halcyon

I picked up this bad boy today after realizing that the 2nd-hand craig's list BC i bought last year is a piece of crap.
it set me back a bit, but it should be totally worth it.
the hose that connects from the K-valve to the BC was also leaking.
But a new hose comes with the new BC i got, so that fixed all of my big problems!

so now my next major step is getting myself into a drysuit.
i'm not really sure what i'm looking for yet, but i believe that crushed neoprene is not the answer.
as for what is... well, all i know is its not that.
i'm thinking there's only two options, so that'll be easy to figure out.

when i went into the shop today, the guy, mark, recognized me as the guy taking the "fundies" class. that's a plus. then, with the wad of cash that i dropped on him today, i'm sure he'll remember me for a long while. this is a very good thing, since he seems to have connections.
this weekend he and some of his buddies/students are heading on over to florida to do some cave diving. dammit. so jealous.
i've got a few more classes to take before i can attempt anything as dangerous as that.
i've read enough stories to know what can go wrong down there.

so i think i'll be frequenting that shop. its too bad its in issaquah, but not that far back toward the mountains. its off of the front street exit on gillman.

my ultimate short-term goal is to be diving in Lake Washington.
apparently there are about 8 known shipwrecks down there, but i have to go through additional training to get to them because they're so deep.
you have to get into something called 'triox' which is where helium is added to the usual mixture of oxygen and nitrogen. helium is an inert gas, so i think the deal is that it doesn't attach to your blood cells, therefore when surfacing you don't need as much decompression time as you would if you were only dealing with nitrogen and oxygen.
i could be wrong...

anyway. i'm getting into this shit. it's a damn shame that it's so expensive, or i'd urge my friends to do it.
but they're not as much of a leech as i am, living at home...
it's nice to throw rent money into other avenues, but on the other hand, i feel lack of independence.
whatever. i get to do what interests me at a small cost.

oh! i should also mention that i misplaced my First Americans book one day and took my Lost World book which is very much my style. It does review the history of how archaeology came to be a science, but thankfully the more abridged version that Adovasio's (First Americans), but it goes into a "what if?" on pleistocene cultures that haven't been found in the new world because of their proximity to the old shoreline.
see, when the glaciers trapped a huge amount of water in ice form, sea levels around the globe were 350 - 400 feet lower.
look at the world today and see how many large cities are located near water.
um. damn near all.
be it river, lake, or ocean.
so if you're exploring a new territory, and resources are abundant near the water, wouldn't you travel along that resource base if you're migrating to a different environment?

i'm just getting into the book, but he's already talking of cave sites along the BC and southern Alaska panhandle with artifacts dating back to 10 kya (thousand years ago).

today the more popular theory, rather than this coastal migration, is that of the Clovis people, who came through that ice-free corridor that we all heard about when growing up which led people from Russia through to Alaska and on down to Alberta, Minnesota, and so forth until they spread from New Hampshire to New Mexico.

Proponents of this theory claim that the coastal migration theory's pull is null, claiming that glaicers would have been covering the coastline, leaving no resources or even land for people to work with. however, Koppel, the author, gives results of archaeology done at certain coastal caves which, although haven't given up any cultural remains during the supposed uninhabitable pleistocene time frame, they have relenquished faunal remains proving that mammalian life in this area was possible and that the land wasn't entirely blanketed by ice.

i've now just come to a point where human remains were found in a cave, but i don't know the outcome of the find.
Koppel just went on a tirade about Kennewick Man.
fun.

speaking of which. archaeology is totally rad.
i was thinking about this last night, and i came to some conclusion of why archaeology draws my attention.
well. i guess it is crazy to see how people lived in the past, yeah, that's well and good,
but the things that i'm interested are found underwater or in caves. or in underwater caves.
these places are really the least well explored places on earth.
the entirety of the exposed globe has been, well, exposed, but what lies beneath the water and what lies beneath the earth are all that really remain for a modern-day explorer.

i've always enviously heard stories of charles darwin and james cook and marco polo who are able to go to exotic places and encounter exotic cultures.
there isn't really any of that left except for what you can dig up from the past.
so send me to the deepest, darkest, wettest recesses of the earth where lie remenants of human ancestors who once hid from the uncontrollable elements facing them on the outside world, and maybe i can get a glimpse of how those famed explorers felt.

how cheesy was that?

nah. but really. i do just want to be original and do things that not many people do.
is that too much to ask?
something with a little excitement as well. semi-life-threatening. somewhat remote.

that would be the life...