Vatia (again again)

We spent another weekend in Vatia; this time at the other side of the village near Pola Island. The side with the National Park is great for hiking and scenery, but not the best for spending time at the beach. It's rocky and the waves tend to be pretty big, while the other side has some sandy areas and is more protected from the larger waves.

That's not to say we didn't enjoy ourselves. Everett's especially good at keeping himself entertained - trying to pull a piece of driftwood out from between some rocks took at least an hour! As always, the diving was great.

Vatia (again)

We spent Saturday in Vatia - it's becoming one of our favorite places for diving and hanging out on the beach. The dive was incredible. We saw a bunch of fish, but the most amazing thing was the Tahitian stingray we saw. Clif almost swam right over it before I could get his attention. We watched it for a while, swam around to the other side of it so we were able to get a great look, watched it some more, and then it finally got tired of us hanging around and swam away. Watching it lift up off the sand and swim away was one of the coolest things I've seen in the ocean.

Sharks

Yesterday I went diving at Fagaalu with a few of my dive buddies. It looked like it would be a pretty drab dive. The visibility was poor from the rain the night before. We decided to swim across the bay and drop in on a different part of the reef because the visibility is usually much better on that side. It was an excellent choice. The visibility probably went from 15 feet to around 100 feet. The coral was amazing and there was a lot of interesting sea life. We cruised around the reef farther than I had been before. About ten minutes into the dive I saw my friend Paul Brown motioning enthusiastically. I looked to my right and two Great Hammerhead sharks swam out about 7 to 10 feet over my head. One was around 6 feet long and the other around 7. They get up to 14 feet so these were younger sharks.

Hammerheads are an extremely rare site here so it was neat to see. What is funny though is that these are the first sharks that I have seen. The more common sharks have yet to be marked off on my checklist of sightings. We also saw a giant moray eel, longnose filefish, and some other interesting sea life. Suprisingly seeing my first sharks was not too scary. Maybe Paul's clapping in the background helped me feel a little safer. I mean sharks cant be dangerous if someone is clapping...right?

New Years

We had a few people over on New Year's Eve. The kids were so excited to stay up until midnight, and they really enjoyed all the glow stuff that came in a Christmas package. Those things provided hours of entertainment -thanks, mom & dad!

In the morning, Everett actually slept in.

We spent the first day of the new year at the beach in Vatia. We went diving, snorkeling, and kayaking - it was a great way to start the new year.

scuba stuff

Everett got to go scuba diving last weekend! He was so excited! For weeks he has been talking about doing it and asking when Paul could take him. For some reason, I thought the chatter would die down a bit after he went, but instead it's simply switched to how fun it was and how many fish he saw.

I've been diving too. I took Paul's scuba class over the past few weeks. In spite of some major stress over a few of the skills - well, one skill in particular, with a few different variations - I'm finally certified! I didn't like the pool sessions at all. There was nothing to look at and nothing to do except think about all the things that could possibly go wrong. That's a really bad train of thought for me because I have a great imagination when it comes to imagining the worst. So I was glad when we got to dive in the ocean and I had fish to distract me and remind me that it was actually going to be fun!

My first and second ocean dives were on the same day. And it was horrid at first - it had just rained so the water was really murky. It was so brown I couldn't see my hand when it was a foot in front of my mask. Then we moved to a clearer spot where we could actually see our limbs, each other, and some cool ocean-dwelling stuff. In my first two dives we saw a pregnant pipefish, a nudibranch, and a flatworm (kind of similar to the linked photos, but definitely not the same). There's no way I could have seen all that snorkeling. Honestly, I probably wouldn't have seen it anyway if Paul weren't there to point it out.

Then I had to wait a week until my third and fourth dives. I saw a crown-of-thorns starfish and a juvenile brushtail tang. I really love how some fish are so different when they are juveniles and adults. So now I'm certified and excited to go see all the interesting things in the ocean, but I have no gear so I can't really go diving much until I buy my own. I feel a bit like a 16-year-old with a new driver's license and no car.

Return of Computer = pictures

Yeah....we got our computer back from the Police - thanks to Aaron. Our pictures were erased, but they were still in the recycling bin so we were able to recover them and download them onto our external hard-drive. The computer was also locked and Julia was able to find a way to unlock it on-line. It is still running slowly, but now we can update our blog and post some pictures. So here is a nice picture of the kids at the beach.


[diving at Liz's B-day]

Diving is awesome. This is a picture from my favorite dive so far. It was a really beautiful spot. My gear is on the way and I have met even more divers lately so I should be getting out a lot more pretty soon. Not to mention that with Carol gone Jay is available to go almost any day.

Simon v. The Librarian

Simon recently had a conversation with our friend Naomi at Moi's birthday party. Naomi, of course, was trying to convince Simon that reading is a good thing because it makes you smart . Unfortunately Simon disagreed, at least on some of the finer points. The conversation went something like this:

[Simon running to catch a wave w/ kickboard]


Naomi: Do you like to read?

Simon: Yes.

Naomi: Reading makes you smart - huh.

Simon: Well...reading doesn't always make you smart. Sometimes it makes you dumb.

