Well this morning I rented a car and headed to a local dive shop in Kentucky, it’s just the other side of the river you know. The reason I went there is because I am going to be taking a dry suit class on Saturday and I needed to go in to try the suit on and get in the pool and make sure it fit.
For those of you who don’t know what a dry suit is I guess I had better start with a wet suit which is probably more widely known. A wet suit is generally made of neoprene rubber and what it does is allow a small portion of water in between the suit and your skin. Your body heat quickly warms up this small portion of water and then the Neoprene insulates that little bit of water from the larger body that you are diving or swimming in. This is great for most diving and can even be used in colder water but the colder the water, even with this insulation, you still get cold. Water has a greater heat capacity than air does so water absorbs the heat from your body 25 times faster than air. So unless you are diving in 93 degree water or warmer you still lose body heat to the point that eventually you will get cold and need to get out of the water.
I have dove in a two piece 7mm thick wetsuit while I was in Vancouver a couple of years ago. The two pieces means that on my chest there is actually 14mm of insulating neoprene rubber keeping me warm. My friend was diving in a dry suit. Well the water temperature for those two dives was a nipple freezing 47F or 8C. After the first dive I was literally blue and my friend was shocked that I was going back into the water. The reason my friend was shocked was because he was diving in a dry suit and was warm and toasty.
What a dry suit does differently than a wet suit, as the name implies, is that it keeps you dry. It is usually a shell of some sort that looks like a giant one piece jump suit with feet that has a big zipper and seals at the neck and wrists. It is the seals at the neck and wrists and the big waterproof zipper that keeps all of th water out and keeps you dry. As I said earlier air transmits heat slower than water so by insulating yourself with air you can stay warm longer, plus you can wear thermal underwear which allows you to stay down even longer.
So I went to this dive shop in order to try and see if one of the rental suits would fit me and to get in one before diving in a Quary for the first time. The first forray into the drysuit was interesting. Sticking your hands through the wrist seals is difficult and pulls a lot of your arm hair. The neck seal is just wierd because there is something tight around your neck. Add all of this to the fact that you are standing in a warm humid room and I think I was getting more wet inside of the suit than if I was wearing a wetsuit and in the water. Once I did get into the water I was much more comfortable. On my first submersion I felt a little bit of a leak down the front of my chest where water was getting in. I came up, we readjusted things and I went back down and again more water down the chest. By now the store owner had stopped in and asked me to hold on for a second while he went and got something.
Basically what he went and got was a tube of neoprene that I was to put over my head and onto my kneck to help the suit seal there. Well the first time on it came off almost immediately because I thought it was too tight and was going asphixiate. After calming down for a second the owner put the tube on, and his neck was definitely larger than mine, and he said it was okay. So I took a deep breath and calmly put it back on and let him adjust everything for me and in the end it wasn’t so bad once it was adjusted. Normally you don’t need this kind of thing but because it is a rental suit they have to adjust the seals to fit a larger group of people than if I was to own the suit myself. I went down again and this time it was just fine.
So now I have a scuba tank, a dry suit and thermal underwear in my rental car just waiting to go diving on this coming Saturday without getting the majority of my body wet. My head, face and hands will still get wet but that is manageable. I’ll let you all know how it goes on Saturday.
I hope you all were able to follow this…
Many months ago (before my break in guitar lessons), my teacher gave me a CD of songs to play along with. We started with Sheryl Crow’s ‘If It Makes You Happy’ because it is exceedingly simple. Well at my lesson yesterday, I managed to make it all the way through it along with the music. I probably botched about 1/4 of the song, but I was impressed and enthused by the progress. So to those of you who gave me lessons last Christmas, they’re starting to pay off!
As an aside, M absolutely LOVES playing my guitar. If I leave it out, she runs to it directly and starts trying to play it. She loves it. I see a guitar in her future!
So I’m working today without my DVD collection, so I have the TV on for background noise instead of my DVDs. Well, there was a limited selection of shows, so I threw on Jerry Springer (which I last watched in Hikes school). Well the show has changed quite a bit, let me tell you. They now have a sound effects guy who just does sound effects (like ringing a boxing bell when people are fighting), and they have this time on the show when people get to comment on the guests and sling insults and mild racial slurs. Well, apparently, it is also now a tradition on the show for women in the crowd to say they have a question, and then they just flash. The lift up their shirts, and dance around, and Jerry moves on to the next question.
WHAT THE DEUCE IS GOING ON?!? Gays can’t marry, but Jerry Springer gets a show on network television? Actually, one of the girls who flashed gave a little speech about how everyone should be allowed to marry- gay, straight, other, then she flashed too! This went over so well, the sound effect guy put on the national anthem while the girl talked about how the country was founded on gay rights. The funny part here isn’t so much that they played the anthem while this woman ranted, it is that they panned around the audience and people were completely oblivious to the words to the anthem. One guy just stood there with his mouth open and his hand on his heart. He was pretending to sing because he didn’t know the words!
Again, what the deuce? I guess that’s what I get for thinking turning on Jerry wouldn’t be that bad. Maybe all the flashers go to Jerry because New Orleans is still messed up? I dunno.
I think it is generally accepted that in most parents life’s, there comes a time when their child’s physical strength and prowess exceeds their own. Normally, this happens when the child is approaching adulthood, and there is no associated shame. It is the natural order, after all. But what about when your child is a girl? For a father, perhaps, this transition of strength takes place later in life, maybe much later. So what am I to think when my daughter, M, has already reached this point, and in fact, seems to have begun whooping up on me.
