THIRD SEMESTER HERE WE COME

Phillip passed all of his classes and is now officially a THIRD SEMESTER student!!!! HOORAY!!! I am so proud of him!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thursday was pretty uneventful, thank goodness! No storms from Hurricane Bill! Yeah!!! It did rain a couple times, but that was it. We got lucky! Thursday and Friday were pretty boring really. I spent most of both days reading my scuba book and watching the scuba videos. (Phillip enjoyed watching a bunch of movies while I worked on scuba stuff!) We did read at the pool again on Thursday though. I finally did something I’ve wanted to do at the pool for a long time! I took the underwater camera along! There are usually flowers floating upside down in the pool and I kept thinking how neat it would be to take pics from underwater, looking up. Some of these pictures are simply amazing!

My scuba stuff paid off though…today was amazing! It was definitely interesting, and not quite like I expected, but it was amazing! The training tells you that the first day consists of “confined water dives.” In other words…training in a pool! We had wondered about this because we didn’t know of a pool in the area! The training also says that most of the skills are practiced in water shallow enough to stand in. Well…we reviewed the information this morning, took three quizzes, got our equipment, and took the boat a real dive site…Creole Rock! We learned how to go down first, then knelt on the bottom of the ocean and practiced all the skills. We were only 20 feet deep, so could have easily reached the top if anything had gone wrong. (Good to know!!!) Anyway, we were wearing wet suits, but only the kind that have shorts and short sleeve shirts. My knees quickly started to burn like CRAZY!!!! AAHH! Something on the bottom was burning/stinging me????? Not cool! But we all did great with the skills we were learning. It’s actually a really neat feeling, being able to breathe underwater. After practicing skills, we swam around for awhile. You ALWAYS swim with a buddy when diving. The instructor put Becky and me together and motioned that he was Alicia’s buddy. Ok, cool. We swam around with him leading. We saw tons of fish and one was huge!!!!! Another was really crazy bright colors! So cool! The visibility wasn’t good today though. We could only see a few feet in front of us. He said that was because of Hurricane Bill! Interesting! So we’re swimming around and next thing we know, the instructor took off faster and left Alicia (his BUDDY…you NEVER leave your buddy) behind! Well, Becky and I were behind her! So he DISAPPEARED and we couldn’t find him! We finally surfaced and eventually located him…we were on our own for like 10 minutes! NOT COOL for first time divers!!!!! I wasn’t really scared though. The three of us were together and had mastered all the basic skills already, plus we weren’t very deep at all. But still!!!! I loved it and am anxious to go again tomorrow, but I must admit that I am REALLY GLAD Phillip will be there too! I’ll be in good hands then! Not only is he medically trained for emergencies, but he’s also a DIVEMASTER!!!! He has been on approximately 70 dives and his divemaster certification puts him at a professional level! Impressive!

It is so nice to actually get to spend time with my husband again!!!! I was too busy reading scuba stuff to enjoy the first few days of his break with him! As soon as I got home from scuba class (8:00 – noon), we had a quick lunch, I took a quick (and freezing cold) shower, and we left for Philipsburg!!! We walked around for awhile on Front Street and Back Street. Then we stopped at Sunny Foods and headed home. We bought fresh baked hamburger buns, so I fixed turkey burgers, fries, and peas for dinner! Delicious! We ate while watching CSI! We LOVE CSI! We got behind on the shows during school, so bought the last few episodes online and are really enjoying watching them together! I love spending time together!!!! It is such a treat!

We plan to take the underwater camera diving with us tomorrow! Hopefully I’ll have some great pics to post!!!! I’m very excited for tomorrow’s dive! Hopefully it will include more exploring and less skill practicing! :-)