Not Just Alki

Last week, just before xmas, I went to Alki to meet up with my buddy, Cory, to dive.
Beforehand I toured the port area and the underbelly of the West Seattle Bridge.
But then, somewhere along the way, there was a bit of miscommunication. He didn't show by 2:15 (our usual dive meet up time is 2pm and he's always so punctual) so I gave him a call to find out that he wasn't aware of my diving intentions. This was kind of a bummer since I had just picked up my new dive suit from the dive shop in Issaquah, but no big deal otherwise.

So with more time to kill on my hands, I decided to take the long way home from Alki along the Sound,
until I needed to cut over to get to the pool in Lake City.
So I went through Alki, through downtown Seattle, cut through Magnolia, Ballard, and Fremont, before cutting through north Seattle to get to the pool.
It was quite the journey.
See it for yourself.

g-pa

this is so very weird.
one year to the day (my mom's bday), my grandpa returns to the hospital.
i forgot what last time was all about, but he made it out in a few days.
he might not be so lucky this time.

in other news.
my coworker at the pool hates me.
i'll get to the know-how maybe the next time i get around to blogging.

UNESCO

I've got nothing better than to cruise around flickr, checking out what other people have got.
This one guy is a traveling fool and has a collection of photos that are of UNESCO sites.

It's kinda crazy. I look through them and think, "I took that same shot!"
but i never realized the name of the place or that it was a world heritage site.

I swear I have this same shot in Belguim.
It's just very unfortunate that I didn't have a digital camera back when I went to Europe.
I would have taken so many more photos, and I could have posted them.
I guess I could scan all my photos, but not only would that take forever, but I don't have a scanner...

Boats

I went to my sister's place on Xmas eve eve to watch the boats that travel from Kirkland to Lake Union (my same voyage except by water).

Most every ship was decked out with string upon string of lights.
Some notable ones was the palm tree boat, the boat with a snowman water skiing behind it, the Jesus boat (with a fatty white cross as its only decoration), and the line of reindeer with Santa behind them boat.

Later carolers sang and all boats blew their horns.
Some of my pictures came out nice with the exception of the damn rain making its mark with annoying white dots.
Steadying the camera is also insanely hard.
One slight movement and you get fuzzy/blurry lights.

Nevertheless,
Merry Christmas.

underwater pictures

I should post these more often.
They're links to other people from my dive shop that have been taking pictures way longer than I have so they're actually good.

This round is from Bob Bailey:

"Went out yesterday afternoon with Lynne and Cheng ... and we found the
most incredible concentration of hooded nudis ever, just off the end of
the jetty in about 15 fsw. Simply amazing ... they covered just about
every available stem of eel grass ... literally thousands, if not tens
of thousands, of nudibranchs."

Here's two more rounds from a guy named Lamont.

And this last one is from the woman I wrote about earlier who makes calendars from her photos. Kathryn.

Irene

I got a frantic call last night asking, well, begging, that I got and let Irene's dog Otis out, as it had been many an hour since his last potty break, with Irene and her husband, Geoff, stuck in Oregon.

God, that must have been horrid.

So I get there, get in, get barked and snarled at, but after a while, everything's all good.
I let Otis out, I play with him, then I got inside and play with the birds.
Here's my tale...

Green Lake & Alki

The other day, I believe it was a Thursday, I made my way on down to Issaquah and made a down payment on my dry suit.
After that, I took 90 on over to Seattle, but still had some time to kill;
maybe a couple of hours.
So I had lunch at that Pho place on Aurora and 72nd, then drove on down to Green Lake.
I was just going to take a picture or two of the Space Needle, but then I just ended up taking a stoll around the whole lake.
The sunny side was fine, but it was a bit too cold for just a t-shirt and jeans on the shady side of the lake.
Nonetheless, it was still a nice walk.


Then on Wednesday, I finally got back to Alki since I took that DIR class.
After seeing Manuel's new place on Capitol Hill, we walked to Broadway and had lunch there at a place called Ali Baba's. We had some tasty beef/lamb gyros with Vitmos berry soda.
I'd go again.

Once I left there, I headed out to Alki, and once again I had some time to kill, so I took some pictures.
This time, however, I ventured over to the westside of Alki to get a better look at the Olympic mountains. It was a chilly, but clear day. When on the very tip of Alki, you could look to the west and see the Olympics, or look to the right and see the Cascades. If you found the right location, you could also look south and see Mount Rainier.

So I took a bunch of photos to kill time before Cory showed up.
After taking way too many pictures of the Olympics and the ferrys that passed by them,
I headed back to Cove 2 and found a harbour seal lounging on the lower pier using a boat to break the cold wind.
Scored a few pictures of that guy, then found Gimpy scoping the place for food.

Cory finally arrived and after donning all my gear, we made the plunge.
My hands were full. In my left hand, I had a light. In my right was my camera.
Apparently though, that's good for me because it keeps me from using my hands while scubaing.

So I took a ton of pictures. A lot of them unfortunately came out blurry.
I need to figure out how people take such beautiful underwater pictures.
I'm assuming it has something to do with a large amount of light that exudes from a very expensive flash attachment.
There's a diver that goes almost every wednesday night who takes pictures and has even used them for making calendars.
I've met her once before, but we never talked. I'll have to get on that.

Either way, here are mine.
I finally got a picture of what I set out for: a sea cucumber.
I also got a bonus with a baby octopus and jellyfish.
And again I remembered what else I want a picture of:
One of those halibut, like the one I saw on my previous dive with Cory before the class.

Oh. I guess I'll let you in on some of the stats:

Water temperature: 50 degrees F
Max depth: 114 feet (new record!)
Average depth: 62 feet
Time down: 41 minutes

I think that's all the vitals.
Man, there's some large fish and starfish down there.
5 foot long fish almost make me shit myself.
It's a good thing we're under so much pressure 100 feet down...

