Hey, guys!

I'm having fun in the Florida Keys.  I've made five dives in the past two days.  It feels like I'm getting an ear infection, which I really hope isn't the case.  Keep your fingers crossed for my ears.

Today, I dove into an actual underwater hotel.

Now, before you think this place is uber cool...

Imagine your toilet, all pristine and pretty.  Now, imagine it after a night of heavy drinking and eating of fatty food.  You have Bud Mud like crazy, and you've puked up every ounce of your Super Size Fries.  On top of that, the flusher is broken.  And then, after that, you decide to try and add a week's worth of garbage into the toilet.  You know... just because.

That's Jules Undersea Lodge.

Visibility is about three feet.  They have a plastic tarp closing it off from the rest of the canal system, so there are absolutely no fish.  It smells like tepid, stagnant sea water.  The lagoon is used as a garbage dump.

And it costs $1300 a night.  Yeah... seriously.

Why did I dive in that today instead of the pristine beauty that is the John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park?  Seas were at 5 feet today, and it would have been miserable getting out to the reef.  All I needed were two quick dives to make my certification complete.  That was the easiest way to do it. 

Tomorrow we are either diving then going to Key West or are just going to Key West.  It depends how rough the ocean is tomorrow.  Keep your fingers crossed for calm seas.

Oh!  I almost forgot to mention...

One of the guys that came along with us ended up getting the bends on a deep dive they did yesterday.  He's spent the past two days in and out of the decompression chamber.  It messed up his back pretty bad.  He'll make it, though.  He has another morning in the chamber tomorrow, then he'll be done.  He can't fly home, so we will have to make room in the truck for him to ride with us.  He'll get to meet my Granny.

That's all the news from me.  I'm eating well.  Lots of fish, though not as many oysters as I hoped I would have eaten by now.  None of those, actually.  Bummer.

Well, after two days on the road, I finally arrived in Key Largo. In the spirit of William Least-Heat Moon, we took a LOT of back country, two-laned blue highways. It may have added some hours to our traveling, but it sure made the trip a lot more enjoyable. Our exact route.


We stopped for a night last night at my grandmother's. The one who calls me Dumas because she says it's a more polite way of calling me a dumb ass. She had fried crab and seafood gumbo waiting for us when we walked in the door. She may be mean as a fireant, but she sure can cook!

When we pulled into town -- into Key Largo, I mean -- we went straight to a pizza place where I had two local microbrews and two slices of pizza. I'm tired, but I'm happy I'm back out on the road on yet another adventure.

I sure miss April, though. I don't intend to sound sappy at all. But when you love someone, you just want to share everything with them. It feels like I can only half-way enjoy my trip because half of me isn't here.

We are going on our first dive tomorrow afternoon. On Tuesday, we'll be diving on a sunken ship. There's a cool story to tell with that ship, but you'll just have to wait.

Have a good week, guys! I'll keep in touch.</a>

April and I went for a walk the other day.  I love being in love. :)

April and I have been working out a lot lately. We're gonna be toit
like toigers.

Why I'm so proud of my girlfriend:

She made it onto Mississippi Public Radio's Morning Edition.

I got cornered by the weird guy I work with. Some of the highlights:

• Deja Vu is not caused by some weird brain hiccup but by us time traveling from a different life. We time travel all the time without realizing it.
  
• One of his transcendental meditation teachers went to Egypt and, through meditation, slipped out of the time/space continuum and traveled to alienville and had a grand time. He magically lost three hours here on Earth. (I call that a good nap...)
  
• Just like plants, we are attached to an individual planet in the universe. Whatever happens to that planet happens to us here on Earth.
  
• The government has remote viewers who sit in secret rooms and spy on all of us. There were, according to him, people spying on this exact conversation.
  
• Russia uses remote viewers to spy on us. They used it before we did, and that's how they got nukes.

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Whew.

I've just had three cups of coffee at double strength (I love you, Senseo!) with sugar and Coffeemate. I ate Thai for breakfast.

My breath smells like the unwiped gonorroeal asshole of a homeless Egyptian.

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I unfortunately had to quit my radio station job after only three weeks.

The main reason I got the job was to have extra income to help with the debt reduction and savings. Had times been different, I would have been making an extra $650 or so per month for that purpose.

But with the station 40 miles away, and gas at $3.54 per gallon, and my tax at 18%, I was making exactly $1.34 per hour after all of those expenses.

