Post Number Two

Okay, so it's been a few months, and now I'm basically driven by guilt to update this thing. Believe it or not, things have happened since the end of February! I'll try to distill the most interesting parts. First off, I spent the month of March doing some dives and learning how to ID the various cichlid species in Xiloa. It can be tough since you can't always rely on coloration - instead, you have to recognize the general body shape in order to be certain of the species. I also spent some time learning how to use Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro for image and video editing. Honestly, that's the gist of the entire month - nothing really blog-worthy, in my opinion.

Kittens love a warm external hard drive

April was even worse in the blog-worthiness category, since I spent the majority of the month at home in Pennsylvania! Initially, I had planned to be home for a week. Unfortunately, my trusty Dell XPS laptop decided it was tired of having a defective graphics card and gave up the ghost as soon as I returned to the US. I decided to order a new laptop from Dell, which was a bad idea for multiple reasons - first, I had to delay my return flight by 2 weeks to accommodate the delivery date; second, because Dell then decided to delay delivery by another week on the initial delivery date... with no direct notification. Their customer service is incredibly useless, although I suppose that's no secret. During the month of April, I also saw James and Ben Taylor live at Hershey Theatre and got violently ill for several days. I reread the previous sentence and thought the implied causation was funny enough to leave it as-is.

Getting ready to garbage dive

Upon returning to Nicaragua, I only had a few days to get settled in before the big event: a wide-scale community clean-up of Laguna de Xiloa on the weekend of April 30. Along with about 50 other divers, I conducted garbage collection dives to clean up the lake bottom. In the meantime, about 1000 members of the community showed up for terrestrial garbage collection. Even the Nicaraguan army and navy helped out! It was absolutely exhausting, but considering the ridiculous amount of trash that was removed from the area, I'd say it was worth it. The lake is nowhere near being clean, unfortunately, since lakeside bars generate a constant stream of plastic cups and fishermen seem to be very good at losing hundreds of feet of nylon line.

One full bag!

Anyway, through a series of fortunate events, I managed to get my new laptop down here, so I've got all the computing power I need. My next main task is to complete my Rescue Diver certification so I can proceed to the Divemaster course. There's a chance I'll finally get to dive in the ocean (could be Atlantic or Pacific) soon, and hopefully I can provide some photos from that.


No more blog-guilt for now, but I'll keep trying to update more often, I promise.