Friday evening, I came home to 4 messages on the machine. Jeff mentioned that several were from my mom, but didn’t fill me in on any details. Message #2 was the typical Mom message:

“Hi, it’s me calling from South Carolina. [She always identifies herself as either “Georgene,” “from South Carolina,” or both.] I don’t really have anything important to discuss, just thought you might be home to chat. You don’t have to call me back.”

Message #3 was also from Mom – and it was a bit more unusual. She started off by telling me that Katie would probably not be camping by herself anymore. My sister is a big camper, so I rightly suspected that some story of camping woe would follow.

Apparently, Katie was out camping alone, and woke up in the morning with a snake bite. (At this point I gasped aloud and yelled to Jeff that my sister had been bitten by a snake – he didn’t seem particularly surprised or moved, but of course, he’d already heard the message.)

Since Katie had seen rattlesnakes in the area, she was understandably worried, and drove herself to the nearest clinic. They kept her overnight to see if there were any signs of invenomation (I wasn’t surprised that Mom was familiar with snakebite terminology, because in the past few months she’s become an enormous fan of “Venom ER” on Animal Planet.) Mom’s voice was shaking a little; I figured she must have been pretty upset that Katie had such a close brush with the wild!

She tried to lighten the mood by joking that it was just too bad Katie hadn’t wound up at Alta Loma (the hospital featured on Animal Planet), because then Mom would have “had” to fly out and visit those cute doctors.

I should have been suspecious at this point, but still bought it all until she continued: “but of course, I didn’t have to fly out because this is all just an April Fool’s joke!”

She gets me every year! Almost always with a story about Katie, which I suppose just proves that I’m willing to believe anything about my sister, no matter how ridulous… Of course, the “shaking” voice was just Mom trying not to laugh!

The story that she got Katie with this year was that I’d spent a night in jail after being caught driving medicinal marijuana to an ill friend of the family – Katie likewise fell for it hook, line and sinker, and apparently complained that Mom always gets her with stories about me!.

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: https://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:

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

Our weekend visit to South Carolina began as an attempt by Jeff and myself to save money by cashing in some frequent flier miles on a February visit, in lieu of the planned Christmas visit. Katie was also unable to make it out for Christmas, so she hopped on the February bandwagon as well, and somehow convinced her poor, unsuspecting boyfriend Joel to come along and meet the insane family. Then, my half-brother-in-law Mark (my, that’s a mouthful) decided to stop by for a few days after doing some work up in DC. So, we wound up with quite a crowd!

Weeks before the actual trip, we started getting near-daily phone calls from Mom. (Mom, if you’re reading this, I’m not making fun of you – it was cute, really!) Some questions she had for us included:

• Would it be ok if she had us sleep in a room other than my childhood bedroom, should it prove absolutely necessary due to the number of guests and configurations of beds?
• Did we prefer flannel or cotton sheets?
• What foods do we want on hand? (She actually sent out a rather detailed questionaire with sections for each meal, plus snacks, and sample options)
• Were we absolutely positive we wanted to visit? It wasn’t too late to cancel if we had better things to do.
• Were we sure we didn’t want to stay in a hotel, where we could get away from everyone and Jeff could live cat-hair-free?
• Did Cookie and Barrie mind driving down to Columbia to visit? Mom was more than happy to drive us up there instead.
• Et cetera…

We arrived at my house late Friday night, after Mom picked us up at the Charlotte airport (slightly more than an hours drive away from Columbia). I immediately became completely wired, zipping around the house looking at all the things I hadn’t seen in two years, frantically pursuing the two still-alive cats. There was also TONS OF FOOD. Possibly literally. Sitting out in the dining room was a table full of snacks (muffins, brownies, cheese straws, grapes, ginger snaps, to name a few), and Mom instantly offered us some corn chowder and creme caramel.

Poor Jeff was completely exhausted from several consecutive days of travel and trade shows, so I finally took pity on him and we hit the sack.

Saturday, we crawled out of bed around noon (but were still up before everyone except Daddy and Mark). There was a perpetual pot of coffee going in the kitchen (Daddy-style – that is, stronger than almost ANYONE makes coffee, except for Jeff). I think I had more coffee this past weekend than in the entire month leading up to it.

Katie and Joel actually took a few hours in the afternoon to go out somewhere and do something, but Jeff and I contented ourselves sitting around doing NOTHING. (Well, not entirely nothing: I spent large chunks of the day battling some problems on Katie’s laptop, before finally concluding that the hard disk was totally hosed.) We ate, chatted with my parents and Mark, ate some more, puttered around with our laptops, enjoyed a visit from Mom’s friend Kay, ate some more – etc. Good day!

Saturday night, we all had dinner and cake to celebrate Daddy’s 79th birthday (actually on Sunday, but by then Mark would be gone). Afterwards, we played one of my sister’s favorite games: “Eat Poo, You Cat.” (I have no idea if that’s the real name.) Everyone sits in a circle with a piece of paper and a pencil. At the top of your piece of paper, you write a sentence (“The weasel danced to hunt the rabbit,” and “It is 10:20 at night” were both examples). You then pass your paper to the person next to you, who has to draw a representation of your sentence beneath it. Then the part of the paper with the original sentence on it is folded over out of sight, and the paper is passed to the next person, who writes down a sentence that describes the picture… and so on, all the way around the circle.

