CaptainOrange

Our family hosted a staff Christmas party for our friends in the Children's Department. It was a near thing, but Wendy managed to keep the house in one piece despite all the dancing and wild abandon. As you might predict there was a serious literary discussion while we dined. Anwyn was grilled by the staff over her opinions on such greats as The Hobbit , A Face Like Glass , and The Hunger Games . I think her comments were well supported by the texts and the library staff were in agreement that Anwyn may wish to start her career in literary review with all speed. She decided instead to show Henry (hereafter known as Hank) the purpose of her extensive Nerf weapon collection. Lori provided the dessert hit of the evening with her fantastic  carrot cake  -- although, it appears that Jenny is more fond of eating mice. I guess it takes all kinds -- a fact that could be attested to by the insane people that hired all of us to work in the same place. We were so g...

I think I just lost a button! Wendy and I are not much for partying. This year we started off Halloween a little bit early. We got some tickets to a Diabetes fundraiser and enjoyed ourselves dancing part of the night away with Jodi. The band played a little too much country for our taste but, for the most part they seem to read their audience well. We're just not typical, I guess. Anyway, the cool thing is that we got to design steam punk costumes for ourselves. I really love to make things and this was an awesome opportunity to play around with paint and cheap doodads that we found at Value Village. The two feature parts of my costume were the knee-length leather jacket which I found for $14 and a top hat. The hat was originally baby blue felt, which just wouldn't work for my particular costume. Although, as it turns out, it would've matched Wendy's outfit pretty well. Alas, the candied corn wound up in the trash :( Sadly, my camera had just arrived back fr...

Just a quick note. I will be among many story-tellers and poets participating in this young-ish annual event. Mostly, I'll be enjoying the other performers, but I will be telling at least one story. I've attended previously and it was fun (but loud). Here is a link to the Facebook Event . And here is what the event says, if you want to avoid going to facebook ;) 7pm-9pm at Lydia's Story time debauchery! This is not your toddler’s story time. Help us ring in Saskatchewan Library Week with an evening of performances for  grownups. There will be stories, music… and a full drinks menu.  Performers include The Seahags, No-Nos Improv Comedy, author Wes Funk, and radio personality Berkley Staite. Master of ceremonies will be our Writer in Residence, David Poulsen. Free! (Note: this is a licensed event) View Larger Map

Wow. So tired. I found the same thing in Honduras. When you have a full day of vacation, it's pretty hard to go back to your hotel and process pictures/video and then write about it all before you fall asleep. But, I missed you yesterday, so here goes... Saturday--am Beach House looks like an old fort We caught a boat out with Steve, from Quiescence. The trip was a little longer out than usual at 45 minutes. I was a little irritated that our trip was being hijacked by two young couples who wanted to go hunting Lion Fish. My irritation gave way when we found ourselves at an out of the way location that gave us the best diving of our trip. As it turns out, the two young women on our trip were from REEF .  The Reef Environmental Education Foundation is a non-profit organization of recreational divers who conduct fish biodiversity and abundance surveys during their dives, among other things. One of these thing is reducing the lionfish population. Lionfish are native to the...

Double Crested Cormorant We have started to fall into a really good rhythm here. What with the not throwing up added to lots of sun and diving, it is starting to feel very much like a vacation. Or at the very least, some place that I don't loathe existing in :) We did morning dives again, which means no coffee as we have to be at Quiescence  by 8am. We were on French Reef today. The two locations we did were called Hard Bottom Cave and Hourglass Cave. As you might expect, each of these locations offered some nooks and crannies to weave through. Neither contained any seriously challenging elements, but both were substantially deeper dives than yesterday. Speaking of which, here are some numbers from yesterday at Northern Dry Rocks . Dive 1 -- Minnow Cave 59 minutes at 4m average and 6.1m max Dive 2 -- Dry Rock (Not sure of this name and I think Brad is sick of me asking...) 58 minutes, averaging 4.9m and 7.3m max. Today's Dives:  Weather Hot and Sunny. Light ...

American White Ibis As you know, I like to have coffee in the morning. If you know Brad, you will also know that although he loves coffee (possibly even more than me) he does not love morning. What I'm saying is that I've had to make due with another of my weird animal coffee buddies. Meet the American White Ibis . They seem to be quite curious, and though they are a little skittish, they don't seem to mind posing for pictures. If you were checking Google+ early this morning, you probably noticed that I was feeling pretty positive about my chances for diving in Key Largo today.  I'm really not sure how I managed to be so upbeat after yesterday's gore-fest on the boat. But, I shall not keep you in suspense. I held my breakfast down today! Let the trumpets trumpet and the banners... ban. Brad and I did two dives after lunch totalling about 1hr 55min. The number of fish was really quite spectacular. I found this lovely fish in Florida [Nope! Link now broken....

7:30am Got up and headed for the dive shop. My G+ crew will recognize this optimistic video clip. Headache and stuffiness better but not gone. I decided to give snorkelling rather (than scuba) a try. This was a good plan for a number of reasons. The first reason was that I did still find it difficult to clear my ears, particularly on ascent. It's not a very big deal snorkelling because you don't go to the same depths and therefore there is much less equalization pressure on your ear drum and sinus cavities. Leaving the Keys The other reason that I'm glad that I snorkelled instead is that I was violently sick to my stomach 25 minutes after getting in the water. If you are down at 30 or 40 feet at the time, this can become tricky. You probably remember that I had this same problem early on in Honduras. There is one small difference. I took anti-nausea medication in advance this time. It just didn't work. I don't know if it is because I am immune to this ...