At 5:01pm today, I got the slightly unwelcome news that I have to show up at the LA courthouse tomorrow at 7:45am for jury duty. There are three possible scenarios now:

1. I sit in the courthouse until 5pm and never get called, and then I’m done with jury duty for at least 12 months
2. At some point during the day I get called into a jury, subsequently dismissed, and am done with jury duty for at least 12 months
3. I get called into a jury and they like me, and then I’m stuck there for an indeterminate number of days.

I’m kind of hoping for #2, actually. It would be fun to go through a bit of the process, plus I’d get dismissed before 5pm and would beat the horrible crunch getting out of the parking lot. #3 would suck for a lot of reasons, mostly having to do with how incredibly busy I am at work these days. Caltech pays for 10 days of jury duty, so that’s not the problem; it’s just that I’ll probably wind up working nights and weekends to keep from falling behind. I’m not really a fan of working outside office hours; I prefer to sit on my ass and vegetate.

To celebrate my impending doom, I got a library card. As I stepped inside the Glendale Public Library, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t even been inside a library since college. And I hadn’t been inside a non-school library since… umm… I’m not sure, but an embarrassingly long time.

See, I always buy my books. I don’t know why, when there are perfectly good library books sitting around that you can pick up for free. I got into the habit when I was young and living in South Carolina, and the library didn’t carry much in the way of science fiction and fantasy – after all, only heathens read those books, and the South Carolina libraries weren’t big on sending their readers to hell.

But books get expensive, and also take up a lot of space. So, with the possibility of a 9-hour day sitting in a courtroom with nothing to do looming over me, and being out of already-owned books to read, I decided to make good on my promise to myself to quit throwing away money on books.

Sadly, the library only had one of the books that I wanted, so I went and bought the other one. (New hardcovers tend to have long waiting lists at the library, so I guess it’s still no good for those super-long fantasy series when I have to have the new book RIGHT THIS SECOND.)

The book I checked out of the library was Listening to Prozac, which I can’t believe I haven’t already read. As I was checking it out, the girl in line next to me noticed the title and asked me if it was actually about Prozac. She announced that she was on Paxil. I was a bit thrown – I mean, I’ve always been very up front about the fact that I’m on Prozac, and I don’t think there’s anything to be ashamed of, but this was the first time I’d ever had a stranger tell me what psychiatric medications they were on. Either she’s part of a new enlightened generation, or she’s just really neurotic (after all, she is on Paxil).

Somehow, I doubt tomorrow will be nearly this interesting.

It’s amazing to me how quickly December zips by each year. I swear, it feels like we just did Thanksgiving, and now New Year’s is already upon us. Craziness.

We’ve packed the month with our usual Christmas shennanigans, including the annual Laity party. And yes, we do celebrate “Christmas” here, not “the holidays” – I’m a total heathen who just happens to love the secular aspects of Christmas and doesn’t mind that it also happens to be named after a religious figure.

Sadly, I have yet to manage any decent pictures of our apartment decorations, but we did come away with a pretty nice picture of the two of us by our tree (that’s a snorkeling Santa on top in place of a star):

My frantic party preparations included a lot of baking; about three times as much baking as the turnout really warranted, I would say. Luckily, my officemates were more than happy to help polish off the leftover cookies at work.

I’ve also created a webpage with all my Christmas Recipes, which currently just includes cookies (with pictures!) and cornstarch ornaments.

We spent four days in Phoenix for Christmas with Jeff’s family, during which time I also finished editing some more underwater videos. So some of you can expect a DVD in the mail early next month. Don’t worry; it’s short!

In other news, Jeff’s bookshelves are still beautiful. Seriously, I have to restrain myself from licking them every time I walk into the room. I hope he hurries up and builds the boring desk soon, so we can get to the fun project: the coffee table with Catalina tile insets. Oooooohhhhh.

I will never use a chat client while in a meeting, EVER AGAIN.

I use Trillian, which just shows text like this:

alaity47: Boo
jlaity88: boo back

Jeff has his set up all fancy, however, with icons and speech bubbles and whatnot.

One particular exchange, made during a meeting after I’d devoured an ungodly amount of cookies, made me chortle aloud when I should have been paying attention to the meeting instead, but we managed to continue on. Then Jeff sent me a picture of what the exchange looked like to him, and I completely lost it. The two people I was meeting with both insisted on seeing what was making me crack up so hard, and my public humiliation was complete.