You’re especially screwed if you’re sitting next to my dad, who Jeff jokingly refered to as “Picasso,” more for his surrealistic tendencies than his artistic talent! For instance, Daddy took a picture of a cat being kicked through a doorway, and translated it as “Get out of here, and don’t come back,” which the next person found understandably difficult to draw. I’d have half a dozen other bizarre examples, if we hadn’t accidentally thrown away the sheets when we were done. :(

Daddy’s actual birthday was a bit more eventful. Mark was taking off late in the morning, so we spent 30 minutes or so taking pictures outside. Anyone reading this who has a family is probably familiar with how this went:

“Ok, now I want a picture with just the ‘kids’ – Mark, that means you, too! Now one with the men. Now one with the boyfriends/husbands. Ooh, we need a sister pic. Now all of us together! Shoot – did we get one with Joel?”

After PhotoPalooza, Cookie and Barrie drove down from Rock Hill to hang out for a while. We set off in search of Frank’s, a famous hold hot dog place in Five Points (Cookie and Barrie are trying to visit lots of famous old diners/hot dog stands, and this was the closest one on the list). After about 10 minutes spent cruising up and down Harden St, and with several fruitless calls home to talk to my dad (who claimed to have some vague idea of where Frank’s was located, but wasn’t really sure that’s what it was called), we finally gave up and had lunch at Yesterday’s instead.

After several more hours of Doing Nothing (but now with Cookie and Barrie to entertain us), we packed some clothes and drove up to Rock Hill to stay with them overnight. First, we swung by Olive Garden for dinner. Jeff and I ordered glasses of wine, as we always do when eating Italian food. The waitress started to nod, and then looked surprised and told us “Oh no, I forgot, it’s Sunday.”

That’s right, folks: no alcohol is served on Sunday in South Carolina. (Well, not unless you shell out for a fairly expensive liquor license, which Olive Garden apparently opted to skip.) There’s something extremely surreal to me about eating Italian food, about being SURROUNDED by people eating Italian food, and not seeing a single glass of wine on any tables. Pasta and coke – not the same.

After swinging by Target (to pick up Miami Vice DVDs for Barrie and Jeff – I am SO being punished for subjecting him to Gilmore Girls) and Dunkin Donuts (for dessert), we headed to Casa Clark to see all the latest home improvements. Every time I visit, Barrie and Cookie have done something amazing to the place (granted, it’s usually years in between visits, so they have plenty of time to do stuff). This time, almost every room in the place had been repainted, and none of them were boring. Barrie had expanded on the wiring, so that you could bring up the video from a front-porch camera on the tv screen to see who’s ringing the doorbell. Jeff instantly started playing with the light dimmers and remote controls, as he always does, while Cookie and I zoned out in front of her fish tank and fish-watched for a bit.

The next morning, all of us geeks ganged up on Jeff and made him watch an episode of SeaQuest. (The one with the fish poo, if any of you were fans – and by the way, Barrie has one of the actual fish poo props in the Geek Room, and has fixed it so that it even lights up now!) Speaking of the Geek Room, we should have taken more pictures – but here’s one angle on it. You can see several framed SeaQuest uniforms (incidentally, Cookie and Barrie actually MET through an online SeaQuest role playing game), and one piece of the new built-in shelves that are home to all his unwrapped dolls. I’m sorry, “action figures.” :) There’s also a velociraptor claw on the table beneath the left-hand uniform, from Jurassic Park 2, I believe. I love the Geek Room!

Mom picked us up in the afternoon, and we headed home again to do more nothing. I made Mom watch Gilmore Girls while Jeff hid upstairs doing work.

In the evening, Daddy randomly got chatty. He’s quite a character; if you ask him outright to tell you about some part of his life (like, oh, say, WORLD WAR TWO, or living in Liberia, or starting to date his secretary – that would be Mom – while being married with five kids), he’ll wave you off and say he’s got nothing to tell. But if you wait long enough and don’t actually ASK, all sorts of stories can just start pouring out! For some reason, on this particular night, he was especially chatty about his, er, love life as a younger man. I love that my father is comfortable enough to tell me some of these things, but I think I may need to draw the line when he starts to get into details about my MOM….

