It’s all gone to the dogs

Chez Chris has become a house of dogs. Now that Red and Spot pretty much reside on my patio, I’ve taken to leaving them a plastic pot outside full of water. It’s actually the small plastic pot that I am supposed to use as a ladle to flush the loo. Except I found that a couple of ladles at a time didn’t really do all that effective a job at getting rid of nasty business…..

So now my shit-ladle has become the dogs’ water bowl. Every morning when I wake up, the pups are asleep on the patio. After we take the 45 minutes to an hour getting ready slowly (not having to be at the dive shop at seven, means I am quite alright with lying in bed for half an hour figuring out if I am actually awake or just having an awful nightmare that I am stinking hot, headachy and feel like I have recently coughed up my left lung), we leave the house for breakfast. The last few days have been nice and sunny (well at least for sizeable portions), look, the missus took a picture of a very pretty blue sky today:

As we leave for brekkie, with the sun blazing already, the pups tend to lie on various steps leading down from the porch, where abundant shadows wait to cool their weary bones.

When we come back throughout the day, the pups are either already up on our porch waiting for us, or they spot us either parking the bike or walking up the stairs and coming flying from some direction to happily accompany us up. It all comes down to the missus feeding the blighters and I am sure if James knew he’d have a small conniption.

But it gets better and better. So now Red and Spot have domiciled themselves at Chez Chris, well so too has Padi decided this is his home away from home. A few times now, as we lie here reading books listening to the old iPod or watching movies on the laptop, the screen will suddenly bang open and in lopes Mr. Padi. This often results in a hop up onto the bed for a wee snooze, but more commonly it means he scuttles down to the end of the bed and curls up in the crook of the bed and the wall. He then passes out here for a while until he gets restless at some godforsaken hour of the very early morning and scritch-scratches at the door to let him out so that he can make his way home to mum and dad (Natalie and Tim).

Last night it got even better. It seems Padi snuck over to our place simply to evade Sunny, who loves to torment the black devil. Sunny decided to hunt Padi down into our room. Of course, it has to be a particularly buggy night as well, so the screen keeps banging open, we keep trying to get the buggers out and they keep trying to come back in. The room is now infested with small flying critters. And in the midst of it all, world war three on the floor, the bed, all over Chez Chris:

I need a waffle bat to keep these little shits in line.

Oh, I took another old DM physics exam yesterday for practice….I screwed up one obvious question, but otherwise got the rest right….95%….Stone, hope you appreciate this subtle tuning of my old and crusty mind. Tonight….physiology!! Whhhhooooo-hoooo, the excitement builds!! What I really need to turn to soon, however, is a bloody shareholder’s agreement……yep, even more exciting!! And getting my crusty old bloody professors to respond to my requests that they assist me in my application to the U of T to do a doctorate…they really aren’t fast action kind of dudes…..dammit.

Ok, so, I got back in the water yesterday. Assisting Natalie on the confined portion of a rescue course. Julia, the German girl that hangs around Sunshine a lot, is one of the rescue students. The other two students are an English fellow and a Spanish dude. Both the guys are fairly competent…..Julia…..we’re working on it.

Anyway, the confined session went mostly great. I actually felt pretty useful, because Julia was having some issue with her ears which took a lot of Nat’s attention and so it fell to me to demonstrate to the other two a few of the preliminary skills that Natalie wanted to know they could all do before we started the actual rescue elements (mask removal and clear, alternate air source breathing, buddy breathing from a single regulator, free-flow regulator and oral-inflation fin pivots). This is great for me as most of these are skills I need to be able to demonstrate as well on the IDC and IE’s, so demonstrating them to real students was awesome. And I did them flawlessly, I might add. Yeah. I am THAT shit-hot.

Then I got to play victim a lot. Which is always fun….especially as a panicked diver. Sure, you get tired flailing around on the surface, but hey you also get to attack the students!! One of them couldn’t quite get one concept (where you submerge slightly and swim around a panicked diver to surface behind them so that you can control them) and so the third time they screwed it up, I totally jumped on their tank and threw them around a little. They didn’t screw it up after that. But beyond attacking the students, I also had to watch one pair while Nat helped the other or be the victim for one while she helped the other pair. This meant that I had a lot of hands-on “teaching” time. Not that I am a qualified instructor, obviously, but as they performed the skills I got to advise them on how they could improve, what they might have missed and so on. It felt good.

And while all of this took place, the missus sunbathed. Tough day for her. Actually, she said she liked seeing what I did, because she now has a different appreciation as to what it is I am trying to become. Of course, she’s the missus, but she said that observing me I am very good at helping the students understand things. Aw shucks. Here’s some pics the missus took of us in the pool practicing surface skills (i.e. responding to an unconscious diver on the surface):

Took a few hours, but it was fun. And my cough wasn’t crazy bad, so bonus!! Today is the big test….today I go out on the Ban’s boat with them. It’s another beautiful sunny day, we’re just enjoying breakfast, so let’s see how I fair in the ocean. Come on cough, fuck off.