beautiful misery

We decided that it would be smarter not to schedule dives for the day we arrived in El Nido, because jet lag is a jerk.

So we scheduled four of them for the next day. (I said smartER, not smart.)

I had a grand idea a few days before we left on our trip, and I had my doctor call in a prescription for the motion sickness patch. This thing had some downsides - it didn't completely get rid of my motion sickness, you can't drink on it, and it makes you sleepy, to start - but it worked pretty well the first couple of days.

So we hopped into the water and dove, three dives. And then we went back to the dive shop, where I took the night diving class, and we went back out and dove again.

I'm not going to lie, I was exhausted. I was jet lagged and dopey from the patch and, actually, diving at night is a little scary. It's really, really dark down under water.

Fortunately, we had the next day to zipline from one island to another and lay on the beach.

That night we went diving again, again in the dark, but this time with fluorescent lighting. I'm not sure that I would have done this dive if I'd known what a fluo dive meant. I thought it meant phosphorescence, but no. 

What it meant was that we wore amber lenses over our masks, and we held blue lights, and the only thing we could see at any given moment was the living thing at which we were directly shining the blue lights, which then started fluorescing, and it was extremely claustrophobic, and I don't even get claustrophobic. It was the most claustrophobic I've ever been. 

During our safety stop at 15 feet, near the end of the dive, the dive master suddenly grabbed me and pulled me toward the surface, and on the way up he grabbed J. and pulled him up, too, and it turns out that we were surrounded by tiny, lovely, blue-fluorescing jellyfish that would hurt if they touched you, and a bigger one had been right where I was going but I didn't see it.

This was kind of the story of the rest of our dives: So many pretty, dangerous jellyfish. One of our dive masters got stung (by a little one, thank goodness). I got massively motion sick, because I managed to put the second motion sickness patch on wrong so it wasn't in full contact with my skin, and then when I moved it, I managed to get some of it in my eye, so my eye dilated way too much (a known side effect) and things were blurry up close. Two people got separated from the group on one dive, and I mistakenly followed the instructor when he went to look for them instead of staying with J., who was my buddy. The instructor and I got back to J. and the group, but we had to surface early to find the missing pair. (They'd gotten lost taking photos.) We had a strong current on one dive. The whole boat got so motion sick in the large swell that I had to stand at the front staring forward while other people lay in agony inside the boat. I got a little panicky about my breathing, even though I've loved diving since the first time I went under water. 

I make it sound miserable, and sometimes it was, because diving can be, with the wetsuits and the ocean swell, but then I would look out at the gorgeous green water with the gorgeous green rocks standing up out of it, and I wanted to stay forever. 

pre-Thanksgivinging

I like Thanksgiving a lot. It might be my favorite holiday. No presents to buy, no decorating to do, just lots of delicious food. This year, though, J. and I are getting on a plane on Thanksgiving morning to go scuba diving in the Philippines. 

I've known that we would miss Thanksgiving for many months, ever since January when I got all excited about scuba diving and started looking at the best dive spots in the world and then checking kayak for flights costs to those spots. Fiji was $1000, which seemed pretty good. But Manila was $630 if we left on Thanksgiving Day, so we bought flights without stopping to think about it. 

I'm excited about this trip. I have a whole new regulator/dive computer/octopus set, thanks to J. thinking ahead on my birthday and a quick trip to my favorite dive shop. (My own! My very own regulator and dive computer!) We have eight dives scheduled, including my first two night dives. (I also bought a dive light at the dive shop.) The island looks stunning. 

I also started feeling a little sad about not getting to have Thanksgiving dinner. Wherefore the pies?

So I managed to talk J. into having a pie and game night last night. He also wanted mashed potatoes, so we made those. And corn pudding and burgers and brats. Because what says Thanksgiving like burgers and brats? 

We invited people over, and we did the cooking and baking, and we ate the delicious things. And now we have leftovers until we get on the plane. I just had a veggie burger with a side of mashed potatoes and corn pudding. 

I'd call that winning Thanksgiving.

I do not yoga (I do Mexico)

I do not yoga, as we know, but somehow I found myself signed up for a yoga retreat in Mexico.

Re. Mexico: I also never really had Mexico on my radar for travel purposes. It's so close to the States, and so many people go on vacation there, and I tend to want to go further afield for my adventures, so I wrote it off. I mean, I figured I would end up there someday, because it's next door, but it wasn't on the list of places to go because, well, it's close.

I loved Mexico. We stayed at a little resort at one end of a beach that had a park in the middle and a town on the other end, where foreign tourists sat drinking margaritas at the beachside bars and Mexican families played in the surf. 

"I forgot how much I love riding in the back seat of a crappy taxi through a new country while the driver plays pop music way too loud," I texted T. 

The days were warm and clear, except when it poured down tropical rain. 

J. and I played in the Pacific Ocean waves like kids. The only person who played in the waves as much as we did was 12 years old. We skipped yoga class to jump over and through waves. The other J., the 12 year old, taught us to angle into the waves so that we launched out the other side like dolphins leaping above the water, and we compared how successful our launches were after nearly every wave. 

We went scuba diving along the edge of a rocky island, with battered gear and three older people, two of whom flailed even more than I do, beginner that I am. On the first dive, I bit off the edge of my mouthpiece and had to hold the regulator in my mouth with my hand. My depth gauge didn't work. On the second dive, my mask kept fogging up. But M., my diving instructor, taught us to deal with those eventualities, and I was fine. 