These bookcases have been “almost done” for over a month now, it seems. That last 10% of the way took more than 50% of the actual time and effort, but Jeff made a real push last weekend and every evening this week to get these puppies done and installed. Right now, there are 3 shelves left to be varnished this weekend, but the bookcases and 9 movable shelves are totally done.

Here’s the point we reached that started to feel like we were almost there, when in reality we were still so far. Two bookcases stained, but lots left to stain and nothing varnished:

Finally, all the bits and pieces had been stained, polyeurethaned, lightly sanded, and polyeurethaned again (with lots of drying time in between those steps). Tuesday night, we glued and nailed the backs onto all three bookcases:

Then we moved them into their future resting places in our bedroom, not yet filling them up with shelves and books in case we decided we didn’t like the placement. Plus, they still had to finish drying.

And there they sat for 48 hours. Tonight, Jeff attached the earthquake straps (aka, “things that will keep our legs from being crushed in case of another Northridge”), and I set about correcting what has been the bane of my existence these last 5 years: books stacked vertically in TWO ROWS so you couldn’t see them all at once. Blasphemy! But look – see how pretty it is now?

So, was it worth $500 in materials and tools, countless hours of Jeff-labor (and a few hours of Anna-labor, but honestly, mostly I just watched), and three months of having bits of wood scattered all over the apartment as we hauled parts inside and outside week after week? Well, they certainly put our remaining Ikea furniture to shame (take a look at the shabby dresser in that picture – doesn’t it just look sad?), and they actually look like Real Bookshelves instead of dorm room furniture. I’ve seen similar, slightly smaller shelves at CostPlus for about $200 a pop, but they’re never quite what we want – this way, we got to totally customize them, and they’re built much more solidly than anything we’d buy in pieces and screw together.

Or so Jeff tells me. I’ll let you know how they look after 10 years and a couple of moves.

We couldn’t have picked a better weekend to dive the Northern Channel Islands. The weather was sunny and beautiful, the swell cooperated, the sea lions were in a playful mood, and we had a great bunch of people signed up for the limited load trip on the Vision. 14 out of the 21 divers were with Ken Ashman of California Digital Diving, and of those, 6 of us were from the Sole Searchers dive club. The Vision, an enormous boat to start with, normally takes 40 divers. For about an extra $100 apiece, we got so much room to spread out as to make it completely worth it; empty bunks to store extra bags, two galley tables devoted entirely to camera rigs, and plenty of room on the dive deck for everyone to gear up.

Basically, we were on the ideal dive trip.

Sunday dawned flat and beautiful at San Miguel, the channel island farthest to the west and most susceptible to high swell and rough weather. We knew it was going to be an outstanding trip when we heard the first dive site was at Wilson’s Rock, a favorite of ours from previous trips, and a tricky site to dive unless conditions are perfect. As the boat slowed down and approached the dive site, sea lions started leaping out of the water to greet us, as if to ask why on earth we were taking so long to come amuse them.

Visibility at most sites we hit was anywhere from decent to outstanding, and there was little or no current. There actually was some surface swell, but extremely long-wavelength, making it easy to get in and out of the boat – but creating some pretty deep surge, which made the photographers’ jobs harder.

Still, we really can’t complain. We got dives in at some of the most amazing and hard-to-reach sites around San Miguel. On Sunday we hung out at Wilson’s before moving over to Castle Rock, where I spotted our first ever wolf eel.

My wolf eel!

Monday morning we headed out to Richardson’s Rock, a pinnacle that comes up to about 30 feet, with most of the dive site around 60. The top layer of water was a bit murky, but as we descended down the anchor line the entire dive site suddenly popped into view. We could see the entire topography of Richardson’s clearly; a wide plateau of rock with craters and crevices carving out most of its inside. Every surface was crawling with decorator crabs and anemones; we even saw one crab dragging away an octopus for lunch. There were strangely no fish in sight, but their absence was soon explained when a dozen sea lions popped into view, searching for breakfast. Instead, they found their second-favorite thing: divers! We did two dives at Richardson’s, and the sea lions performed on both, twirling around and blowing bubbles in imitation of the divers.

This really shows off the psychotic side of sea lions:

In fact, we saw sea lions on 9 of the 10 dives we did at San Miguel, including a night dive (it’s a bit alarming to have a sea lion pop up in front of your face in the dark). In between dives, they amused us with antics on the surface, jumping and splashing as if it was all choreographed, until anyone tried to get some video or a photo. Then they became suddenly camera-shy.

