Well, {sighs} um yeah, I had the chance to share a story once before, which was about Cape May Harbor because I've spent...close to 20 years of my life um or more than 20 years, as the director of the Nature Center at Cape May and the harbor is our outdoor classroom, it's...pretty much defines who we are what we do. Um but I thought I needed to come up with another body of water to share another story. So...I thought about where I actually began my work life. Um right after college, my first job was...I worked for the National Marine Fisheries Service at Sandy Hook at a facility up at Sandy Hook. And my body of water is actually called the "New York Bite", which is this triangular... of water um that kind of feeds up into the Hudson River and in dense there near Raritan Bay, and part of my job um, I worked for the environmental chemistry unit. And what we were doing back in 1985, was um testing the effects of ocean dumping of sewage sludge. Um that's what they used to do back then. And it was pretty prolific. And we would go out um and sample the water and different transects off the Sandy Hook all the way down as far as um uh....Long Branch up to Raritan Bay. And I mean, it was a fun job, my first you know, real life experience. Uh {laughs} we would go out on these, these research boats dressed in bikinis. Um and because in between the...the transects, we would sunbathe and try to get like, I probably gave myself skin cancer that summer.Um but I was probably the tannest I've ever been. And um onestory I remember was there, there was a photographer from National Geographic that came out with us, and was they were a stud--a story on ocean dumping and ocean pollution. And um I noticed he was taking a lot of pictures of myself and this other females {laughs} in our bikinis than he was of what we were doing. Um and to this day, I never knew if, you know, if they ran that story, I'm going to have to go back in the archives of uh National Geographic to see if there was ever that story run. But I remember talking to the pho-- photographer, and he said that, you know, for any stor---one story, they may shoot as much as um over 800 frames or more. And maybe only use like five pictures in the story. But it was it was interesting to meet him and um...I ended up that job. I started right....Actually, I started before I graduated from college, they were so desperate to fill the job. So I actually reported to work a week before I...graduated. And so that was from May. And then by September, when I was living there on site, in the old um army, the officer's mansions at Sandy Hook, we lived in some of those buildings. There was a fire. And the place where I worked actually burned to the ground. And it was set by one of the park rangers. He was he was determined he was an arsonist. And there was a big trial and everything but basically my...I no longer had a place to go to work, because the whole laboratory had burned to the ground. And um sometimes I think those experiences you know, I didn't have my whole life figured out but just one thing led to another and different jobs and opportunities. Um you know, I think in a way that's how I eventually ended up down here in Cape May was because when I left that job, I didn't know what to do. I was about to go back to school for my Masters, but...I just my heart wasn't in it. So instead I ended up taking a job with a...an environmental consulting company down here and then the rest is history. I settled down here. So...that's my story it...It all began with the "New York Bite" and ended with the Cape May Harbor.
