2009 has gotten off to a rocky start.

I’ve been sick for the last two weeks. A2 left (both the office and the country). And there are some major upheavals happening at work – not the “my job is in peril” kind of upheavals, but definitely the “my job will be stressful for a while” kind.

So it was a welcome bit of good news when I was invited to work on my favorite dive boat again.

I crewed for the first time last December, and I guess I didn’t embarrass myself too badly, because the captain made it sound like he’d ask me back.

And he did! I got to go out last Saturday – ironically, the charter was for Hollywood Divers, the shop I got my DM with and will hopefully get to work for once classes pick up again. We spent a gorgeous day out on the oil rigs. The nice thing about the rigs is that it’s almost as fun to stay topside as to dive, especially when it’s sunny and flat out like it was on Saturday, and the sea lions are all going crazy playing around the rigs.

Keeping an eye on the air fills:

For those of you who ask: “what do you do if you’re not diving?”, I give you a list of boat crew duties:

• Prepare paperwork for the divers, check certification cards and nag them to fill out forms
• Untie the boat (and tie back up at the end of the day). I’m having to learn a few knots, and the particular ways that the existing crew like things to be tied/stowed.
• Keep the snack bowls filled
• Be prepared to unplug the marine head. I haven’t had to do this yet, but I plan on thinking of it as another good learning opportunity when it inevitably happens.
• Fill tanks. This is actually kind of fun. The basic concepts are simple, but the exact details of which knobs to turn in what order and which gauges to watch requires more attention than you’d think.
• Help tech divers gear up – attach stage bottles under their arms if they can’t reach the clips, help them stand up from the bench, etc.
• Deal with anchoring the boat (and sometimes tying off the other end to a rock). This can actually be a workout. When diving at Catalina in Dec, the main crew guy (the poor man who’s stuck teaching me everything) would swim a line out to a rock and tie it off. At the end of the dive, he’d go out and untie it – and then I have to haul him in on that line as quickly as possible, before the boat drifts into anything. Hauling a fully-grown man through the water at high speed really puts your shoulder muscles to the test.
• If diving the oil rigs, throw a line to the divers to haul them away from the rigs for pickup. I sucked at this. So I practiced a bunch. Now I suck slightly less.
• Usher divers off the boat and hand down cameras or scooters as necessary.
• Help divers back ON to the boat (hand up cameras, stage bottles, scooters; pull off fins).
• While divers are under, stare at the surface of the water for a solid hour in case someone surfaces in a panic. I need to remember sunglasses next time.
• At the end of the day, wash the boat. So far I’ve only worked on “rinse days”, when we hose everything down with fresh water and also scrub the deck with dish soap (actually kind of fun in bare feet). Once or twice a month they do a full-scale cleaning, which I imagine is a little less fun.
• Keep an eye on divers in between dives in case anyone starts acting weird. By weird, I mean “having symptoms of decompression sickness.”

If everything goes well (ie, no rescues), it’s actually not that physically demanding a job – I’m getting  to spend a day out on the water, hanging out with a bunch of divers. It can be a little hard to watch them all jump in while I have to stay dry, but it helps to remind myself that what I earn can go towards my next dive!

Hopefully I’m learning fast enough to be useful; I would love to keep working with these guys.  It’s a wonderful boat with a terrific crew, and I’m extremely proud to have the opportunity to be part of it.

Hi!  How are you?

I’m still around.  Not much has changed in my life.  I’m still fat – but for the first time, I’m actually okay with being fat. (Well, maybe about 90% okay, but I’ll get there).

It’s interesting – once I really gave myself permission to be the size that I am, I started to realize just how much of my brainpower I’ve wasted over the years berating myself for being heavy, for not doing enough to be thin, or dreaming of all the ways life would be better once I got thin.  Finally giving myself a break has been a relief in a lot of ways.  (And, I admit, NOT a relief in other ways that aren’t really blog material.)

So here are my new year’s non-resolutions:

• Not step on the scale.  It’s just a number, and I don’t need to know it.  I know what size clothes I wear, and I know how I feel, and those are what matter.
• Not diet.  I will not count calories or attempt to restrict my food intake in any way.  I will try to incorporate more healthy foods into my diet and eat in more often, but with the goal of exactly that: eating healthier, not getting thinner.

Although I am nearly-ok with the fat thing, I’m less okay with having let myself get rather out of shape.  For a variety of stupid reasons I stopped my gym routine back in September.  But I eased back into it over the holidays, and was on the track at 6am this morning, and it felt great.

Once I get over the hump of adjusting my schedule to accommodate the workouts, I really do enjoy the excercise.  Plus it more than pays off in the diving department.  But again: if this does not make me thinner, so what?  It’ll make me healthier.  At this point in my life, I am ready to accept “fat but fit” instead of “a thin person who just needs a little help to come out.”

I will buy clothes that look good on me, not just clothes that make me look thinner.  I will not begrudge myself dessert when I feel like it (or vegetables when I feel like it).  I will be grateful for the body I have and the things I can do, instead of hating myself for not having the “willpower” to change it.

Those of you who are thinking “what the hell – she clearly needs to try harder to lose weight!”… see here, here, here.

And that’s pretty much all I have to say on the subject.  I promise future posts will be more about fun things like diving.

2009 will be good.