coming together

Man! what a cool day.

first off, i get to sleep in. no alarm to bother me.
when my kidneys tell me its time to get up, i get up.
i take my sweet ass time, get around to taking a shower, and head on down to issaquah to a cool dive shop there called 5th dimension.

i googled 5th dimension for directions just before leaving, and the 8th hit was back when i mentioned my first trip there back on 3/9/05.
i don't know if that's a good thing or not.

what i do know was a good thing was this time around to the shop.
if you read my first entry about last time, it kinda implies that i didn't get too much information out of them.
this time around, i again talked to one of the board of directors for SCRET in some actual depth.
he was friendly to begin with, but i think what really did it was when i told him i was ready to drop some cash.
then he dropped everything and showed me to his desk.
can't blame the guy... money is business. business is life.
so i signed up for the GUE 1 class which starts on November 18th and goes through the 20th.
that means i'll have to ask for some time off from both jobs.
oh well. this is important to me. can you imagine that though?! a full weekend off?
most of you fuckers are just laughing at me... assholes.
anyway. so i'll be getting into that.
apparently though, my setup isn't good enough for them.
if i want to get into this GUE, then i'm going to have to suit up like them.
get the same fins, the same BCD. apparently they like the back floatation BCD rather than the one that wraps around you.
the one i got is kinda shitty, but the upgrade that they want me to get is slightly expensive.
the fins are doable, but still pricey.
i can't tell yet if they do this for a reason, or just so you buy all your shit from them.
whatever, if i'm in, then maybe i'll have to buy their shit.

so i BSed with the guy for a while, and then he offered to show me an 8-minute clip of a shipwreck he dove for SCRET. it was 320 feet down off of point no point which is just a bit northwest of edmonds on the penninsula side.
the boat itself was riddled with mostly white, cauliflower-looking anenomies. they went from the bow to the stern.
along the way, the cameraman's light went out. pitch black.
scary shit. the guy i was talking to said that he had to come over and use his light for the rest of the filming.
320 feet. damn. recreational diving usually only allows you to go to 120 feet.
personally i've only done 40, and that was without scuba. with scuba i've only done about 30-35.

the guy, mark, also introduced me to another guy who comes to the shop a lot and helps beginners out with their stuff.
he offered to take me out on a tuesday or thursday up at alki.
luckily, this coming tuesday i have off. it's my first day off since the 13th.
21 days, i got lucky! what'd i tell you, shit's falling into place.
so i left there with two email addresses and two dates to use my scuba gear.

from there i went to pho on aurora and 77th. i hadn't been there since i was able to drag meg there on a rare occasion. i think this was the first time i've been to a sit-down resaurant by myself. i didn't really mind cuz it was damn tasty.
however, toward the end, i gobbled down a large jalapeno slice that kicked my ass. they never refill your water there. that's my only complaint.
good shit. good price.

from there i had to work. but you know what? that wasn't all that bad either.
arturo, my sifu (kung fu teacher) moved back to seattle from Whidbey Island and was around to keep me company.
we caught up on old times, new events, and he even helped me critique some of the moves i was having troubles learning.
before i knew it, it was 9:30, and i had to boot everyone out of the pool.

i drove over to fred meyer to get my next week's schedule, and a trip to the shari's restaurant came together.
half a dozen of us kicked it there for a while, then all parted ways.

i came home to discover that i had gotten an email from Canadian Todd. the guy that i've been hoping to go to south america with since i met him up in Alaska.
i tried to email him almost immediately after returning from Alaska, but i couldn't seem to get through to him via email. i had ambitions to write him. i even typed out a letter, but i never printed it and mailed it to him.
he just gave me a short "how do you do?" email, to which i responded with, "bitch, we goin, or not?".
hopefully he'll get back to me shortly.
leanora can't have all the fun in thailand and surrounding countries!

well. tomorrow will be a long day, especially if i stay up much longer.
but i guess in my own tradition, i still have to mention the new book i'm reading.
it's called The First Americans by Jim Adovasio.
this guy works at whichever state university that is located in pittsburgh and works at a controversial archaeological site called Meadowcroft.
the reason it's so controversial is that it predates all Clovis dates. Clovis being the supposed first Americans. those dates are around 11,200 to 11,500 years ago at the latest, whereas Adovasio's dates are more around 14,000 years ago.
I think he's trying to link his site to the Solutrean culture which can be found over in southern France and northern Spain, near the Pyrennes Mountains.
A lot of archaeologists don't accept his site stating that there has been a lot of waterflow through the site that has brought in contaminated coal samples which account for the early dating and really have no affiliation with the occupation of the site itself.

But even with this, i still like his boorish attitude toward the believers of the Clovis First:

I believed the idea that Clovis Man had leapt fully armed (out of the head of some Siberian Zeus) into midcontinent and proceeded to overrun the hemisphere in less than a millenium to be, at best, an oversimplified notion and, at worst, hopelessly naive if not simply dumb.

Called out!
I can't wait to see what else is in store.
this book is going to be a bit more lively than the last one i read.
i needed a good change of pace.

and today it came to fruition in more than just a book...