, a danish themed town

And saw the Santa Ynez Valley on the way back. First time I have ever seen a cactus in real life!

I decided to get a pet betta fish, Cornelius, to keep me company in the apartment. I had to set up a fish feeding device to dispense 3 pellets a day. Every day at 5:30pm PST is his feeding hour. Every day around that time he waits for his food.

Who would have ever known a fish could be so smart!? (Clifford and Roxanne, my previous two betta fish, could jump up to eat a food pellet off my finger and swim through a hoop I crafted, so am I really surprised?) After he receives his food, him swims around the bottom of the device to guilt me into manually overriding the system to give him more. No Cornelius you'll get more food tomorrow!

This is another beach in Santa Barbara

It really makes you feel like you are on the side of the world

It is a full day of travel between Santa Barbara and Massachusetts, by bus and plane. On my most recent trip back, I took a bus along the coast, capturing the pacific ocean in Camarillo.