Recently, I have mostly been learning how to drown with minimum fuss. C lured me into having a tryout dive at a pool with our local scuba centre. There was mention of wondrous underwater seascapes, brightly coloured fish and fantastical coral, and things with funny names (nudibranch).
I’ve had a fairly long-lived fear of getting my face anyway near underwater, and the notion of water actually getting in my mouth or nose induces an almost pantwettingly anxietal reaction.
I was promised that in scuba, the mask covering the nose, and the regulator in the mouth meant there would be no problems.

This was a lie.

Firstly, I discovered upon prancing around in the pool with scuba gear on, that this is just a trick, to get you to sign up to a £300 course to become certified. They make it fun the first time, like heroin. You swim around underwater, breathing away, your mask is on, so nary a droplet near the nostrils.

So, lured in by these cohorts of doom, I signed up, all excitable like. Then the terror began. I found out I had to do a 200m swim to prove I could swim well enough. No great problem you might think.

Wrong.

Apparently I would have to swim like a proper person, and not like an english granny with my head stuck out of the water at all times. Plus, I haven’t really done much swimming since I was, er, 12, so my stamina is not the best.
C, who likes to take things to extremes spent two weeks, (every single day at the pool after work, at weekends) teaching me how to swim properly. This involved me getting over severe anxiety about water, and complete inability to breathe out underwater, and breathe in when I raised my head above the surface without it all going wrong and inhaling a pint of chlorine water.
There were some interesting teaching techniques involved in me getting over this anxiety, such as repeatedly drowning myself time after time until I learned how to breathe out through my nose while underwater, and not breathe in until I came up out of the water. Then I had to learn how to do that whilst swimming. Apparently it take 2 weeks to learn how to swim comfortably underwater. Who knew?

Which was just in time for my first proper pool dive with the scuba centre. I was feeling a little confident of myself now. I could swim underwater. That means I could pretty much do anything right?

Again, with the wrong.

I was subjected to 3 hours of exercises that makes waterboarding seem pretty lightweight. A lot of this involved kneeling at the bottom of a pool for ages, taking out the regulator (yes the thing you keep in your mouth so you can breathe underwater) and blowing bubbles until it was time to put it back in, taking it out and then throwing it away (why would I ever want to do that?) and retrieving it before I drowned, using someone elses spare regulator, breathing from a freeflowing regulator (akin to having an audience with Neptune and Njord, the Norse god of the wind, at the same time) and other crazy shit.

Wearing contact lenses as I do, I particularly enjoyed the bits where they made me take off my mask underwater (exposing my nose to the water!) and I had to breathe through the regulator (and not the nose for that would make me die) for a minute, with my eyes clamped shut so my contacts didn’t shoot out. Then I had to put the mask back on, and as it was full of water, do a complicated procedure involving breathing out through the nose while lifting my face from my chest and pressing down on the top of the mask. The end result was intended to be that air pressure would push the water out of the bottom of the mask.

Several times this did not happen, and I merely managed to inhale water through my nose somehow, panic, and thrash towards the surface, some inches above me.

I did this three times. The minute was terrifying, but easy enough. Just chanting (in my mind, as chanting is hard underwater) ‘do not breathe through your nose you asswipe’ helped a lot. Getting the mask on, with eyes closed was tricky but ok. For some reason I could not get the clearing the mask bit, and did quite a bit of drowning.
Eventually I got it, but managed to lose a contact lens in the process, so ended up all half blind and wonky.

The upside of my intense training regime was that after all this watery torture, the swimming test was a total breeze and was enjoyable in comparison.

I am told that after one more pool session, and two days of diving in a water filled quarry where further attempts will be made on my life, I will be allowed to swim around underwater without actually fucking around with any of the equipment that is meant to protect me, and keep me from a watery grave. Possibly then I will get to see fish. And stuff.

Bah.

Contemplating whether I would blog more (at all) if I could write from within my browser, as i have become very lazy with all the tweeting from firefox, and facebook integration with my igoogle homepage. Logging into wordpress is just too painful. By the time I’ve done that the moment has passed. So checking out scribefire, a firefox add-on.

Just a quick update. Moved my life into storage on Friday. Spent the weekend at friends, cleaning the house and got our deposit back (miracles do happen!). Was supposed to fly out of Cardiff at 6am to Houston, but got delayed due to fog or some such. Pretty sure pilots just need some lights on the runway and instruments, but what do I know?
Set off 2 hours late, landed in Amsterdam having missed the flight, then re-routed to Toronto, but that plane was late too, and arrived in toronto too late to get the connecting to Houston. Ended up staying in the Sheraton over the road, courtesy of Continental. Not too shabby. got some meal vouchers which covered maybe the breadrolls for dinner.
pleasant Canadian waiter suggested Rickards Red which was indeed tasty. The steak was more well done than medium rare, but I was tired having being trekking the globe for 18 hours. Tried in vain to tweet a friend in toronto. I was passing through, it seemed a rare opportunity…
Sadly my phone was out of juice and my charger was in my luggage which I assumed was in Houston by then. Little did I know.
So I failed to meet up, but slept like the dead, and up for another early flight at 7.55 which actually left at about 9.30.
made it to Houston 24 hours later than I should have done.

then found out luggage was nowhere to be found. not even in the system. Oh well.

After two days of incompetence two of them turned up, no sign of the other one, and then out of the blue, a courier woke us up at 2am with the bag. Whilst I admire the above and beyond’ level of service, it might have been nice to wait until the morning.

Whatever. I got some free clothes thanks to continental. finally have my luggage (the 2am wake up was last night), getting over the jet lag, and have eaten large quantities of food. Great Texan barbecue at a place called Joes… Awesome.

Texans are very friendly, and somewhat creepily happy all the time. I suspect it’s all a front and they are secretly planning to lynch me. the refrain from Deliverance pops into my mind unbidden a lot, but I;m sure it’s nothing.

I think I may have gained 20 pounds since I got here. not that I couldnt do with gaining 20 pounds.

so, if my updates are somewhat sporadic over the next 2 weeks its because I am eating my way through Texas, and on my return at the beginning of the year I will be moving into a new house. Oh, and then a new job.

I had too many margaritas last night at the mexican and spent the morning and afternoon alternately feeling ill, throwing up or having a headache.
Just starting to feel human again, but might skip the monstro-food escapades tonight, and the drinking.

I’d like to repeat my tweet from earlier this week.
Never fly KLM. Their service is awful, and their staff incompetent. Although the in-flight meals are good. This is no way makes up for the confused hell I went through.

I can never thank you enough,
For introducing me,
To the CelebFash hilarity,
That is GoFugYourself…

Unusually for a man,
I do like a good chortle,
At whatever Posh Spice is,
Wearing this weekend…

FIN

I am playing with the new QuickPress feature on the dashboard. It is, well, quick.
(Aside: Where the hell did Dame Wiggy go? Wiggy! Why do you keep disappearing when my back is turned…
What was all that malarkey with Marco and why did that happen? I never understand anything that goes on at your blog…are you constantly drunk? Did the crazed woman stop stalking you, for whatever reason that was happening, which you didn’t explain properly either…unless you did it in some kind of youtube pictionary way. Thinking about it, I think possibly Dame Wiggy may have been one of those feral children who turn up and speak their own strange language, only instead of strange grunts and runes, Wiggy used youtubes as some kind of interpretive symbolism)
Ok so that was less of an aside and more of a whole paragraph. Sorry.

No. Crap. I lost the thread again. I’ll come back.