We saw a cornetfish lingering motionless in the water, and schools of thousands of fish swam between us and the light. We swam down through a tunnel in the rock. 

On the way out to diving, we saw a whale breach, and on the boat ride back, dolphins swam under the  boat. 

There was yoga. We did yoga from 7-9 am and from 4:30 to 6 pm. 

"Set your intention for the week," said the instructor peacefully the first day.

"My intention is not to kill anyone while doing yoga this week," I thought to myself. 

I managed that just fine the first day or two, so by day three I thought I was ready for more. I upgraded my intention.

"Don't hate everyone while doing yoga," I thought. That one didn't work - halfway through the class, I wanted to cry or quit - so I went back to resolving not to kill anyone. Turns out I'm pretty okay at not killing anyone while doing yoga. I am less okay at not hating the world while doing yoga. 

I survived six days of yoga, although, to be honest, I was down to one class per day for the last three days. 3.5 hours of yoga a day is a little excessive for a beginner. I did a shoulder-stand thing, though. (My neck has been bothering me, so no attempts at a headstand.) J. did headstands galore. 

Between yoga and eating and playing on the beach and taking a few naps (they made me get up at 6:15 am. On vacation. There were naps), a week flew by.

I quite like Mexico. I'd like to go back. 

I don't know about the yoga, though. Maybe. I've gone to a couple of classes since I've been back. (Shhhhhhh. Don't tell anyone.)

certified

I had lofty goals of blogging at least once a week this year. That was my plan. Not a resolution, exactly, just a plan. 

(My other plan for the year, signing up for and using digit, is thus far a success. I have finally begun to train digit on the fact that I want it to save more than $0.17 at a time by forcing it to save $10 or $100 at a time. If you want to try digit, by the way, let me know. I have a referral code. It is addicting.)

So anyway, blogging. I was going to do it. I was going to do it regularly.

Then I realized that if I want to scuba dive in Mexico at the end of February, I should get certified now. I figured this out the day before the first of five Tuesday night classes that culminated in open water dives last weekend. This means that I had class from 6:30 - 10:30 every Tuesday night, and also homework. 

I loved, loved, loved the scuba classes. I got all excited every week when I knew that I was going to get to go underwater that night. 

On the first pool night (which was actually the second class, because our first pool night got canceled due to the apocalypse snow), we had to swim 400 yards. I started off slow, because 8 laps is a lot of laps. By my return on the first lap, I had switched to the time-honored swim stroke of the women in my family: the side stroke. By the third lap, I was way out ahead of the other two students. Tortoise and hare, people. It pays to be the tortoise.

On the second pool night, we had to take off our masks and sit underwater without them for a minute, then put them back on. People panic over this, mostly because you just about have to keep your eyes closed lest the chlorine destroy them. It didn't bother me at all. I knelt sightless underwater for a minute, just enjoying the feeling of being underwater. I knew that the regulator wasn't going to fail me - I could breathe - and I knew that the surface was up there if I needed it. (I would worry if I were in 50 feet of water without my buddy, but this was not that situation.)

At the end of the class, we drove up to Other PNW State for the open water sessions. J. came along, because he's a diver, and the dive shop said there are usually other people up there diving.

To dive in 36 degree water, you need a serious wetsuit. Actually, you need more than just a wetsuit. You need a 7mm farmer john (a sleeveless wetsuit) covered by a 7 mm shorts/long-sleeve combo. You also need 5mm gloves, hood, and boots. And you will still be cold just about every second you aren't moving. (For comparison, in Honduras I dove in a 3mm shortie - shorts and short sleeves.) 

It's really pretty down there. The sea anemones stand a foot or two off the ground, orange and white, faces turned into the current. There are tiny jellyfish the size of a baby's cupped hand floating through the water, opening and closing slowly. Schools of fish swim between you and the sky.

By Saturday night, after three dives and a lot of standing around in and out of the water, I was chilled through. There was no reprieve out of the water, with the wind blowing on the wet neoprene, except the few minutes when we could stand directly in front of the propane heater. Sitting in the hot tub and taking a hot shower in the evening did not raise my body temperature back to normal. I went to bed still cold. 

I guess it probably didn't help that I was in the worst days of a cold. I felt like I'd been hit by a truck - and that was before I doped myself up with Sudafed and Afrin and ibuprofen to get my congestion to the point where my ears would not explode with the underwater pressure, and then jumped into freezing water.

Sunday morning before the final dive, standing out in the 33 degree air in a still-wet wetsuit, my hands were so cold they burned. J. had to run inside and get a bottle of hot water to pour into my gloves before I could move them enough to get my gear on. My instructor's regulator was frozen, spewing air in free flow when he tested it. 

When we dove, I had an extra 3 lb weight on one side of my BCD (the diving vest) to make up for the different air tank I was using, so I kept tipping to one side. I couldn't get warm. The water was so murky that I just followed the orange fins of the instructor. All I could think was, "Is this over yet?" I'm usually pretty good with air, but I tore through it trying to stay warm and not give up. 

And then we were out of the water, and we were certified, and I took another hot shower and put on layers of clothes and slept in the car most of the way home. 

So I'm good to dive in Mexico next week. I'm guessing that will be a little more pleasant than the frigid waters of the sound.