Prior Occupations

After graduating with a degree in Marine Biology from Texas A&M at Galveston I worked for a time as second mate on the university's research vessel, the R/V Gyre. We were basically a ship-for-hire, with scientists from all over the country (and occasionally from other countries) hiring us to take them out into the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean. We did all kinds of work, from drilling bottom cores for geologists to dragging nets for biologists to towing SONAR arrays for the navy. It was a great way to become exposed to a lot of field science and meet some interesting people. The picture on the right shows me hard at work (can't you tell) keeping the vessel "on station" for some middle-of-the-night bottom sampling.

Eventually I left the Gyre and found a job as mate aboard the NRC Admiral, an oil spill response vessel stationed in Galveston. We spent most of our time at the dock, doing routine maintenance, modifications, training, paperwork, etc. Then, if one of our clients had an oil spill in our sector (roughly from Freeport to Beaumont, depending upon the size of the spill), we had two hours to get the vessel underway to go clean it up. That happened about once every month and a half.

While most of the NRC Admiral's work involved tankers offshore, the picture below shows the vessel cleaning oil up at the mouth of the San Jacinto river after severe flooding in late 1994. The orange "U" shapes on either side of the vessel are inflated lengths of boom which trap the oil. On the starboard (right) side our crane is suspending a device called a "rope mop" which dips long fuzzy ropes into the water. Oil sticks to the rope and then gets wrung out and held in our recovery tanks. On the port (left) side floats our other clean-up apparatus, called a Marco skimmer, which is attached to the back of the boom’s mid-point. The oil funnels back to the skimmer, where a conveyor belt lifts the oil and then pumps it into the recovery tanks. Our utility boat can be seen picking out some large debris that might cause the skimmer to jam.

If you are interested in more information, here is a link to NRC's website.

It was a great job, and full of adventure, but eventually I decided it was time to try something else that I'd always had in mind: teaching.

My first teaching job was at Springfield Elementary School, but I didn’t stay there long. This bratty little kid named Bart Simpson was just too annoying, so I left for Seabrook Intermediate.

Just kidding, of course. I made this picture on a website called Simpsonize Me, and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to include it here.

Seabrook was my first teaching job (the 1998/1999 school year), and I loved it so much that I’ve been here ever since.