over the cliff

I taught for 8 hours today. Noon until 8 PM. And being me, I neither ate breakfast nor lunch before heading over to the divestore. After two hours of lecturing and getting equipment, we headed over to the pool where we spent the next six hours in the water. I am… exhausted. On the bright side, I’m in love with my class. It’s absolutely the best group of students I’ve ever had. Well, the Courts Plus group I taught a couple of summers ago was good, but they were people who already knew eachother.

I actually like this class so much that I’m considering doing their first check out dives instead of passing them off to my father. And I hate checkout dives. It takes a pretty special group of people to make me forget my hatred of salt water. I was especially proud of this girl Nicole. She’s the one I was most worried about because she’s not taking the class because she wants to, but because her mother wants a dive buddy. She has some fears about open water, and yet she was the most comfortable today in the pool. That made me happy.

It was still exhausting. And draining. But it was a good day.

Last night I decided to try to organize some of the papers piling up beside my desk and I came across my travel journal. Here are some things that I thought were so fascinating as to recount in those pages:

When I arrived at the airport to check in and fly across the ocean to Stavanger, Norway… the ticket person discovered that my flight plans included a 10 day, 2 hour layover in New Jersey. I’m sure New Jersey is lovely to people who live there but I really had my heart set on more exotice places like Berlin, Krakow and Prague. So my mother called the travel agent who made the error and she (the agent) drove two and a half hours to Raleigh to give me new tickets that had me leaving the next day sans 10 day layover.

When I arrived in Stavanger, I was majorly sleep deprived and had a miniature bottle of wine in my hands when I greeted Katie, Josh and Katherine. I fared better than Katherine though, who was dragged to a party the night she arrived and was pestered constantly by people asking her if she had a boyfriend. She finally exclaimed, “I’m a lesbian” and tried to crawl under a glass table to take a nap.

When we were trying to get to the ferry, we had to climb a fence because we couldn’t find the entrance… and I fell. P.S. Oliver, stop laughing at me.

The hostel in Berlin lost our reservation so we had to stay at a pension. Katie was disappointed that we weren’t going to be staying in the gay district.

Our first night in Berlin we went to a restuarant where some drunk German kept coming to our table and talking to us. The only German words we knew well were ‘Yes’ and ‘Thank you’ so we kept repeating them. When the waiter finally shooed him away, he told us that the man had been asking for Katherine’s hand in marriage.

Firetruck ladder interpretive dance!

We didn’t figure out until the last day how to pay for the public transportation… so basically we had been travelling illegally for the past 3 days on the buses and subway.

Katie got smited by a steel door when she tried to sneak into the restroom at the Berlin train station without paying.

On the overnight train to Krakow, we were woken up several times by armed guards. Customs agents. And when I say armed, I mean like AK 47 armed. You try waking up to that two inches from your face and see what it does to you. Well, actually we were so friggin tired we didn’t pay much attention.

Feet. Pain. Ow. Duct tape. There are a lot of comments in my journal about that.

The second day in Prague we went to the train station to get tickets to Budapest and a policeman stopped me and asked me for my passport. Fortunately I had it on me… but normally I left it in my room. After that, I kept it with me.

We saw ‘The Mummy Returns’ our last day in Prague. Czech, Russian, and German subtitles. That was only a problem when the characters spoke ancient Egyptian because we didn’t get the English translation. Although that didn’t really detract from our understanding of the plot.

One night in Venice, Katherine, BB and I decided we wanted to see the sun set over the water. So we kept heading west trying to find well… the end of Venice. What the HELL were we thinking?

The train ride from Venice to Munich sucked. Really sucked. It was so insanely crowded. Basically if you have a Eurorail pass, you can get on the train. Doesn’t mean you can get a seat though. Katherine, BB, and I were in a compartment with 3 Equadorians who kept hitting each other in the groin with water bottles. On one of the stops, Katie got off the train and came to our window yelling ‘Our train is going to NICE! Where is your train going!’ It turned out that somewhere along the way, the train would split and one part (the part with Katie and Josh) was going to France whereas the part Katherine, BB, and I were on was going to Germany. So Katie and Josh got on our part of the train but had to stay out in the Hall with the rest of the 2 million backpackers. I’ve always wondered what would happen if Katie hadn’t discovered that when she did.

