Living in a bubble

9, April, 2006
Sunday, 8:30 pacific/ 11:30 p.m.

It is so flippin’ hot here. This morning, at around 10 o’clock it was 82. Thankfully that’s Fahrenheit, not Celsius. We are now in Arizona, the state that has 300 days of sunshine a year. Seriously, it’s not only sunny; it also feels like you’re in an oven.
This morning, since it was Palm Sunday, we decided to hit the oldest church in Arizona. It was 200 plus some years old. Obviously, Christianity was not as widely spread as it is now days. The seating was very limited and the tiny church was packed. People were standing outside straining their eardrums to hear. We quickly saw that we were going to get nothing out of the sermon or anything else so we took a look around and then left.
After leaving the church we headed to the sight of the Biosphere 2 where in the 1990’s they built a huge 3.5-acre glass building. The building had several different biomes in it including the tropics, desert, savannah, marshes, and the rainforest. It is sealed of from earth by a 500 ton steel liner and is home to over 3,000 species of organisms and has a 25-foot deep ocean. A host of instruments constantly monitor the air, soil, and water. The Biosphere 2 was totally sealed of from any outside air, water, and food, meaning it recycled it’s own oxygen and H2O. Then, after building this amazing structure they locked four women and four men in it for two years. They had to grow their own food and they worked 10 to 12 hours a day maintaining the different biomes. Of course, even though this structure was clever, very clever, they forgot a few things. 1) Thinking that ultraviolet light was bad, the scientist put in glass that shielded it, of course bees need ultraviolet light to live so the bees inside the Biosphere died, making the Biospherians inside pollinate all the plants by had. 2) Microscopic organisms quickly flourished in the Biosphere and ate up all the oxygen the plants were producing, raising the levels of Carbon Dioxide, making the scientists pump emergency oxygen into the Biosphere twice, for the sake of the Biospherians. The only thing I didn’t like about this place was that they didn’t talk enough about the social aspects of the experiment. They didn’t even tell us the Biospherians names. All they told us was that they didn’t get along well and after the two years were up they hated each other’s guts and have never seen each other again.

Am I talking too much? Well to bad, I have nothing else to do so I’m going to keep yapping.

After a couple hours at the Biosphere, we visited what sounded like a cool reconstructed frontier town. It turned out to be a hokey, kids place with a couple neat stores. We watched a reenactment of a showdown, that had some really neat stunts, got ice cream (I had a Margarita snow cone, that was awesome), went to a haunted house that was the wimpiest thing I have ever seen, and Darby, Tatum and Katty went on a train ride. CHOO-CHOO! Sorry, kinda random.
We are now sitting in a church parking lot, about to go to bed cause my mom’s exhausted. She slept till 8:30 this morning, took a nap, and now wants to go to bed at 9:20. She claims it’s the time change but we’ve been out here two weeks, I think she’s just lethargic.

CUL8r,
Morgan