Can't wait til next wednesday...
I may have my drysuit!

weekend

finally a mother fucking weekend... so to speak.
haven't had two days off in a row since i asked for that weekend off so i could learn to dive.
but i was busy that whole time. before that... i can't even remember.
at least a few months.

so what am i doing with it now? wasting it.
well. i guess i could find a few things to do.
tomorrow i'm pretty booked: lunch and diving.
good times.

speaking of, i was talking to a guy at the pool who just came back from a caribbean cruise.
he says its the best diving he's ever done (and the man's been to the Great Barrier Reef.
he said the viz was as good underwater as it was on land.
he went to cozumel (off the yucatan penninsula) and the grand caymans.
i think he enjoyed the latter better.

but goddamn. this just makes me want to get out to warm water.
he says cold vs warm are like two different sports, and if you don't treat them like that, then you'll never want to go back to coldwater diving.
he wore a wetsuit one time and went "naked" the other.

goddamn. i need to get my ass down to mexico.
i guess the way to go is to bring all your gear down except your weights and tanks (the heaviest of the gear) and just rent that down there
(plus, i'm sure airplanes don't enjoy the idea of highly pressurized tanks onboard).

oh, but did i mention how next week is going to be hell?
this is why no one in retail can really enjoy the holidays:
i'm going to be working 6 days out of the week, 40+ hrs at fred's.
that's not to mention the at least 10 hours that i have to work at the pool (thankfully they're closed on friday).

so needless to say, 50+ hours will make for a happy week.
all it does is spawn the want for the holidays to be over.
hurray for my life.

oh, but yes!
i get to go diving tomorrow, and hopefully for the last time in a wet suit.
before xmas i should have a new drysuit. yay for me.
funness factor of cold diving will exponentially increase.
i'll probably even be able to last for multiple dives.
(but that will also depend on getting a new light.)

Bling

I talk to this guy at the pool often.
He's a landscaper by profession and very much an intellectual.
He went to some small college over on the east coast and majored in geology.
We have some really intense discussions about the world, etc.

Last week he offered a job to me. 6 hours of work, $120 dollars when completed.
I'm down. $20/hr?!!? I'm definitely on it!

So i show up on Tuesday at the Inglemoor Golf Club at 9. No one's there.
crap. am i at the right place? I call Ted, the guy who hooked me up.
Oh, they're getting all the equipment together. Fine.
9:30 rolls around and so does the crew. Ted plus 5 more for a total of 7.
So we all grab a fatty gas-powered hedge trimmer and start hacking.
noon rolls around and the call is made for lunch. it just so happened that we were finished with the job except to pick up a few scraps.
we chow down some dominos. 4 medium pizzas between the 7 of us.
good stuff. free food.
when we've had our break, we go back and do that little bit of clean up.

everything is said and done at about a quarter past 1.
time to pay up!
John, the guy in charge pulls out a fat wad of $50's.
he mutters some math off kind of under his breath and hands me 3 $50's.
fine by me!
i just scored $150 dollars for under 4 hours of work that happened to come out to be $40/hr.
yeah. i can handle that.
today i'm slightly sore in my forearms and near my hip from where i rested the hedge trimmer as i swiveled it back and forth to whack the crap out of those trees and shrubs.
today i had to pull out a thorn or two from the berry bushes that got stuck in my hands, but all in all, i think for the wear and tear, it was totally worth it.

take a look again at a map of the area, you can see where we worked.
we hacked down everything outside of that loop on the water with the dock sticking off of it.
and inside the loop, we did that northern area that doesn't look like a lawn.
in my pictures you can see the tennis courts, and west of there where the geese were.
to the north there's the island and the Sammamish slough.
to the south there's the country club.
to the east are the condos we made a view for.

so now i'm that much closer to my dry suit.
i'm going tomorrow to put a down payment on the bastard.
oh yeah, i'll be divin in style...

SHA & work

So it's official. I signed up for the SHA conference, I have a plane ticket down and back, and I've reserved a room in Sacramento.
I asked for the time off, and since it's not in December and I asked over a month in advance, I think I'm good to go.
Now I just wait. Then I pack the night before.

As for work, I would have had Tuesday off, but I'm also looking to buy a dry suit, so I offered to whore myself out to a guy I know at the pool.
He's paying $20/hr to hack the crap out of some cattails and dogwood that are pretty much along the waterfront by the Inglewood Golf Course at the top of Lake Washington.

(side note: Manuel and I did our one snork up that Tracy Owen Park where we were caught tresspassing on the gravel barge 1/4 mile from shore. $66 of fun came from that adventure.)

This much closer to a dry suit!
My warm body will thank me.

SHA again

So I made flight and hotel reservations to Sacramento.
And a bagillion dollars later, I still have to register and pay for the actual conference.
Well, at least I'll have some time in Sacramento if i don't get to go to the conference.
I applied for membership to SHA, but I had to do it via snail mail.
That means that I have to be a member when I register, but I don't have a login name as of now.
So I have to wait to get all that info, but hopefully it's before December 15th, cuz after that date, the prices increase.

Oh, and I still have to ask for it off from work. It will effect both jobs.
FM won't be too bad. I need the later half of Wednesday through Saturday off.
As for the pool, I need two shifts covered, which is actually 4, cuz i'm the only crazy one that works 6.5 hrs in one sitting without actually going crazy. So I need Thursday and Friday covered.
the hard part is that there's only 3 other lifeguards to confer with. and none of them like working Friday night.
Maybe I'll just go over their heads and let the boss deal with it. Although I really don't like doing that.
Either way, I'm going to fucking Sacramento.
Fire me if you have the balls.