No joke- right now I have a scar on my face from when she beat me up last night. And this morning I was holding her in the kitchen when I was inexplicably pulled backwards, only to realize that she’d grabbed the refrigerator handle and had managed to haul me around according to her own designs.
So here’s my dilemma: Should I be proud, or embarrassed and head for the gym? Currently, I’m thinking I’ll just be proud because I _hate_ working out. Next time you see me, though, if I have a black eye and I’m missing a tooth, check M’s knuckles for bruises.
So I was approached by some friends today, actually happened to be after I read Andrew’s earlier post, and neither of them are from this country. One is from Hungary, Kata, and the other from China, Peiuy, and they asked me “Great Paul (don’t ask) which movie should we go see tonight?” I pondered for a second and then replied “Why you should go see Little Miss Sunshine my brother loved it”. Quidam ended and I went to my departmental dinner and had a nice time. I didn’t stay too late because I was getting tired and wanted to get to be early. As it turns out as I entered the lobby of the hotel my two friends, Kata and Peiuy, were sitting on the foyer couch. I asked them if they had gone yet and as it turned out they were waiting for the taxi cab to take them to the movie. I said my goodbye to a friend from the dinner with whom I had walked home with and said okay let’s go.
So after a few minutes of waiting for the cab, fortunately for me it was running late, we all piled into the cab and this nice woman cab driver drove us to the Theatre.
A little History is in order: my brotherAndrew has some eclectic, to say the least, movie tastes and I admit that I was now a little concerned to be going with my friends whom I reccomened this movie to. Sometimes Andrew’s movies can be a little out there but not wanting to let my friends see the fear in my face I put on my best poker face, not that good, played along and went with it.
The movie starts and it get going and it’s going okay. A couple of funny laughs here and there and that is about all I’m going to say about the movie except to say:
GO SEE THIS MOVIE
Trust Andrew and I on this one, be patient and wait for it. My head hurts, my stomach hurts and we laughed the entire way home in the cab and the driver said she is going to see it tomorrow just from how much we were laughing and we didn’t tell her anything about the movie.
GO SEE THIS MOVIE!!!!! you won’t be disappointed.
Thanks Andrew for the movie reccomendation
The saying goes, ‘They don’t make ‘em like they used to’, and when it comes to refrigerator magnets, they’re right. We have all these cute little picture frame magnets on our fridge (why is there a d in ‘fridge’?) with pictures of family and friends. They work just great for holding the pictures and sticking to the fridge, but heaven forbid you should try to stick a piece of paper behind them because they’ll fall faster than a dancing granny on America’s Funniest Home Videos.
So what’s a person to do? Well, I went to Home Depot, asked for directions, and ended up picking up some magnets that will literally destroy each other if you let them bang together. Now stuff on my fridge stays on my fridge, and all is once again right with the world. (I actually show visitors the magnets)
Oh my freaking gawd. Go see this movie right now. I honestly don’t know if I’ve ever laughed so hard at a movie in my life. If you know me, you’ll feel sorry for Kelly for being in the same theater with me. Beyond tears, beyond out of breath, beyond stomping on the floor, I swear, I thought I was going to laugh up a lung. I have a headache and my chest hurts and the movie ended over an hour ago.
Ok, so seriously, GO SEE THE MOVIE. If you can, go now. If you’re working, take a break. Hell, if you are reading this, you’re not doing anything that important, right? Check out the trailer, if you like, at the movie site.
Well, yeah, go see it. Do it now. Now. NOWWW. Ashley, get in the bronco!
For those of you who aren’t geek enough to understand a couple of the words in the last post by Andrew about M, here is a link that should help you out Haxor.
Also I have put some new pictures on my website from my trip to Chicago, Las Vegas and a baseball game I attended here in Cincinnati.
Ciao
My 12 month old daughter seems to have been born with l33t haxor skills, no joke. Every now and then, we’ll let her play with some gadget (a telephone, a computer, a cell phone), and she inevitably gets it to work. It is simply amazing. You might be asking, why wouldn’t she get it to work. Well, not only will she be able to place a call or type something into an application, she’ll manage to do it in a way that is completely foreign to myself or my wife. She’s not just using the tool, she’s hacking it!
For example, I was letting her type into my gmail account intending to put some text in about how she’d typed the garble, but before I knew it, she managed not only to type, but to send a message using nothing but keys. To this day, I can’t replicate the feat. As far as I know, she used some tiny person tech-fu magic to get it done. Similarly, she seems to be able to call up phone numbers on our phones that don’t appear to reside in any simple menu option. Just the other day, she was playing with the phone and I heard a voice come from it (at that point she was sitting on it!). Apparently she’d found my cousin’s number and dialed it while sitting on it. She also manages to turn on advanced, un-used features on our home cordless phones. She’ll be cutely pressing buttons, eating the antenna, and next thing I know, the thing is telling her the date and time and that there are no messages. The answering machine function isn’t even on!
These are just some examples, but look for more amazing feats in the future as she expands her capabilities and stretches her apparently in-born technical prowess. Also, if you someday get a call from me and all you hear is muffled talking or what sounds like a little butt sitting on a phone, just start saying hello to M, cause it is her.
I’m not sure how I found this particular page, it started with the Google Mail RSS ‘Web Clips’, and ended at this page:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~egbg/counterscript.html
It is a site that gives you a script to follow when a telemarketer calls you. As the page points out, the telemarketers have a script, so arm yourself with similar weapons. Myself, I typically just say, ‘I’m not interested, thank you. Have a good {day, night}.’ If they don’t start saying good-bye at that point, I hang up. Not very interesting, I know, but it works for me. If you’re up for it though, try out this alternative script and let me know how it goes!