Friday morning at IPAC was a bit surreal. At about 10am, Shelly (the secretary at the “main” desk, although that “main” desk is buried in the middle of the IPAC labyrinth) came bustling through the hallways, urging everyone to read their e-mail from Kathy (the MSC secretary).

Said e-mail didn’t materialize after a few minutes, and when I spotted Shelly heading back the other way I asked what it would be about. Apparently, Kathy had entered IPAC into an “office of the day” drawing at KRTH (oldies radio station), and won! They were on their way to the office with snacks and coffee, and were bringing someone who’d be “serenading” us as well – all the conference rooms were booked already, so we’d have to squeeze into the kitchen.

The ipac-staff mailing list was still taking it’s slow time actually delivering Kathy’s mail, so a few of us helped Shelly make the rounds and fill everyone in on what was about to go down in the kitchen. It turns out that not that many people are in their offices at 10am on a Friday morning, but we managed to get a fairly respectable crowd (mostly women, for some reason) in there by the time the KRTH van pulled up out back:

They brought in several boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts, some coffee – and a mexican acoustic guitar player, Miguel Rivera, who did in fact proceed to serenade us, mostly hamming it up to the ladies in the crowd. He was actually quite good, even!

Miguel and Kathy:

Everyone got into the silly spirit of things, getting autographs and snapping pictures. For some reason, the men didn’t seem quite as interested in joining the fun:

Fun way to start a Friday!

What a weekend!

Friday night, A2 and I picked up Kathy and headed to Happy Hour and McCormick & Schmidt’s, for cheap burgers and drinks. The drinks were absolutely necessary – we’d all had a nutty week and needed to vent for various reasons, plus it helped to be slightly tipsy for what followed: Bride and Prejudice at the Laemmle. By the director of “Bend it Like Beckham,” “Bride and Prejudice” is an adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic done in full-on Bollywood style. That includes people spontaneously breaking into badly-dubbed song and modern-Indian dance – I loved it! The leads were terrific, the music was fun, and one of the cute guys from “Lost” had a large-ish role; definitely a good Girls’ Night movie.

Saturday am, A2 and I headed down to Anza Borrego State Park, northeast of San Diego, to check out the wildflower bloom. The day started out well: we had a pretty drive, and after a brief stop at the visitor’s center we were directed to check out acres of wildflowers blooming just north of Borrego Springs.

The high point of this area for me was a gigantic caterpillar flopping around in one of the bushes. This puppy was about six inches long, and nearly an inch wide:

Yum!

Our original plan was to do a hike near the visitor’s center in search of bighorn sheep, but the heat did us in by the time we’d walked from where we had to park (it was seriously crowded) to the trailhead, and we heard the sheep weren’t showing anyway. So we piled back in the car and headed south, since we’d read online that the southern half of the park was putting on quite a show.

Sadly, the show never materialized – unless it referred to all the yellow hillsides, which actually got a bit boring after a while. And then A2 started to get carsick, and we got a bit lost, so it was pretty much all downhill from there!

We compensated for our lousy afternoon by heading to the California Poppy Preserve the next day, since we knew they were pretty much in the middle of peak season. Here are some non-poppies, as seen from the poppy preserve:

The whole area was obscenely windy, so we didn’t get too many good shots in. Still, it was a beautiful area to walk around, full of birds and waving grass (and closed-up poppies hiding from the wind).

Windy poppies:

Despite the weekend’s disappointments, we walked away with some nice pictures and got to see lots of pretty flowers. Both parks were definitely worth checking out while they were in bloom!

My pics: http://gallery.laityphoto.com/v/anastasia/200503_wildflowers

Sitting around Saturday afternoon, after a morning spent violently scrubbing our unusually filthy apartment until it gleamed, Jeff and I decided that a whole Sunday spent hanging out at home with no internet was just too darned boring to face. We fired up our dial-up connection just long enough to hunt up dive trip possibilities, and started making phone calls. Alas, all the boat charters were booked – I suspect that so many people have been getting their trips “bumped” due to foul weather these last weeks that all the boats still going out are completely packed. But Bill over at Hollywood Divers informed us that Nikki, Rhonda, Karim, and a few others had decided to hit Casino Point on Sunday just for fun. After a little waffling, Jeff and I called up the Catalina Express and made our reservations for a Sunday on the island.

Besides the fact that we’ve done very little diving lately (due mostly to my constantly being sick), we also haven’t taken any underwater photos in almost THREE MONTHS! Jeff was getting serously antsy to use the 300D some more. Of course, wouldn’t you know it: the strobe wouldn’t fire. It would go off just fine in “test” mode, but wasn’t responding to the signal from the camera.

