Open Water Diver

I take it back. I take it ALL back. This Sunday we did our last day of open water diving on a boat called the Sand Dollar. This time we were scheduled to leave at 6am... unfortunately I had a birthday party to attend the night before so I didn't get in bed until around 1:30 and so, come 4:30 when my alarm went off (the dock was an hour away), I was about ready to quit the sport altogether. But I dragged my ass out of bed and rolled up around 5:45. We checked in and then they told us to go on board, claim a bunk, and meet in the galley for breakfast at 6:15 - WHAT?! A bunk?! Breakfast?! A half hour later, full of eggs and toast, I was drifting off to sleep in my BUNK and loving life. We were still heading out to Catalina it just turned out that this boat was a bit slower so the trip was going to take 2:30 to 3 hrs. I got a solid 2 hours of sleep and then woke up as we pulled into our dive site. After our first dive they fed us lunch (chili), after our second dive we got a snack (chicken wings) and after our final dive we packed up, dried off and then ate as much salad, spaghetti and garlic bread as we could handle while watching Sunday night football on a big flatscreen while we motored home. It was awesome. I am now an official open water diver and I will be working on my advanced certification so that I can sign up for a lobster diving trip on the Sand Dollar ;)

Pool Diving

     This is my second weekend of dive class. Today, Saturday, we spent the morning at the Culver City community center pool doing our last skills labs (which included maintaing neutral buoyancy, which is all the pictures of us floating cross-legged). Tony, our instructor, is wearing the yellow fins... Carolyn and Abby are there and then I am the one with 1) black fins 2) the white nike watch 3) my yellow regulator tucked up into my BCD strap 4) brown hair (Abby's is red, Carolyn's is black).
     I was having difficulty paying attention to Tony's demonstrations this morning not only because I brought my camera, but because during our dive class there was a water aerobics class going on in the shallow end of the pool and we could hear the music underwater. I was doing my very best to ignore it but when Gloria Estefan's 'Conga' came on my shoulders started shimmying of their own accord... here is a picture of the aerobics class (trust me when I say it was far more funny/mesmerizing to be watching them in action):
Tomorrow we head back out to Catalina for three more open water dives.

Sing Along Sound of Music

Ashley, Kayla, every child in L.A., every gay man in L.A. and I went to Hollywood Bowl last night for the sold out showing of the Sing Along Sound of Music! Ashley had never seen the Sound of Music (which made the costume contest beforehand quite confusing) and I don't think Kayla knew what she had agreed to come to, but by the end of the night they were belting out the songs with the rest of us... my favorite part of the show was during 'Edelweiss' when everyone pulled out their cellphones and held them up like lighters at a concert, except it was cooler than lighters because of all the different colors! Ashley had downloaded an image of a bic lighter onto her iphone which you can see right at the beginning of the video:
During the costume contest/parade before the show they had the original Liesl von Trapp come up on stage (she is the girl who is 'sixteen, going on seventeen')... only in Hollywood.

Dancing With The Stars Season 7

Season 7 starts next Monday Sept. 22nd with a three night premiere event and I admit it... I'M EXCITED! So excited in fact that Ashley, AP and I will be attending the first results show on Wednesday the 24th! I put my name on the ticket waiting list last season and this is the first time I've been emailed with a ticket offer (guess I'm no the only one watching). Get excited, and watch for me on TV ;)

for Katie

Piper Palin grooming little brother Trig
not to be outdone by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler as Palin and Clinton