That wasn’t the case underwater at all. On our last dive at San Miguel, Jeff and I attracted the attention of a young sea lion towards the end of our dive, as we puttered around in 30 feet of water. This guy couldn’t get enough of us, dipping down to stare and blow bubbles, and coming closer and closer. He bumped his nose into the glass front of my video housing, and poked at my video lights. Then he went to check out Jeff’s camera rig, mouthing Jeff’s strobes as if to see if they were edible (he didn’t actually bite down, so no harm was done). I was laughing so hard my video is unwatchable from all the shaking – doh!

On Monday night, I opted out of the night dive (it would have been dive #6 that day, and I’d attempted a night dive the previous night only to be disappointed by lousy vis and terrible surge). Jeff buddied up with Carol and Ray, and I joined the other holdouts on deck to keep an eye out for returning divers. We were about a half mile off the coast of Santa Rosa, but every time the waves crashed into the rocks there you could see the glow of bioluminescence. Sometimes you’d see a flash in the water closer to the boat as some large fish made a fast move. Every now and then, the divers would aim their lights in the right direction, and the water would light up in a halo around their location. It was a pretty surreal way to spend an evening, and beautiful.

Random prettiness:

Tuesday, we stayed at Santa Rosa in the morning, visiting some of the pinnacles off shore to the east. The boat metered some reef structure they hadn’t dived before a bit to the west, and we headed back that way to check it out and see if it was a decent dive site. It turned out to be pretty cool; a rock plataeu in about 60 feet of water, dropping off to about 80 feet with a ledge-like overhang that you could poke around under in search of critters. I imagine they’ll visit it again.

Our last dives of the trip were over at Santa Cruz, an island we sometimes visit on the Spectre – but not usually the west end. At first it looked like a fairly mediocre dive site; shallow, so-so visibility, and lots of the ubiquitous surge. But near the end of our last dive, it suddenly turned into one of those nifty, memorable dives when I spotted a Hilton’s Aeolid on a little wall. We’d only ever seen one of these guys before, and they’re one of my favorite nudis. Then I spotted another. And two more after that. There was a whole village of Hiltons! Of course, Jeff didn’t have the macro lens on. After we tore ourselves away from Nudi Central, I found myself accosted by a very curious sheephead. Now, these guys are popular food for spearfishermen, and tend to be at least a little skittish. Not so this dude: he kept drifting right up into my mask as if he wanted to come inside.

Checking out his reflection?

In some ways, I wished it was a longer trip – I didn’t want to stop diving! On the other hand, three days is about all my body can take, at least when I’m cramming in 5 dives a day. I loved diving San Miguel in a dry suit (water in the low 50s, so it made a HUGE difference), but there were a few drawbacks. Less neoprene padding means it’s more painful to hit the water in a giant stride, and WAY more painful to crawl around on the metal swim step on your knees. I have an interesting array of bruises up my shins and knees, and on the last dive I barely managed to haul myself up the swim step stairs.

Even the ride back to Santa Barbara was fun; the captain slowed the boat down so we could all check out a school of grampus, which look like a cross between pilot whales and dolphins.

I hope we don’t wait a whole year before doing one of these trips again; it’s the best way to do California diving. Check out the rest of our underwater and topside pics, and hopefully I’ll have some watchable video snippets soon as well. If you’re really bored, my dive logs are here.

Lots of nice scenery from the boat:

We almost have new bookshelves – three of these puppies:

As promised….

My poorly-fitting, super-stylish drysuit:

About halfway poofed-up with air:

Jeff gets in on the poofing fun:

It’s been one of those lovely weeks where we’re booked solid every single night (and sandwiched between two fairly strenuous weekends, to boot).

On Monday night, I wandered over to Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena for an author event; Robert Jordan was there to do a Q&A and sign copies of the Wheel of Time series. It being Halloween, I was really hoping some hardcore geeks would show up in WoT costumes; alas, I was disappointed to see only a handful of vampire and Japanese schoolgirl outfits.

A lot of the excitement of the Q&A was gone because of the detailed reports everyone had posted on the internet since he started his tour a month ago – ten years ago, you could get away with giving the same spiel at every stop, but now we’re all spoiled in advance! Still, it was good to see one of my favorite authors still hale and hearty. He’s a little thinner than the last time I saw him, and a little grayer, and he wasn’t personalizing signatures – but he was posing for photos with the fans, which is new. He used to always wear a hat and dark glasses indoors, and seemed to dislike having his photo taken.