A buck thirty four.

Hardly worth it.

I really enjoyed being back in radio. But business is business. With the forced-speculation economy we're in, I just couldn't justify the low wages.

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On Tuesday, May 22, 2007, mitsu99 and I went scuba diving off the coast of Oahu, Hawaii.

During the week of May 12-16, my dad and I will go scuba diving in Key Largo, Florida. We'll be diving on huge coral reefs and on sunken ships. We'll drive down to Key West and see some five-toed cats. We'll be grilling fresh fish and drinking cold beer.

Expect tons of pictures and video from the trip. April made me swear on our relationship that I'll wear at least SPF 15, so don't expect any posts bitching about sunburn.

I'm taking my certification class over the weekend. It should be pretty exciting. I just have to swim 200 meters at nine in the morning. I'm not even in shape. Except round.

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Have a fun weekend.

Just a series of randomness and news updates on my life. Since, you know, this is a journal about my life, and you may not always be interested in funny video clips of Chinese English lessons.

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Almost a year after planning on buying one, I finally had resources enough to buy an iPhone.  I'm going through a bit of buyer's remorse due to how much it cost.  There is a lot I could have bought/paid off with the chunk of income tax refund money I used.  April could have used the money more than my greedy ass.  It seems selfish to spend that much money on myself.

However, I've been wanting it for over a year.  And I've been working my rump off.  A little bit of self reward is good, isn't it?  I'll keep repeating that mantra until I believe it.


Yes, I realize I look like shit.  These overnights are not nearly as easy as they were ten years ago.  And I've been eating like shit.  I'm about two inches away from being absolutely disgusted with myself.

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I also bit the bullet and opened a Facebook profile thingy.  For some reason, the stress and heartache of last year killed the little part of my brain that thought it was fun to let everybody know where I was every minute of the day.  So, I deleted my very active MySpace page and quit writing as much personal stuff in here.  I'm trying to force myself to become part of the living world again and get back in touch with old friends.

It makes me nervous and anxious.  Yech.

But I have to figure out how it all works.  I just got an email saying April wrote on my wall.  I have no clue what that means.

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April and I will be living together when she gets back from Italy in early August.

Just thought you should know.

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I went to see April's final performance in Jackson on Saturday night.  I had pretty decent seats -- row L, orchestra section.

Three rows in front of me was a woman who, during the first half of the show, seemed at worst very unclassy.  She was all but lying down in her chair with her feet propped up on the chairs in front of her.  She would make loud yawning noises and was just making a fool of herself.

Which, you know... whatever.  Not really affecting me other than slightly distracting me from the opera periodically.

Then came intermission.  Then the beginning of the third act.

The lady seemed really restless.  She started out in her lying position.  But she was doing a lot of adjusting around.  She would get up out of her seat, shake her butt a little, and sit down, lying down on the opposite side of the chair.  Her yawning noises got more frequent.  She would cough and hack.  It was very distracting.

Then, she slid below the top of the seat to where I could only see the top of her head.

This is where it gets crazy and unbelievable.  But I swear to all things holy and good (like the pope's hat) that this contains not one iota of falsification.

I didn't see her for a while... maybe for a couple of minutes.  I thought she lay down on the floor.  I was partly concerned, maybe that she was having a medical issue and needed help.  But then I -- and everyone around me -- heard it.

It was the distinctive sound a jet of liquid makes when it is squirted at pressure onto a hard floor.  My heart started beating rapidly, and my eyes widened.  As did everyone around me.  We were all strangers, but we started whispering to one another like we were classmates in the middle of a test.

"Is she...?!?"  "What the--?!?"  THE WOMAN WAS PISSING ON THE FLOOR IN THE MIDDLE OF THE THIRD ACT!

!!!

She got up after she was done, pulled up her panties, and sat back down.  She sat up for the rest of the show and paid attention.  Meanwhile, I was so distracted by the pee that I didn't really catch much of the last half of the opera.

After the curtain call, and after she promptly got up and left, we all got up and rushed to where she was sitting because none of us could believe what we just saw.  But there was a big puddle where she was, and a nice little river that went down the slanted floor to the front row.

It was the most unbelievable thing that has ever happened to me ever.

I knew nobody would believe me, so after the show I got one of my seat neighbors to verify to April that I wasn't making this up.  I wouldn't have believed it had someone else told me.  I bet some of you won't believe it.  But I swear to you. 