Drs. Cove, Catalina Island

This past weekend and next weekend my life is being consumed by a PADI scuba certification class. Actually, before these weekends even arrived I had to spend about five hours studying a book on gear, rules and regulations and watching instructional videos. Now for these two weeks we spend Saturdays in class for the first half of the day reviewing skills and equipment (so we can pass our written exam at the end of the course) and then the second half of the day in a pool, practicing the skills and using the equipment that we have just reviewed. Sundays are the fun part, we spend both Sundays completing our open water training dives! My class started out with 5 students and two instructors. Our instructor's names are Tony (the guy with the pony tail and the tye dye shirt) and V (she won't tell us what it stands for, she is from Australia and she is training to be a divemaster). We had one male student, Sam who got kicked out as soon as we got to the pool and had to tread water for 10 minutes - he apparently didn't think swimming was an important skill for scuba diving. Of the four of us left, one lady (who had clearly been coerced into signing up by her husband) decided that scuba was "too cold and too wet" after our pool dive so she didn't show up at the boat Sunday morning. The three of us who did were me, a girl with red hair named Abby and an asian girl named Carolyn. I don't know how anyone invented scuba diving because it requires a huge amount of extremely heavy and extremely uncomfortable (at least on land) gear. After quite nearly reaching the point of total exhaustion just trying to get into my wetsuit, I was standing in line wearing my STEEL tank waiting for the divemaster to tell me it was my turn to jump in and thinking that there was at least a 50/50 chance that I would require immediate rescue as soon as I entered the water and proceeded to rocket to the bottom (somehow these thoughts hadn't occurred to me during the five hours we spent in 6-feet of pool water the day before). The next 15 minutes were a blur, one moment my shaking hands (whether shaking from nerves, or the strain of the tank cutting off all circulation I don't know) were fumbling with my fins and then my attention was completely consumed: inflate your BCD! hold your mask! hold your regulator! big step! look up! I didn't sink! this water is freezing! signal OK to the divemaster! try to pee in the suit! this water is freezing! switch to my snorkel! find my buddy! this water is freezing! try to pee in the suit! s.o.r.t.d. (signal, orient, regulator, time, descend)! equalize! descend! equalize! this water is freezing! try to pee in the suit! descend! equalize! Are you getting the picture? The next thing I know my knees are hitting the sand, we are thirty feet below the boat and everything is silent. As soon as Abby (by buddy) made it down we signaled OK to each other and waited for Tony, V and Carolyn. It turned out that Carolyn's hood was too tight so she and V went back to the boat. Abby and I followed Tony around for about half an hour during which I took about a million pictures and didn't look at my gauges once. Thank goodness Tony was in charge! It turns out that this was what they expected, that first dive was called our "exploration dive" and was meant to let us get used to the equipment and the environment and (in my case) to let us take a ridiculously large yet satisfying amount of pictures. Abby is wearing the red snorkel with the splash guard on top, my snorkel is black - unfortunately red is the first color that is filtered out as we descend so another clue is that my back-up regulator (the yellow one) is tucked up into the strap of my BCD and Abby's isn't. Tony has his big white instructor cards clipped to him. It was much more comfortable/relaxing once we got to the bottom... I didn't take my camera on the second dive because we had to do all these skills (buddy breathing, mask clearing, regulator recovery, etc) and I didn't want to get distracted. I had fun, although my favorite part of the trip was the sunset ride back (beer in hand) and I am hoping I will be a little less stressed next week :)

CT-ICU Beach Party

beach + bonfire + fireworks = pretty much the best evening of my life

ACLS

I took an Advanced Cardiac Life Support class over the past two days and one of the new developments in their protocol is called an intraosseous infusion which basically means that when there is an emergency and you need intravenous medication but we, for whatever reason, can't get an IV started we will now be doing this:
I wish our instructors cursed that much.

PBR

Kayla and I are on exact opposite schedules right now, I am working days and she is working nights which means that we pretty much never see each other, in fact I might have been convinced that I don't even have a roommate anymore until I came home from work today to find that Kayla had apparently gone grocery shopping, I'll let you guess what she got:

Gustav

I flew back to Tampa to spend Labor Day weekend with mom on Anna Maria Island. We got in late Friday night and were greeted with overcast skies and flooded streets on Saturday and Sunday care of Hurricane Gustav. This left plenty of time for sleeping, eating, biking, reading, scrabble and a jigsaw puzzle. It was nice to see some rain again (it hasn't rained yet in California since I moved!) and it helped keep the bugs at bay. Monday was beautiful so we got to the beach early and stayed as long as possible before packing up and heading home...