Getting my books signed by Robert Jordan:

He commented on my battered-up copy of The Fires of Heaven, which is dog-eared, fruit-punch stained, and a bit wobbly in the spine, saying he liked to see a well-read book. You’d think I’d take more care of first-edition hardcovers that I always make the effort to get signed, but you’d be wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Books are for reading, not re-selling; that’s why I’m bummed he doesn’t personalize anymore, though it makes them more Ebay-able.

***

Tuesday, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the dive condition reports coming out of Laguna. Zero to one-foot surf, almost no surge, and 15-20 foot visibility. On a beach dive!! The reports had been steadily improving since Saturday, and I didn’t dare hope they’d last much longer. I jokingly sent Jeff an email asking him to ditch work with me Wednesday morning in favor of a dive – and we wound up heading down for a Tuesday night dive instead.

By the time we’d picked up tanks, packed up gear, and waded through rush-hour traffic on the southbound freeways, it was well past sunset. We pulled up in front of Shaw’s Cove at about 7:30 or 8pm, and I was delighted to see a few other groups of divers suiting up on the street.

It was dark down there. We’d timed our dive well to coincide with high tide, but it was also a new moon. Did I mention dark? The instant I hit the water, my octopus started free-flowing, and the bubbling/whooshing air was so distracting that I almost dropped a fin, which would not have been good in the dark. By the time I had my fins firmly attached and could pay attention to the octopus (one good whack set it to rights), it had blow through about 500psi of air; we still had plenty left for a long shallow dive, though, so we headed down to the reef.

All in all, it was only a so-so dive. We saw a little octopus, some skittish stingrays, and one little bat ray that floated slowly over our heads and then zipped away at an amazing speed – but that was really it, other than what turned out to be a whole lot of other divers bumping into each other and the sand. A class or two had apparently decided to take advantage of the nice conditions! Jeff also discovered that the macro lens’ autofocus really is not sufficient for night dives, even with a focus light, so he didn’t come away with any pictures. (On the up side, this means he won’t waste any of our night dives off the Vision later this month with the macro lens!)

It was midnight by the time we’d driven home, rinsed our gear and tidied up, and probably not really worth all the effort; I don’t think we’d do it again. But it’s cool to be the kind of people who just up and go diving mid-week.

***

Wednesday, Jeff and I split up again – he went to some sort of alumni/student networking event at USC, and I went drinking. Well, I went to a movie with some girlfriends, and we just happened to hit a local pub in time for happy hour in advance, and walking distance from the theater. Several cocktails in the space of an hour turned us into three very loud women (okay, not that different from usual), having intensely personal conversations in the middle of a crowded bar. I think a few barflies got an earful; every now and then we’d see a guy sort of twitch in our direction like he wasn’t sure if he’d heard correctly.

***

Thursday we finally had a “boring” day – we stayed home and did laundry. And watched Nikki’s video from diving in Borneo, 2004 – we’re scoping out the South Pacific for our big 2006 trip, and so far Tahiti is losing its lead (despite the 6 night stay Jeff won at the Kona Classic – the darned place STILL winds up more expensive than anywhere else!).

***

And now, Friday November 4, we’re celebrating two holidays in one: Jeff’s 35th birthday next Tuesday, which he’ll actually spend on a plane, and our 5-year “smoochiversary.” We’ve got a fancy dinner planned, and then it’s off to bed as early as possible (which won’t be very early, since we have 8:30 reservations) – tomorrow we’re doing our drysuit checkout dives at Catalina.

Jen blogged earlier this week about celebrating her “real” anniversary; the anniversary of the day she and Jeremy decided “they liked each other well enough,” as opposed to their wedding day. I feel sort of the same way; the day that Jeff finally decided to make a move in response to my endless flirting was hands-down the best day of my life. So I was pretty happy with the idea of celebrating tonight, even though it’s not his real birthday yet.

We made a point not to overbook ourselves this weekend, as it’s been a crazy couple of months with a lot of travel for Jeff. But since the next dozen or so weekends are spoken for, it turned into a bit of a hectic one after all trying to cram in various tasks and errands.

Yesterday was a cleaning day, and this time I won’t bore you with pictures of the process. I will, however, brag that the place is spotless – except for the sawdust all over the carpet. More on that in a bit.

