Does tomorrow really have to be Monday?? I have had a string of really great weekends this term (despite how annoying and less than fun many of the weeks have been). Lots of diving coupled with some solid studying and this weekend was no exception!
Yesterday afternoon I visited Flamingo Bay for a nice dive. I've marked down as having been there before but it didn't look familiar to me. What a beautiful reef! The corals there are exquisite and it is full of life. So many Christmas tree worms and shrimp! The thermoclines in the area were pretty impressive - we enter a couple of pretty chilly locations! Okay, I say chilly but my computer was reading 85 degrees, so maybe I'm just that much of a wimp. I'm not convinced though, because it was ready 86 degrees most of the time and it certainly didn't feel like it just got one degree colder. It said the same stuff today; I am skeptical! We snorkeled at the sculpture park for a little while afterwards and I did a little bit of free diving to get some pictures of the statues.
This morning I went back up to the Marine Protected Area to dive Flamingo Bay and then the sculpture park/Buccaneer wreck/grand mal wall. This is such a beautiful part of Grenada, I am so glad we have protections in place to help keep it that way. During my dives I found a kite, some fishing line and a hook, a large rusty nail, a KFC cup, and a beaded necklace. Not exactly the kind of things you want to see on such beautiful reefs! Makes me think of turtles accidentally ingesting stuff and dying (but they certainly aren't the only ones that accidentally eat rubbish lying around under water). Luckily my BCD has nice big pockets so I collected the stuff for later land disposal. Yay for doing good deeds :) Kind of hard to turn it down though when you're diving with a company with the word "eco" in the name!
Both dives were gorgeous overall and my air consumption was better than the dive master with us : D. I enjoyed rubbing it in his face a little! That's what he gets for forgetting my name! I dropped 2lbs off my weight belt this weekend. I had kind of forgotten that I was going to need to re-evaluate the amount of weight I carry after a couple of weeks of school (combination of getting used to diving again and losing weight because I never eat here - I am so tired of eating the same things!!). Last week when I did a dive I paid attention to how much air I needed to add to my BCD on the bottom to achieve neutral buoyancy (it was a lot) and then how much I dumped throughout the dive (very little). Both a sure signs you are over weighted! Regardless, I feel much better diving with 2lbs fewer. It's amazing what a difference it can make! I don't feel as much drag and I definitely think it helped contribute to my excellent air consumption. It's a pretty great dive when you're down for 50 minutes and only breathe half a tank! Part of that's being female (smaller lungs), but a lot of it has to do with controlling breathing well and not over exerting yourself (in other words being lazy).
I've been diving so much lately that I'm actually starting to develop blisters and ulcers on my ankles from my fins! The first one hurt a lot when it started, but now I barely notice it. Is that a bad sign? I have this large ulcer on my ankle that I don't notice when it rubs?? Poor nerves haha. Guess we'll see if it heals some over midterms! It's amazing to me just how fragile skin becomes when it is soaking wet and supersaturated. This is largely what contributes to all the scrapes and cuts I come back with after being on the dive boat! That thing is dangerous! No not really, these are always really minor little wounds.
I think my next task to "conquer" will be my mask issues. I really love the ocean, and I long for the ability to just jump into water without worry. I haven't really jumped into any body of water since I was little, it's just too risky. Just thinking about flooding my mask makes me feel panicky. My heart rate elevates, my breathing becomes irregular, and this is all just me thinking about the task! I kind of doubt I'll ever like getting my face wet, but I'd at least like to be a little less afraid of it. After I first got certified, I spent my whole dives thinking about 2 things: breathing evenly and slowly, and making sure my face was protected at all times. I focus mainly on breathing these days, but you'd better believe that I'm conscientious about where my mask is when I roll into the water and when there are people around me. Can't have anyone accidentally kicking it off my face! It really scares me to wonder how I'd react to that. I had a small leak in the seal against my face yesterday and as I tinkered with the placement I had to remind myself over and over to breathe and that it was just water!! Not cool! The sneaky thing is, I've set a small list of required "steps" that must be in place in order for me to practice. Only at the end of a dive, only if Christie is present, only if the dive conditions are good enough. Not an extensive list, but it does have to be 100% and so far since I've been thinking about practicing this skill (4 dives), those three things haven't been met. Oh darn!
In addition to all of this diving, I did plenty of studying this weekend. I made some good progress on diagnostic imaging and large animal surgery, two of my "harder" courses. My first exam is this Friday - theriogenology. No one really knows what the heck is going to be on that exam. We know to studying the first visiting professor's notes and the current visiting professors notes, but what the heck did he cover in his 4 lectures?? Not a clue (and yes I was there in class for all of them). I think I'd have a better chance of understanding his material if it was written backwards in German.
I also made some delicious and long overdue zucchini bread this weekend too. Grenada being Grenada (and not very reliable in the grocery department), I decided to plan for three different types of bread and hoped that I'd be able to get all the ingredients for one. In order of my interest, I chose zucchini bread, banana bread, and pumpkin bread. Lucky for me, they actually had all the ingredients, but I was pretty set on zucchini bread so I stuck with my original plan. I really had no idea whether I could get zucchini in Grenada (I'm pretty excited they sell it here!). I recognized the zucchini before reading the label - they call it green squash (zucchini) here. As I was buying the ingredients, I decided hey why not make a double batch and share lots! As it turns out, I am not the only zucchini bread lover and my neighbors and friends enjoyed the benefits of my baking. I was a little bit surprised by how many people had heard of zucchini bread before and like it. I really had no idea it was so popular! In my sharing though, I did manage to find one person who had never heard of it before (turns out she likes it a lot haha). The only weird thing that happened with a couple of the loaves was that the very bottom was a little bit gelatinous and tasted like buttered eggs. I think some of the egg settled out while I was filling all the pans causing it to cook slightly funny! Lesson learned!
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