Flooding!

Last night my water heater cracked and water flowed all over the floor, under the wall and flooded my neighbors apartment and mine. All my towels were reduced to rags, trying to sop up rust chunks and tea-colored water... Gross! But the plumber came very fast and replaced the water heater. Kudos to the plumber and my landlady. Oh yeah, my dog, the killing machine, bit the plumber on the heel.

The broken water heater is why I missed last nights Astronomical Society Meeting.

Today is my split shift day. I'll be looking forward to a long beach lunch hour and maybe a nap. I'm definitely still a little sick from this cold or whatever it is.

Yesterday back to work wasn't as bad as I expected. I had a lot of little things to fix from just about everyone who saw me. It's nice to feel needed and useful.

Above is a picture of a Queen Angelfish. I'm still trying to get the perfect picture of one.

Here I go

Back to work.
It's always hard to go back after time off. Especially here.
Last few weeks I've been waking up at about 3:30. figured it was just because I go to bed at 9. Last night I stayed up till 11 and still woke up at 3:30. I heard my neighbor come home right after that. I wonder if they've been coming home and waking me up every night. New neighbors are moving in next to me on the other side. I anticipate trouble there. I think I know who they are. . . drunks.
I have a wonderful outlook on life today, don't I?

Last day of Vay-cay

Today is my last day of vacation. tomorrow it's back to work, where I won't have a day off for at least 11 days. It's like you take holiday time, which you've earned, and then go back to work, and feel like you're being punished.
I'm kind of angry about it.

It's time for the IO Girl and I to have a talk. We have to either move forward or move apart. Living on separate islands is no good. Plus it's in voilation of my no long distance relationship rule. Also my plans are to stay here and hers are not. Plus her cat and my dog will never get along.

There's also a problem where I work so much, then I haven't seen her in a long time so I go see her. Then I can't go diving. I didn't dive for almost two months before last week. I basically gave up diving for my now ex-wife and won't do it again. I gave up everything and did everything I could to get that relationship to work and now in my life it's William Shakespeare, "To Thine Own Self Be True". Yessiree, diving will come before a relationship if push comes to shove. I already tried the other way and it was disastrous. I'm not saying I'm inflexible and won't compromise. I'm not saying that at all. Diving is just very important in my life.

Many times in my life I have been lonely and wanted a relationship, then gotten into a relationship and found myself lonelier that I was before. Like now. If I wasn't in an relationship already, I could at least go out and try to meet someone. But since I'm in a relationship, I'm trapped. I just have to suffer. Like right now, I'm waiting for her to wake up so I can talk to her on the stupid phone.

I realize that this doesn't sound good, but it's just half of how I feel. It would be great if things could work out with the OI girl. I want it to. I know this post doesn't sound like that, but I want it to work if it can.

My Dad

My Dad is not doing too well, his brain is bleeding and he lost his memory. My Mom is trying to teach him "L" for Lobby and "2" for their floor. He disappeared in the lobby and she found him on the 10th floor.
I talked to him on the phone and he sounded OK except he told me how he's trying to learn "L" and "4". He hesitated and seemed to know that wasn't quite right.
His 80th birthday is in August.

The End of Inner Space 2006

Inner Space 2006 is officially over. I missed half the diving because of being sick, but what diving I did do was great! I saw a lot of old friends and made some new ones. I can't help but feel a little sad that it's over though.

Sick boy

Night before last, I came home from diving and took a shower. When I got out of the shower, the air in the room was intolerably cold. I ran and jumped into bed with two blankets, wondering why I was so freezing. I ended up being incredibly sick and delerious. It was a miserable night. Yesterday morning I went to the dive shop and told them I wouldn't be diving that day. I moved my rebreather to a nice shady spot and covered it in towels. Then I came back home and went to bed and stayed there all day. Last night I was feeling a lot better and went out and got some chicken noodle soup. Then I went back to bed and this morning I feel a lot better still.
But that's why I didn't post yesterday.

Attack of the baby lobsters

This morning the alarm went off and I said to myself, "You're on vacation, sleep late if you want to" So I did. i slept an extra hour! Now I'm running a little late but I'm trying not to get too worked up about it.
Yesterdays dive was great! the wreck is still there and relatively unchanged. There is a big barrell sponge in front of the bow that I can tell gets bigger and bigger. On the ascent, there were dozens of baby lobsters living on the rope. The one inch rope was about 3 or 4 inches in diameter because of all the sea life growing on it. The lobsters were crawling all over us. One crawled in one guys wetsuit and he was quite uncomfortable the last half hour of the dive.
They were all over the place. Here's a pic, it's out of focus, but you get the idea as to the size of these monster creatures. (He's still alive and we threw him back after I took this pic)
Yes, everone is right, yesterdays abstract photo is the legs of the chairs and tables. Told you it was too easy!