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April also has a pee-related story.  But I'll leave it up to her to tell it.  Keep an eye on her LJ: poxyfairydingle

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Ok.  That's about it from me.  Have a good hump day!

This is April's first aria from "The Marriage of Figaro". I'm going to color-correct the whole thing and make the audio a little clearer. But I wanted you guys to see April sing for the weekend:

Lots of links and fun things below the cut...

If you are around your computer at 12:00 Central time today, go to my TV station's website and watch our new studio webcam. You'll see me running a couple of cameras and being silly during commercial breaks.

It's underneath the 7-Day forecast box.

Since Rachael Ray never called me to invite me to the show, I've decided to upload the video to let you take a look at it.  Honestly, I wasn't very happy with the final product.  I just didn't think I was interesting enough in my attempt.  But I'll leave the final judgment up to you.  I had to break it up into two sections since YouTube only allows ten minutes max length.



And...

I wrote a joke for my radio show in response to this story about coffee being brewed from cat-defecated coffee beans.

It went something like, "Drinkers like the aroma and taste of the coffee, but many didn't care for the bits of corn floating around in it."

I got phone calls in response to my little joke. I felt creative.

I gave up a few precious hours of sleep last night to go shoot some pictures of my girlfriend singing in "The Marriage of Figaro."  I was there for three hours and shot over 650 pictures.  I weeded out all of the overly blurry and awkward ones and ended up with about 125.  Here is a fairly random selection of the night.  Here is a preview:




By the way...  Having a girlfriend who is very talented is the biggest aphrodisiac and natural high-inducing feature I've EVER experienced in a relationship.  She makes my mouth water...

Enjoying my new job! Yes, I drink coffee while on the air. I also bring it right up to the mic to make little slurpy sounds so everyone can smell.

How I feel today:



(By the end of my day today I'll have been at work for 41 consecutive hours.)

The main morning weather guy here at work goes and voice tracks a full shift at a radio station between our last news cut-in at 9am and our midday show at 12. I tag along with him about once a week, and when people at the radio station ask who I am, I tell them I am just hanging out until the station decides to pay me.

Everyone loves that joke.

Well, one of the DJs there up and died two days ago. He didn't show up for a shift, and when someone went to see about him he was on the floor, graveyard dead.

I rushed over there today and told them I was available to work. And, sure enough, I got hired. I'm once again a radio DJ!

Wow. This opera thing is a lot of work for April.

We have gone from the "My roommate things you are staying over too much" discussion to the "Put on your slippers and meet me in your parking lot so I can say hi" text message. We have gone from "I wonder how many times we'll have the sex today" thought to the "I wonder if we can stay awake past 8:00" thought.

But it really doesn't bother me in the least. She's happy (albeit tired), so I'm happy (and quite well rested).

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I have a question for those many of you who are smarter than me.  Smarter than I?  Smarter than myself?

Anyway, smarter than all of us.

It involves global warming.  Yes, I'm opening that can of worms again.

When I was driving around the other day, I got to thinking about things, and I started to wonder if global warming wasn't as much caused by increases in carbon dioxide as it was just by releasing potential heat energy stored within fossil fuels.

For example...  If you have a fireplace in your house and put a log in the fireplace, the temperature will remain the same.  But when you ignite that log, everything will get warm because you are releasing stored up energy the log captured from the sun during its ill-fated lifetime.  Your living room won't heat up due to the released carbon dioxide and other gases.  It's happening because the potential energy is being released.

Since we have only relatively recently started massively burning these fossil fuels, is it possible that some of this global warming could be caused by, in essence, this big log we have ignited?  Biological matter captured a shit ton of energy from the sun millions of years ago, and we are suddenly releasing this heat back into our big living room.  Under my little hypothetical theory, then, global warming isn't caused by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but by the act of burning fossil fuels.

Comments?

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Look at me!  I'm kind of like Ferris Bueller...

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No word yet from Rachael Ray.

I'll know for sure by Friday.

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I spent an hour on my budget last night.  Fuel alone takes up 12% of my entire budget.  Ouch!  It would be more, but my carpooling helps A LOT.

