Cathleens Garden Diary

This is an illustration I did for the August 2014 issue of Popular Science Magazine. The assignment was to show a scifi take on human aging in the future. I wanted to do something relatively positive, so I drew a lady whose life has been been prolonged through cybernetic enhancements and augmentation, so she gets to spend time with her great-great-great-great grandchildren. 

Please be ready to expand your vocabulary when you read books/fics - thank you

You look shit up.

Don't expect the world to shovel knowledge into your mouth. You're not a baby bird. Look stuff up. Ask that person on the train what they're reading. Ask that grandma taking a walk what kind of plant she's carrying and why. Ask that 4yo what kind of animal they're watching on the sidewalk (probably a snail). Ask your cashier about their cool tshirt. Ask. It's so important for so many things. Knowledge, connection, fun.

Beton -> Betong

Pardon -> Pardong

Saison -> Saisong

Karton -> Kartong

etc etc, a personal favourite: Croissant -> Crossong

The businessman that comes in every week who seemed grouchy at first now smiles and waves when I remember his name, and explains he's just finished a long drive, and he doesn't MEAN to come off as rude, he's just tired.

The mother and daughter who visit the hotel each summer and tell me they've been coming here for years, and each time they visit they go to the pier and save up their tickets for the big ticket items. One day they come through the doors with the biggest grins, the older lady in the wheelchair proudly waving a huge stuffed toy tiger she's "had her eye on for years".

The young man with his girlfriend who looks nervous as he approaches reception, and stumbles over his words, his hands shaking as he signs the paperwork to check in. I've spent the last two weeks on the phone with him organising this; we've set up the bedroom with balloons and petals and decorations, and he's going to propose as soon as they get to the room.

The woman who I've not seen before who asks if I'm local, and tells me she grew up here, and had recently found herself drawn back. We talk about the sounds of seagulls, and the metal clanging of masts down at the harbour, and how the sounds that fade into the background are the ones you miss most when you leave. She's writing a book and promises to send me a copy when she's done.

The regular who goes out of her way to buy us all the strangest biscuits she can find at the tourist shops. We try them together, pulling faces at the ones that just don't work.

The thirty something woman who immediately sees a kinship in me and whispers to me that she has been here before, but under a name she no longer uses, and we celebrate the freedom she feels.

The support group that comes in for coffee each week and sit together filling the foyer with laughter.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

They have a bunch of very happy "berried hens" (i.e. mother lobsters covered in eggs), a set of (essentially) aquatic centrifuges that rock the baby lobsters around to help build their strength against the currents, and a GIANT 35-year-old blue lobster named MELVIN who wanders around in a big tank living his best life, with a couple of sharks for room-mates.

It's a MARVELLOUS time and they're on course to release 100,000 lobster babies a year!

Bird #11: Rainbow-bearded Thornbill