Pics as promised

Yesterday was great! Today promises to be better. Yesterday was 303 feet, my new deepest depth on the rebreather. Today is the Carrie Lee, a wreck sitting on the edge of an underwater cliff at about 275 feet. Awesome dive!

Here's some pics I took yesterday on a shallow afternoon dive. They are Flamingos Tongues. the spotted part is the creature that lives inside the shell, kind of like a snail. They come out of their shell and wrap their bodies abound the outside of the shell. The shell is plain tan colored. They live on sea fans.


And a baby turtle. He was about a foot across.
Also, look at this coral, I took it for the pattern, but the flash made it bright red. click to enlarge. This is my favorite pic of the day.

And my abstract pic. Guess what it is! (easy) Hint: I was in a swimming pool next to a restaurant.

Still no pics

But today, I promise to take some!

Yesterday was great! Went down 258 feet, stayed 20 minutes, back on the surface after 103 minutes. Today the plan is 300 feet, which will be the deepest I've ever been on my rebreather.
Yes, Jona, I am waking up at the same time I always do for work, and I'm actually leaving the house earlier than I normally do, but it's great! (I'll try and get some rest when I get back to work!)

This is yesterdays dive downloaded from my dive computer. Depth is on the left and time is across the bottom. The dark blue line shows my actual depth, and the light blue line shows my ceiling, which means the shallowest depth I can ascend to with out risking decompression illness. The little green rectangle at the bottom center is what I see on my handset while I'm underwater.

click to enlarge

I feel like I'm getting a cold, so yesterday, instead of an afternoon dive, I hung out by the pool and tried to catch some preventitive sunrays.

Yesterday was great!

Today will be better!
Yesterday the dive was 150 feet for 30 minutes, swam in one direction. Then up to 100 feet for 30 more minutes, still swimming in the same direction, then across the sand to a mini wall where we swam back for an hour and did our deco and had a 2 hour and 1o minute runtime. It was just a shallow warm up dive.
Plus, it was great seeing a bunch of old friends.
Today I am on the boat.
All these dives are too deep for my camera, (140 feet or 40 meters) but I will take some shots today on the boat and stuff. Maybe this afternoon I'll do a shallower one and take some U/W pics.
SEE YA!

Today is the day!

Yesterday I didn't actully dive. People were arriving and I saw a lot of people I havn't seen in since last year. This morning I am diving, FINALLY. tonight is the official start of Inner Space. All is good. So far work has only called once.

You know what I'm going to say today. . .

I'm ON VACATION!
I'm putting my rebreather together and I'm going to the dive shop!
I'll be there all week, except when I come home to sleep and take care of the dawg!!

YIPEEEEE!

(This is yet another record for most boringest post! Delving down to unfathomed depths of boringness)

Im going on vacation!

This is my last day of work before vacation! I'm staying here and diving with Inner Space, the annual week of closed circuit rebreather diving and training at Dive Tech. I am excited!
I have a hard time reminding myself that no matter how bad it seems at time, I have a really good life. Two years ago at Inner Space I took my first rebreather class. I bought my Inspiration Rebreather (The Best of the Best!). Then last year I upgraded to the Vision Electronics package and this year I plan on being on the trimix boat every day! (See my blog entries a year ago)

Anyway, I'm going to work today, and that's it fo me for 10 days! (I'll still be posting posts here)

Short one today

I'm out the door for the Brac, going this morning, coming back tonight. I have to go to work and get the equipment first. I am worried about a severe lack of coffee consumption this morning. Also I had a flash drive in my hand that disappeared, where the heck is it? I just had it. Add one point to the crazy theory!

How do I know if I'm crazy?

Am I crazy? I could have stayed off work for two more days. But I came back because I wanted to get some things done before I go on vacation Friday. I feel like when I go into work today, people will ask why I'm there, and when I tell them, will call me crazy.
I want to try to get a satellite dish put together and pointed at the satellite. It's almost together and I think I can get it done. And guess what? I have to do it today, because tomorrow I go back to the other island where I just was for work! That's right, I could have just stayed!
Nutso, OI know!