Apparently in Munich, there are clothing optional sections of the city parks.

In Amsterdam we stayed in a Christian Youth Hostel in the middle of the red light district. They gave us a little bible pamphlet on check in. I wonder if I still have it…

One of our travelling companions, wanted to go to one of the Coffeeshops. He came out all excited saying “It’s like a grocery store in there!” Then he proceeded to list a whole bunch of different types of weed. Stupid, innocent, naive me thought there was only one. Learn something new every day I guess.

So that was Europe. Guess you had to be there.

The other day my mother and I got into a discussion about the various charging horse scenes in Lord of the Rings. She and I have the same problem with them: The horses used were not war horses. They should’ve been using cold bloods. Or at least ones with some obvious draft horse in the line.

Of course it wasn’t really Jackson’s fault. When you watch the documentaries on the Return of the King DVD it explains how they put out an open call for anyone with a horse to come be an extra. Finding that many Belgians would’ve been impossible.

It’s really not that big of a deal I guess. I mean I never questioned the gigantic flaming eyeball so why should the fact that regular horses would’ve had trouble carrying the weight of an armored soldier bother me?

I call this the “OMG I KNOW THAT!” Syndrome. Whenever there’s an attempt to include technical details in a book or movie, people who actually know all those technical details poise themselves to pounce on any mistakes. The worst case of this is the movie ‘The Abyss’. One day when I actually read Card’s novelization, prepare yourself for a gigantic ‘This is so wrong and let me tell you why’ post.

I also theorize that people who actually know all the technical junk, are sometimes the worst people to write the stories. You can’t write ‘The Abyss’ correctly because there is no gas mixture you can use that would not produce seriously garbled voices. And there is nothing the aliens could do to make all that DCS go away. Personally, I’ve avoided writing a short story about cave diving for a long time because I know that I would get lost in the explanation of all the gear.

So maybe I should face my fears and write ‘The Horse who went Cave Diving’. Or not.

I had the strangest dream last night. I got engaged. To Adam. I think my reasoning behind it was “Well I have to get married to someone…”

Then the dream changed to something about comparing St. Catherine’s School of Richmond to St. Catherine’s School of somewhere in England for a term paper in Black Lit. There was a line discussing the efficacy of having a religious mascot during sports games. Then the dream shifted to an infomercial for some woman’s singing career… and the woman turned out to be Shawna McCarthy (the editor for Realms of Fantasy for everyone who reads this except Oliver).

If anyone would like to hazard a guess as to the interpretation of this dream… feel free. I left out a few details though… diamonds that kept falling out of their setting, Captain Jack Sparrow, and wrapping up a sled in packing paper.

…Maybe I should go take my medication now.

My cat Demos is absolutely head over heels in love with the family cat Maggie. And Maggie does not return the feelings. Every time Demos even tries to get close, Maggie hisses at him. Growls at him. Swats at him.

Yet time after time, Demos runs up to her with his little trilling meows, begging to be loved only to be rebuffed again and again and again. It’s really quite sad. Although it has given both my mother and me hours of amusement. Earlier this afternoon we put Maggie outside and Demos ran to the door. Then he jumped up in my mother’s lap to peer through the breakfast room window. Then he ran to the solarium to peer through those doors. He just can’t stand to let her out of his sight.

My mother assumed that after a couple of days, Maggie would become accustomed to his presence and cease to hiss and spit. However after several weekends of watching this love affair play out, I think it’s safe to say that Maggie will never quit her role of the frigid bitch. She won’t hurt him, unless of course you think breaking his tiny little kitty heart into a million pieces counts… but she definitely won’t be swayed his continual crooning of “I want to be loved by you, by nobody else but you…”

Okay okay so it’s my mother and I who are doing the actual singing, but we are merely channeling the spirit of his unrequited love.