I got paid yesterday, and every penny is allocated.  I literally have $0 sitting around waiting for its draft number to come up.  In one way, it's empowering.  In another way -- one I'll have to get used to -- it's disheartening.  All of that money already gone.  But it's not like it's been gambled away or stolen.  All of my bills are paid.  I have plenty of food money.  I have gas money.  I have haircut money and clothes money.  I even have money to go to the movies or to the frozen custard place.  Because those fun things are in my budget.  Once I'm out, I'm out.  All of the other Washingtons are already going to something else.

It's responsible.  It's smart.  It's also scary.  I'm following, on faith and trust, someone who is telling me that this is the best way to do things.  And, he's been right so far in my observations.  If I had a sudden car disaster like what happened to April this weekend, I have the emergency reserves to bail myself out without worrying about rent or food.

It's just a whole new process that I've never done before.  That's why it's scary.

More to come on this subject, I'm sure...

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I forgot to mention, but as of Easter day, I officially became a divorced man.

No major difference except I have to pay for my own health insurance now, and I am able to remarry any time I want.

Anybody get supplemental health insurance?  I'm thinking about getting it.  Our work health insurance is one of those 80/20 plans.  If something catastrophic happened, I couldn't pay 20% of anything over a few hundred dollars.  Plus, they pay your normal salary past what your six leave doesn't cover.

It just seems like a smart thing to do.  Comments?

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Ok.  I'm done with this novel.  Get to commenting.

The other day, at work, out of the blue, I got an earworm from my highschool days. "Near Wild Heaven" was playing over and over in my brain, and suddenly I had to have it. But I didn't want that one song. I wanted the best album of my high school years: R.E.M.'s Out Of Time.

I kept putting it off, but after going for an eight-mile hike yesterday (!!), I knew I had to have it to relive the days of my yoot.

Today, I checked and saw iTunes had it on sale. With $5.98 in my iTunes giftcard account, the album only really cost me $2. Woot!

Now, I want Document.

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Yeah. I went on an 8.2-mile hike along the Longleaf Trace. For a Southern Mississippi outdoorsy project, it's really nice.

I'm trying to lose this winter gut I got this year. It's great being in love, except you tend to eat a lot more than you would if you were single. Plus, after my extended period of having little money and feasting on Ramen, I tended to go a little overboard on the food thing when I got money again. Whoops!

So, I'm trying to get used to having my heartrate up before I join the local Crossfit gym.

I've missed crosscountry hiking. When I was losing weight to enter the Air Force, I lost close to 40 lbs. by walking cross-country. My record for one day was walking from Jefferson City to Columbia in Missouri: thirty miles!

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I've been doing well with my Dave Ramsey debt reduction project. I have established contact with my student loan company, and after telling them of my situation, I got my principal reduced by 25%! It's amazing what happens when you just ask.

My emergency fund will be full at this next paycheck. Once that is funded, I can start paying off everybody I borrowed money from. He says to pay off the least amount owed first, then move up the ladder. We'll see how all of that goes.

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April woke up with a dead ignition switch. It's strange how it worked perfectly last night, then today was deed.

After ordering a $55 tow truck, I remembered I signed up for the roadside assistance package from my cell phone company. Argh. Too little memory too late in the day.

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For those of you who asked about seeing my entry to the Rachael Ray competition...

I had to sign over my rights to the video, so no can do. At least not until I find out if I made it or not. If I didn't make it, I won't mind breaking the rules a little and uploading it to YouTube. But I'd sure hate to win the contest only to be stripped of my prize because I broke the usage rules of my entry video.

So... sorry.

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And finally, a little infographic for a Madonna song. It made me laugh

I submitted my application tape to the Rachael Ray show's cooking contest.  If they like it, I'll be spending all next month (I thought it was all of June, but it'll be all of April) in New York doing food-related competitions on her show.

The only guidelines they had for the entry was to record yourself cooking one of your favorite recipes.  They didn't give a time requirement or anything.  So, April and I spent an entire evening on Saturday shooting.  I showed her some full episodes of the Naked Chef and told her I wanted to model my video after that.  I figure it would be a different way at going at the video than most people would think to do.

It ended up being fifteen minutes!  We shot about an hour and a half of video, so it was a good reduction.

So, cross your fingers.  I'd have a lot of fun if I got to stay in New York for a month.

We are off to New Orleans this evening.  See you on the flip side.

Why even do closed captioning when you cant understand it? Most of our cc shows look like this. If I was deaf, I'd be pissed.