Here I am

Here I am, getting ready to go to the other island for work. Due to a work screwup, my reservations never got made. I was told it was "all taken care of" nearly three months ago. Since my reservations were cancelled, and since it is a holiday weekend, all the filghts are full, and as of right now, I am going to be there till next Wednesday. That's five days and all I'm doing is 4 hours work. I think I need an attitude adjustment, because I think I normal person would be glad to get a vacation like this. But it pisses me off. I am a person who likes to stick to the plan. And I have work to do here.
Now I don't come back till the 18th, and my vacation is the 19th thru the 29th. And I will be diving diving diving.

Over Workload

I was having fantastic dreams when the alarm went off this morning. I can't remember them now, but I hit the snooze button twice to continue. It astounds me that I can't remember this dream. I was sure I'd remember it when I was waking up.
Today is an impossibly busy day. I have to:
Pick up an antenna at the airport.
Meet the competitions Engineers about relocating their transmitters to our tower.
Find and order new codecs and modems so we can double the bandwidth of the signal we are sending to the the other islands. (I've been putting this off, and it needs to get done!)
Meet the public works guys about installing new air conditioning.
Physical therapy at hospital for my foot, 12:30-1:30
Set up for a broadcast that is from 2-4 PM
Finish assembly of BBC Satellite dish. point the dish at the satellite and get the receiver working for the newsroom. (unlikely this will be completed today, but at least put some more parts on the dish!)
A sales lady wants me to help her hang some pictures in the lobby, I need to buy hangers for that and at the same time, some power cable for my backup transmitter.

And a few other things. My list of backlogged things just keeps getting longer and longer...
This is me under paid and over worked:
Get it? I made a funny! ha HA!

Tomorrow morning I am going to the other island in the morning. there was a show there Friday afternoon that was cancelled, and there is the agriculture show that is Saturday. Oh yeah, today I have to pack up all my equipment for that too! Thanks for reminding me!

Culinary Disaster

Last night I attempted to make stir fry, what I got was more like a hot salad.
I bought this bag of stuff that said "Stir Fry", I thought it would be easy and I'd get some vegatables in my diet too. But when I started cooking I realized I didn't have everything I needed. One thing missing was a half a tablespoon of oyster sauce. What the heck is that? Another was half a teaspoon of corn starch in three teaspoons of water. Also I didn't have the can of vegetable broth. So I just dumped what I had (the contents of the bag), and a piece of chicken in the (who needs a wok?) frying pan. To make up for the missing stuff, I dumped in a bunch of soy sauce.
I felt like a cow eating grass. The chicken part was good though.
When I came back in from walking the dog this morning, I noticed the place still smells like burnt cabbage.

Today is my first regular day back at work. I am NOT excited. Mostly I am looking forward to lunch hour. And it will be interesting to see who comes up with what kind of amazing bullshit.

I guess this is my last sickday

I guess this is my last sickday. I"ll go back to work tomorrow. My sick pass is till the 13th, but I'm going to go to see the OI Girl Friday (Work is paying the bill, because I'm working Saturday) Also I like doing the talk show on Wednesdays.

Plus I want to say that I need to do some important jobs I have to get done, but I think the message of me hurting my foot is that I'm not supposed to say things like that or feel that way.

I wrote this eariler this morning on Wordpress. Blogger seeemed to be down. I just pasted it over. Wordpress seems really slow compared to Blogger.

Check out this website: "Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth". It is a very cool site, worth checking out, wherever you live. It is pictures of Earth taken by astronauts.

TIme is flying by!!

It is May 8th. The month is one third of the way done. As long as I have leved, the first half of the year has seemed faster than the last half.
This morning I was sorting through my pictures, looking for one to post today, and I noticed I hadn't taken any yet this month. The last ones I took were April 30th of my foot with the cast on it. So heres one I thinnk is interesting, they're artificial reefs that they used down by the Mariotte when they were having so much sand erosion problems before Hurricane Ivan. (Hurricane Ivan gave them lots of sand back.) I thinnk these are being stored here or else maybe they're lost. I found them when I was out snorkeling after work one day. It surprised me to come upon them.

They look like a pencil holder I made my Dad when I was in kindergarden!

I got up early again and went and saw Neptune, I definitely saw it this time, and the first time, but the first time I wasn't sure which object it was out of several.

This afternoon I have another doctors appointment about my foot. I want to be rid of these dang crutches. The killer part, like I said before, is that with crutches, you loose both hands.