We spent a good hour sitting on our bench under the Casino troubleshooting the darned thing. Well, Jeff troubleshot; I sat and waited. And waited. And sweated. (For a nice change, it was sunny and warm at Catalina yesterday!) I wandered over to chat with Nikki and gang for a while, and checked out the stair entry. It wasn’t very crowded, which was a good thing, because the tide was so unusually low that a good chunk of slimy boulders were exposed at the bottom of the stairs, and there was only one small path to get through them easily.

Finally, Jeff gave up on getting the strobe to function, and I braced myself for a day of Grumpy Husband. Luckily for both of us, he managed to look on the bright side and decided to spend the dives working on taking shots using only ambient light (particularly good for sun rays, silhouettes, and the like).

Our first dive, we headed to the right, as per usual. After standing around in the sun for an hour, and then climbing into my hot wetsuit, I was REALLY ready to jump into that cold California water. Too bad that lovely cooling-off feeling only lasts for about 2 seconds before you just feel completely freezing. I can’t say we saw anything terribly exciting, but it was nice to be diving again! But I had to constantly remind myself that I love diving in California, and I really don’t miss the warm Caribbean water. Sigh.

The thing is, I really DO love it – when I can block the excruciating cold out of my mind. I love rolling over on my back and looking up at the sun streaming through the kelp, and watching schools of blacksmith mill around. Sometimes you come across a de facto school of kelp bass, all lounging in the shade of the same bunch of kelp. They’re not as curious as the darting senoritas, which will come up and peck at your mask or try to “eat” the glowing LED off Jeff’s strobe, but if you stay still the kelp bass wil slowly drift up to your face, giving you a good view of their multicolored eyes and tiny teeth.

After more than half an hour had passed, the beauty of the kelp forest was NO MATCH for the block of solid ice that was my torso, and we headed up. Jeff spent our safety stop photographing kelp:

It’s always a bit of an adventure approaching the entry point at Casino Point, because of how many beginners and students go there to dive. There’s usually a dozen or so people hanging out at the surface, who might decide to descend at any moment without first checking that there’s no one under them. There will be other groups on their way up from their checkout dive, and you can often spot newbies struggling so hard with buoyancy that they have to grab onto kelp (I’m not making fun – I WAS one of those kelp-grabbers once). Even though it was less crowded than usual, I still enjoyed watching a few beginners struggle. I think I get such a kick out of it because I myself was such a lousy diver at first – it’s nice to know that I’m not alone, and also to know that the people who are struggling now will probably be fine after another dozen dives.

We hauled ourselves back across the exposed boulders and up the stars – oh, glorious sun! A few more attempts at strobe troubleshooting didn’t get us anywhere, but we decided to do a second dive anyway.

This time, we headed left, which doesn’t have as much reef structure – however, it’s where we’ve occasionally seen really nifty stuff, like rays and baby garibaldi. On the boat over earlier, I’d asked Jeff if there was anything he particularly wanted to photograph today, and Giant Kelpfish were on his list. So when I spotted one swimming around in the water column, I stopped swimming and yelled to Jeff, who’d already gone on ahead of me. Kelpfish usually hide in the kelp and are very skittish and hard to photograph. This one wasn’t going anywhere: he was busy being cleaned by a senorita. I think he had a parasite stuck to his gills – unfortunately, every time the senorita attacked it, the kelpfish would flinch away, and the process started over again.

My yelling went completely unnoticed thanks to our thick california hoods, and Jeff was slowly disappearing around a bunch of kelp. I get myself into this position fairly often: having to make the choice between following my buddy as safety demands, or staying put to keep an eye on whatever cool thing I want Jeff to take a picture. The cool thing almost always wins. Logically speaking, I can say it’s because Jeff will certainly notice I’m gone pretty quickly and come back to find me, and it’s a lot easier for him to find me than it is for me to find the cool fish again. But I’m also aware that letting my buddy disappear because I want to show him this cool fish reads like the opening paragraph of an accident report! I think it’s time to start trying out more effective noisemakers.

Of course, less than 30 seconds after I lost visual contact with Jeff, he turned around to see where I’d disappeared to, and I frantically pointed out the still-circling kelpfish. He spent about 5 minutes photographing Kelpie and the attendant senorita. Without a flash, the pics were only so-so:

We packed it in after dive number 2. Hopefully we’ll get the strobe (or hot shoe, or sync cord, or whatever’s broken) fixed or replaced before our next dive in two weeks. I’m not sure if Jeff can pull off another looking-on-the-bright-side day; I suspect it took a lot of effort! :)

More pics here:

http://gallery.laityphoto.com/v/underwater/uw-20050306_catalina