Today, we kicked off the morning with the pool session of our drysuit class, which went pretty well. It was too hot to wear the fleece underwear, which meant the yucky drysuit fabric was sticking to my sweaty skin and the wrinkles dug into my skin from the pressure of the water. Other than that, it was actually more comfortable than I expected. The only real problem I foresee in using this particular rental suit is that the booties are too big for me, so they bend up unpleasantly when I pull the fins on over them. Plus, all that extra space in the feet is another place air can collect, and once my feet start to inflate the fins really want to go popping off. I’m going to try wearing a layer or two of wool socks to help fill out the booties in the ocean next weekend.

Pictures to come, I promise – someplace more photogenic than an indoor pool.

This afternoon, I ran more boring errands and then baked a bunch of cookies for Jeff’s office; I guess they do a big Halloween potluck and everyone is supposed to pitch in. (“Everyone,” of course, being code for “everyone’s wives.”) Not that I really mind baking cookies, especially when it’s from a mix. A little mixing, a little “dropping by heaping teaspoonfuls,” and I got to go straight to the fun part: smothering them in icing and badly-drawn Halloween motifs:

In the meantime, Jeff has been building me some new bookshelves. (Okay, they’re not just for me, but I’ll probably hog a pretty decent percentage of them.) We bought all the wood a few weeks ago, and Jeff started measuring and sawing out on our back patio.

He was able to cut all the shelves and sides in a day, but then he had some business travel – so all the freshly-cut wood, as well as lots of remaining wood (for the backs and the edging) came to live inside.

Our bar stools were moved aside to make room for all the cut wood; some of it is invisible behind the front rows of wood. This is why I’m not bothering to vacuum until the bookshelves are completed:

The backs – currently three 4×8 pieces of 1/4″ oak plywood, soon to be trimmed to roughly 3×6 – are standing up against the wall in our office in a most attractive manner. The edging – an enormous pile of really long pieces of wood, don’t ask me how long – went on the floor in front of the television, taking up space from the sliding doors almost all the way to the dining room table. Thankfully, Jeff cut those down to size yesterday.

Yesterday was all about routing (making all the grooves in the sides for the fixed shelves to slide into and the front edging to sit against). Today, he’s been drilling all the little holes on the bookcase sides that will allow us to position the remaining non-fixed shelves wherever we want. Here he is with his drill press:

And no, we did not rent that drill press. Alas, the drill press has a premanent residence in our closet. People go in there to hang up their coat, or see us scrounging around in search of tools or toilet paper, and they say things like “good lord, what is that thing in your closet?!” You have to ask Jeff why we own a drill press; I honestly can’t explain it.

Last night, Jeff and I went to Hollywood Divers for the classroom part of our drysuit class – the highlight of which was actually trying on rental drysuits to use for our checkout dives.

I guess compared to my first wetsuit experience, it went extremely well. My knuckles aren’t bleeding, and I only had to try on three suits instead of five or six. However, there was the same basic problem: all the rental suits are designed for men. Men that are straight up and down, and no curves. By the time you get a suit big enough to go over my more-than-manly hips and thighs, the darn thing is usually sized for a giant.

So while Jeff got to look all hot and sexy in a perfectly-fitted off-the-rack black drysuit (his first try), I wound up with the “Spiderman” suit, a blue and red concoction with several extra feet of fabric hanging around my waist, neck and arms. But still tight across the hips.

Ditto the fleece underwear (a one-piece jumpsuit). Jeff and I both wound up in the same size undies; his fit perfectly, while mine was stretched to the max at my hips and hanging in folds above my waist.

We’ll have to take pictures when we take them diving next week, so you can drool over Jeff in his manly-looking drysuit and mock my clown outfit.

On the up side, the latex neck and wrist seals were oodles more comfy than I imagined; I really barely even felt them. (Insert condom joke here.) On the down side, it is JUST AS HOT inside a sealed drysuit as it is inside a hot, dry wetsuit. Only you’re not allowed to pull on the neck and let water in to cool you off. And the pool portion of the class takes place at an indoor, heated pool. I’m tempted to skip the fleece underwear, but I discovered last night that wearing the drysuit over any bare skin makes for very uncomfortable sweaty-skin/drysuit adhesion, rendering it almost impossible to move around or get back out of the drysuit.

Now the trick will be to avoid the temptation of buying my own custom-fit suit long enough to pay off those credit cards we keep thinking we’ll get down to zero. We always use the “oh, but we’ll really use this ____” excuse to justify big purchases; too bad that doesn’t actually reduce the cost. There’d be no poverty on the planet.