There is a lot to fill in since I last posted a week and a half ago and I'm sorry to say I'm not going to be able to do a complete job in bringing you up to speed with all that has transpired. Let's just skip to the exciting bit where I went scuba diving and ran into a shark underwater. It was pretty scary, but not that scary. It was only a nurse shark, which, like it sounds, is not as predatory as a killer shark. Actual diving was scary, since I was convinced my mask was about to fill with blood, like I heard had happened to someone once when the pressure made some blood vessels burst in their nose or something. The shark wasn't scary.

Learning scuba is a process that normally you might learn in a pool or controlled environment, but I had the kind of lesson on the side of a boat out in the water. I was actually going to sign up for a class that went for a few weeks, but I guess this was better, because the whole process, of my not being a diver to being one atmosphere (30 feet) underwater) took about four minutes. They basically slapped on the tanks and ran through a bunch of hand motions, some of which, like the thumbs up for go up thumb to forefinger for ok, were pretty obvious, told me to breathe deeply and don't come up too fast. Then I was overboard.

Even though I have snorkled many times, it's a whole different thing to be underwater with a tank and lead belt. For one thing, you sink like a stone. As you go down, you feel like your head is going to explode, because as you go down, the air in your body expands. The air in your lungs gets adjusted, because you breathe but the air in your sinuses doesn't expand, except through your ears and eyes. So you get a little sinus pressure. Normally you can releive that by pinching your nose and tilting your head back, but when you have had a stuffed head, as I did, it just builds up pressure until it feels like it will pop, which it probably would, if you went deep enough. So you have to keep popping your ears.

Another thing is that I was swimming over a coral bed. If I had a wetsuit on, that would be no big deal, but I didn't. There was fire coral everywhere, which if you rub against it, it makes you have a very bad rash that burns, like fire. But being underwater, you can't really control how high or low you are in the water, or at least I coudn't. You can within a few feet, but the coral is not like the bottom of a pool, it has spikes and sometimes you have to swim under outcroppings or through tunnels about as wide as a dishwasher. So I was a little afraid of touching it. I noticed that my instructor put on a wetsuit before we got in the water.

There were quite a few fish there, some brightly colored ones, some barracuda, and some pufferfish. There was a manta ray

and a sea turtle.

Also, I was breathing dry air, so your throat gets all dry. I was trying to lick the back of my throat, but it was hard, because I would have to roll upsidown to let gravity take the saliva down, and being upsdown would hurn my head with sinus pressure, plus I was afraid I might touch fire coral or one of the many large sea urchins on the seabed, which are kind of like porcupines. If you touch one the barbs can stick into you and get infected. They say you should pee on a sea urchin barb, but I don't see how you can do that underwater. Oh and I got married too. That was pretty nice.