Planet Neptune

Neptune is in Capricorn right now
(image from Heavens Above website)

I got up early this morning to look for the planet Neptune with my binoculars. I'm not sure I saw it, or rather, I'm pretty sure I saw it and didn't recognize it. My star chart only goes down to magnitude 6.5 so there were several stars near where Neptune was supposed to be that weren't on my chart. (Higher numbers are dimmer, for example, I think I can see magnitude 9 with my binoculars, and the sun is magnitude -26 {Negative twenty-six}) Neptune is supposed to be magnitude 7.9, so it is very dim. You can see about magnitude 3 or 4 with the naked eye.
After I came back inside this morning, I made copies of all the charts in Nortons Star Atlas, so I can write on them. I was thinking, why not just write in the book? But I decided not to. And I have a color copier so they came out great! This astronomy hobby can get pretty expensive, when I started, I would just to go out and look with just my eyes and a map I downloaded from SKYMAPS.COM, now I'm zooming in on faint objects and my charts and binoculars aren't good enough. It makes me wonder, if I can exceed Nortons Star Atlas with 10x binoculars, what do people with telescopes use? I must not have my facts straight.....
and
I need a telescope...

Pasting back and forth

It's Saturday morninng. I just woke up, I slept late for me. (7AM Whoooooo!!! That's late.) The coffee is going and THAT'S exciting to me.

I gotta make it to the beach today, I gotta. Last night I slept with nothing on my foot. All I have now is that tan colored stretchy bandage on my foot, so I can take it off whenever I need to. I can take showers!

I'm going onto work today for a while, they're testing the generator for hurricane season and power will be switching around and I should be there. Once they literally blew every fuse in every piece of equipment I have, blew up every UPS power supply and started a fire in the newsroom. But that was different people taking care of the generator!

Friday Night

I got my cast off this morning. My ankle/foot isn't broken, just sprained. It was all black and blue and swollen when the doctor took the cast and bandage off. It looked much worse than I expected. I'm supposed to stay on crutches and I have physical therapy on Monday. I got a sick pass for another week off work. I was already committed to work today, so I went. I was walking on my foot, it was hot and numb. I feel kind of taken advantage of. The problem with crutches isn't so much the loss of a leg, it's the loss of both hands.
But the doctor said I can go in the sea, so that's where I'll be tomorrow . . . after work.

Well, they turned it off.

Apparently, a "real person" from blogger visited my blog and turned off my word verification harassment. Too bad they didn't leave a comment. In the previous post comments, Rose recommended Wordpress, I actually had already started one here. Take a look. I haven't figured everything out there yet, but I will probably switch eventually. As long I've had this blog, I've heard the "veterans" say Blogger isn't as good as others, and blogger is unprofessional and not always that competent. I gave them a chance, and had problems, AND I have always been much more than a little humuorously amused with their ridiculous word verification. But their last stunt was harassment, pure and simple, as it was designed to be.

Stand by for an "I've moved" sign

irrelevant, repetitive, and nonsensical

While last night I felt kind of angry blogger called me a spam blog, this morning I'm kind of depressed about it.
Is my blog irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical? I guess so. Irrelevant, I post about nothing a lot of the time. It is repetitive, underwater pics or "A new worlds record for most boringest post". Over and over. Nonsensical, I guess all of it is. So I guess my blog DOES have characteristics of a spam blog. Can I have some cheese to go with my whine? OOPS, I think I already said that once! The Spam Alarms are going off all over Bloggers corporate offices!
My word verification seem longer than this whole post, and is that two 'N's or one 'M'?

Blogger, turn off your harassment spam robots!

All of a sudden, I have a word verification on each and every page I go to on my own blog. Here's what they say:

Your blog requires word verification

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog.

What Are Spam Blogs?

As with many powerful tools, blogging services can be both used and abused. The ease of creating and updating webpages with Blogger has made it particularly prone to a form of behavior known as link spamming. Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site.

Before we can turn off mandatory word verification on your posts we'll need to have a human review your blog and verify that it is not a spam blog. Please fill out the form below to get a review.

Find out more about how Blogger is fighting blogs.

I had fill in a word verification to submit the request to have a "real person from blogger" come and review my blog and make sure it's not a "spam blog" because Blogger, and their "SPAM ROBOTS" are just about as screwed up as a soup sandwich! This is ludicrous. A Blogger SPAM ROBOT determines I am spam and I have to call a "REAL PERSON" from blogger to check me out!

ri·dic·u·lous!

Going to work.

I'm dressed for work and I'm going today. The first and probably the last time this week.
I can' think of anything to post today.
I don't have a bathtub, I just have a stand-up shower. So what I did to take a shower is put one of those white plastic charis in there and shower with my leg up on the wall. It works good. The OI Girl is coming tomorrow. I'll be glad to see her but I'm afraid I might be crabby. I don't want to be, and I'll try not to be, but I'm not a good patent and I don't like being pampered.
I have a word verification just to post this post now.... WTF?