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We went to Leo Carillo State Beach with the Sole Searchers Dive Club today. Ben and I hoped to dive two tanks in the kelp forest ~50m offshore.

My enthuasism waned when I saw the surf; it wasn’t rough, persay, but it was significant. The club’s dive master went over the entrance procedure: put your fins on at the water’s edge, put your reg in your mouth, inflate your BC, and walk in backwards (to avoid tripping over your fins). If a wave comes, turn your side towards it; if it knocks you over, just start to swim. Once you decide to go, go fast and don’t change your mind. It sounded reasonable enough.

I watched other people battle the surf until I got my nerve up to go in. A couple waves broke over me and made me uncomfortable — the water’s moving fast, the visibility is zero, and although the regulator’s in your mouth and your mask covers your eyes, it’s still easy to get water up your nose and stuff. I made it past the break tired and nervous, but in once piece and fairly proud of myself. I turned to watch Ben make his way through the surf.

And that’s when I saw it out of the corner of my eye — a big rush of foaming water. I was hit by a strange wave that broke 10m further seaward than the rest. (Afterwards, I watched some similar waves; they were about 5′.) I already had my reg in my mouth, and I had time to slam my hand over my mask. It didn’t work. The wave hit me hard yanked my mask off into the ocean. There’s no way I could sink with my BC fully inflated, but waves like that throw you around enough that you could inhale water. The situation was worse without my mask, which usually touches my nose and reminds me not to breathe with it. I got hit by another, smaller wave and discovered that it’s hard to focus on breathing only through your mouth while trying to fight the surf.

Ben made a valiant attempt to rescue my lost mask, but he couldn’t find it, so we aborted the dive. That meant swimming BACK through the surf zone — not a thought I particularly relished — but we made it out with no more incidents. I couldn’t do any more dives without a mask, but it turns out it didn’t matter; the visibility was so bad in the kelp forest that nobody wanted to go back out anyway. Nevertheless, it was a useful experience; Ben and I were *going* to take our advanced open water class with Sport Chalet, but for that privelidge you PAY to go on shore dives. We decided that shore diving was pretty un-fun, and our diving cohorts confirmed that there’s nothing to really see anyway, so we’re going to save our money and just go out to Catalina and do some dives off Casino Point instead. We bought the advanced textbook to read, and we’ll experiment with some of the topics like underwater navigation on our own.

Genre: Spy Thriller
Year: 2004
Stars: Matt Damon, Joan Allen, Franka Potente, Brian Cox 
Violence? Violent but not gory. I was able to watch.
Sex? I would watch this with my parents.
My Rating: 5 stars

This movie was great! I highly recommend it. It’s an exciting, intellectual thriller, and as a bonus it takes you on a whirlwind tour of some beautiful, exotic locations. The only thing I wished is that the German chick had a larger part in the movie; I liked her. Net result: Go see it!

He likes to hang out in here when it’s hot and he’s bored.

I tried to buy a new swimsuit at Sport Chalet tonight. What the heck is wrong with those people?!?! You have two choices. (1) A racing suit. These all run about 8 sizes too small and are designed to squeeze you into the most hydrodynamically efficient shape possible. The permanent wedgie is a free bonus. (2) Tiny triangle suits. The kind that would fall off in a small breeze, never mind a jump off the diving board. For this, they charge $60 a suit. Aaahhh! What a depressing exercise. I’m going to Patagonia tomorrow … with all the diving we’re going to be doing (we’re headed to the beach on Saturday!), I can justify paying their ridiculous prices for something that actually fits.

I made some progress today! I finished leaching my samples without dropping any of them! The only casualty was a glass jar that I dropped on the ground … fortunately BEFORE I put my samples in it :) I didn’t have enough time to completely the samples in the oven; I’ll finish that tomorrow. However, they were dry enough to transfer to lidded jars (which decreases the risk of a spill).

I also got bibtek working! Bibtex is a companion to latex, which is an open-source program for writing scientific papers. It formats the paper for you (for instance, it automaticalLy numbers your sections and makes title pages), contains excellent text-based equation editors (as opposed to the clunky graphical menu in Word), and gives you that delicious “professor font” of problem-set fame. Bibtex allows you to include references easily.

I also started writing my paper (just for my exams, not for publication) about the Death Valley Fault. I’m halfway through the introduction — I spent several hours trying to figure out what the fault is CALLED. It has about six names. What a waste of time. There should be a standard naming scheme. Anyway, I’ve been trying to start this for a couple days and have had major writer’s block/procrastination issues/didn’t know where to start. So at least I started.

AND I worked out at the gym.

AND tonight is geology girls’ craft night … cool! My friend Elisabeth bought special crystals so we can make cooling rags for field trips. Hee hee … it gives new meaning to “craft nerd” (a Lutheridge-ism)!

I went back to lab tonight and started my samples leaching. I really hope I don’t screw this up. How do you like my lab coat, though?!? I’m still pretty excited about that.

The sand will sit in nitric acid overnight. Tomorrow, I’ll wash the samples, make sure that carbonate in the upper soil layers didn’t neutralize the acid, then zap the acid with sodium hydroxide and wash everything off in deionized water. Then I’ll bake it in a drying oven. If, that is, I can find watch glasses or petri dishes or something besides parafilm (which doesn’t look very heat-resistant) to cover the larger (600 mL) beakers I had to buy. For some reason they don’t sell those in the stock room anymore. I thought I had found a solution, but I forgot I super-sized my beakers. The old petri dishes are too small.

Ben took Chaco mountain biking this morning and the poor pup was TIRED! Usually, he’s still going strong at the end of the eight-mile ride, but Ben took him at noon, in the hundred-degree heat, and didn’t bring but 16 oz. of water between them. By the time I got home, Chaco was a limping, dirt-covered zombie. I gave him a bath and rubbed his sore muscles, and he dozed off (as you can see in the picture). I sort of felt bad for him, and I sort of felt really good for us — we tired him out! He won’t run around the house like a tornado! But when I returned from lab at 10:30, he was already back to his normal bouncy self. Oh well.

Ooh, I almost forgot — the best thing that happened today is that I got a package from my sister Becky in the mail! She sent me a special pen from Germany that is actually a pen, pencil, and stylus in one. Depending on how you rotate the pen when you click the top, a different tip pops out. That is SO cool! And useful! Especially because it also has an ergonomic grip on it like my Dr. Grip pencil. I haven’t had any more forarm pain while writing, but I’ve grown addicted to soft-grip pencils. Thanks, Becky!

Tonight we had our second full-field scrimmage — *much* better than the first! I had a blast! For one thing, we won, 3-2, and I scored one of the goals (albeit on a penalty kick) and the other two were from corners that I kicked. Alan made me “Player of the Year” (he didn’t realize that we were going to play another season this year) and I got a trophy! :) And it even looks like me! I feel like a kid again :)

Ben took out the 1D MkII and enjoyed the new autofocusing capability of the camera. Here’s a shot of me getting tripped! Fortunately, I didn’t fall down AND I got past the defender :)