I hope someone can convince him to write some of this stuff down one day (with some judicious editing, I hope). I always learn something new when he gets in a chatty mood. The G-rated parts of the stories concerning my parents are especially adorable. Daddy told me about how he started seeing Mom in a purely platonic way, shortly before a trip out of the country. She drove him to the airport, and apparently he couldn’t get her out of his mind on the whole trip. He claims to have even written poetry while on the flight! Mom and I gushed back and forth quite a bit about how lucky we’ve been to find a couple of terrific men. :)

I really enjoy visiting home – although it may well have something to do with the fact that I do it quite rarely! Mom is a blast to hang out with; just as goofy and gossipy as me. Daddy constantly cracks me up, and I love that Jeff has gotten comfortable enough around him (quite a feat, as you know if you’ve met my dad) to tease and joke with him. I actually get to see Katie every now and then out here in California, so I didn’t make as much of an effort to spend time with her as I probably could have on this trip. I was glad to have the chance to meet Joel again, though; he’s a little like Jeff in that he’s pretty shy and quiet when he first meets someone, so I haven’t really gotten to know him yet. And Cookie and Barrie – well, it’s one of the great injustices of the universe that the Clarks and the Laitys have wound up living 3000 miles apart! Cookie and I always fall right back in step with each other when we visit, as if it hasn’t been two years or more since we hung out; of all my high school friends, Cookie’s definitely the one I miss the most!

Oh, for those who care, some more pictures from Catalina are here:

Our mission for this Saturday was to test the camera enclosure, and make sure that it was seaworthy before we trust it with our replacement D-Rebel. We’d given it the tried-and-true Bathtub Test already, but we really wanted to take it down deep and make sure nothing leaked.

Not wanting to potentially waste a 3-dive boat trip, we decided to just head out to Casino Point, where we could do as many dives as we felt like (depending on weather, water conditions, and the functionality of the camera enclosure).

This morning, my alarm went off at the strangely civilized hour of 7:30. Usually, our trips to Catalina begin with a 4:15 alarm, so this felt just, well, weird. As we rolled our gear bags down to the car, there were other people awake and about! And the sun was shining! I didn’t feel like a real diver.

We hopped the 9:15 ferry from San Pedro, and I must say, it was quite a ride. There was 4-6 foot swell, and we were in one of the smaller ferries. It wasn’t nearly as bad as being on ANY DIVE BOAT, and I feel very sorry for anyone who made that crossing today. But we got a few good stomach-lurchers in, and there were constantly huge streams of spray arcing past the boat as we crashed into the trough of each swell. It was actually kind of fun (I can say that, because I didn’t get seasick today. Other people were not so lucky.)

We were feeling a little lazy, so we hired a cab to take us and all our gear (there’s more gear than there used to be since we bought a Pelican case for the camera enclosure) through town to Casino Point. It feels downright decadent to take a taxi; like somehow, you’re not a REAL California diver unless you’re willing to lug all your sh*t across cobblestones for 15 minutes.

At the point, we discovered a surprising number of classes working on their certifications – lots of newbies cluttering up the stairs. It was also darned windy, making the temperature in the shade something like VERY COLD.

This was our first dive since we returned from Bonaire, and man, it’s hard to get back to California diving. Not that I don’t love the kelp forests, but MY GOD IT’S FREEZING! My feet were freezing when I first stepped down into the water off the stairs to rinse my mask; my lips froze the instant they touched the surface; the rest of me was a complete icicle for the whole 20 minute (was it even that long?) dive.

Basically, we just headed down. We followed the reef south until we came across the wreck of the SuJac at about 90 feet, then I indicated to Jeff that I’d had all the cold I was willing to put up with, and we returned to the stairs and surfaced.

That’s it. No exciting dive stuff to report. And as we huddled by our gear in the windy shade of the Casino, I informed Jeff that one dive was plenty for me today, thank you, and at least we’d ascertained that the camera enclosure was fine. My whole body felt the way your hand feels after you’ve stuck it in snow – kind of a stinging/burning kind of cold. Ugh. This is why we don’t live someplace where it snows (and tell me again why we DON’T live somewhere with warm water?)

We took another cab back to the ferry and stored our bags there (for anyone keeping track, the taxi and luggage storage costs have now made this trip pretty much as expensive as a day on a dive boat), and went for some lunch and stroll-around-Avalon time. Oh, and ice cream:

While we were tooling around Green Pier, a very friendly seagull approached, making odd little barking/grunting noises. He perched on a trash can and posed for us for a while. I know seagulls are boring, but I just couldn’t resist a few pics:

So, not our best dive trip ever, but still a nice way to spend a Saturday. I think we might have to cut back a little on diving in the winter; we’re getting too spoiled by our trips to warmer climes! Either that, or we need to start saving our bucks for dry suits before next winter rolls around…

My first-draft edit of Kathy’s rose picture:

Kathy sent me a DVD today with all the RAW images from Friday, so I can go nuts editing the ones I like. It’ll be interesting to see which ones she and I pick differently, and how we edit them. I’ll post a gallery of my finished products (with appropriate credit to the actual photographer, of course), and maybe some sort of compare/contrast gallery as well if our results are different in interesting ways.

Last night, I spent a few hours at Kathy’s with her friend Zena, modeling for Kathy. (She got these kick-ass strobes and fancy backdrop for Christmas, so she can set up a temporary studio in her apartment). I also got a few Kathy/Chaco shots in of my own. :) Kathy’s promised to set me up with lots of the RAW images to play with, but in the meantime she sent me a few previews:

Sarah took one of the greatest ever pictures of Jeff, cleverly captioned “Jeff wondering when the dog will go away:”