Naomi: No, reading can't make you dumb.

Simon: Yes it can. If its not true. Like if a book is non-fiction and it says that dinasours are still alive. If it was in a fiction book that would be alright but if it is in a non-fiction book it wouldn't be true so that would make you dumb.

Naomi: (Im not sure if she actually spoke at this point or if she just stared at him in shock and with the realization that a five year old had just presented her with a perfectly sound argument about why books can make you dumb and that he was in fact right - not the best moment for a librarian).

Simon: [cute little knowing smile].

I dont know if I got the conversation exactly right but that is the gist of it. Darn kids. Hopefully Naomi keeps pushing book reading on our kids. We know reading books does make you smarter....well....most of the time.

[Beach at sunset]

[Ila]

A lot of people have asked about our dog, Ila. He is doing much better now. However, we let him hang out with the local dogs for a few weeks and now he has mange again. We are going to get him cured of it again and he will be an inside dog only - mainly because mange freaks me out, but also because no one wants to touch the dog and so he gets very little attention.

Alright lest you think that it is all play and no work. I put a picture of the view from my office in here. The rolling surf and swaying palms make it really easy to concentrate while at work.

[view from office]

weekend fun, but not for Clif

It was an interesting weekend. Clif got bit by some tropical bug - literally. He woke up Friday with a small bite on his arm, 3 hours later it was a big red swollen crater with a red blotch around it and a red line going up to his armpit, 3 hours after that it was even bigger and he had a fever of 102 and was pretty out of it. That's when we went to LBJ to see if we could track down a doctor. Luckily, we spotted a friend of ours, who also happens to be a doctor, on our way in who could see Clif (thank you, Matthew!). I've heard that getting in to see a doctor can be quite an adventure. Fortunately, it wasn't this time! So Clif stayed home and slept all weekend and took antibiotics while the bite got bigger and the crater in the middle got deeper... ew. Yesterday it finally started to look like it was healing.

The kids and I didn't do much. We watched some movies, went to Faga'alu for a little while, and went to the pool, but mostly we took it easy. At Faga'alu, Everett was going to get to go scuba diving - when he found out he was so excited and started dancing around! But before he got the chance, we had to leave for his friend's birthday party. He wanted to dive so badly that he was willing to miss the party, and it wasn't until Melanie told him that she was sure he'd get to do it another time that he would leave!

We're looking forward to a Thanksgiving umu tomorrow - happy Thanksgiving to everyone we won't see there!

Sharks!!!

Well, not really... just one shark. We went snorkeling at Airport Lagoon on Sunday and I saw my first shark - a blacktip reef shark that was probably about 5 feet long, but it's hard to estimate underwater. I was a little scared at first, even though it wasn't big enough to eat me or anything, so I swam as fast as I could to Deepa who was out snorkeling with me. Deepa wanted me to show her where I saw it so we turned around to look for it! Six months ago I never would have believed that I'd voluntarily swim toward a place I had seen a shark just moments earlier! It was pretty amazing to see a shark in the wild - a bit intimidating, but still a very cool thing to see. Even better than the 2 unicornfish I saw at Faga'alu the day before - I think they are so funny-looking with the little horn bumping out.

The weekend before last we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves too. We went to Tisa's with a group of friends, three of us were celebrating birthdays that week so it was a perfect excuse to get babysitters and enjoy a night out. The dinner was delicious, but it was the great company that made the whole evening most enjoyable. The next day we went to a group of fales between Vatia and Ofono, in a small village called Amalau for Liz's birthday celebration. It was a great location - the guys went scuba diving, we bbq-ed some hot dogs and had a great time talking and playing in the waves. Then we hurried home, I showered and changed and headed over to Maliu Mai for a dinner and night of Polynesian dancing.

a career change

For the past six years, Everett has been certain that he will grow up to be an astronaut. He has tons of book about space, the planets, the solar system, and rockets. He has learned more about rockets and how they work than I ever have, and talked constantly about being old enough to go to space camp.

But this month he learned that one of our friends on the island goes scuba diving FOR HIS JOB. Everett's eyes got huge when we told him and he quickly asked, "What does he do?" After learning the answer, Everett has decided to make a future career change. He's going to be a marine biologist, even though sometimes he needs us to remind him of what kind of biologist he's going to be. Lately it seems that he can hardly talk about anything other than diving, saying things like, "I'm going to go to the Depths of the Ocean because that's the deepest part that people have been to. Except for the Trenches."

I just wonder how long this future career obsession will last. In the meantime, I'm sure he will learn a lot!

Preparing for the Dive

Preparing for the move to Samoa has been increasingly difficult (to say the least). You would be amazed at all of the things that you have to do to move out of the country (lol). Anyway, I recently decided that I would resurrect my decade old diving license so that I can get even closer to the sharks while I am in Samoa. I had to get a new license online from PADI. It is a lifetime license, which is good and bad. Good because getting a license is expensive and bad because I got my original license when I was 14 and never dove again. So essentially I could walk into a diving store, rent equipment, and then quickly proceed to kill myself because I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. See, I knew that being a boyscout could kill me (they are still after me). Well I had to take this picture of myself for the new license at work with the camera on my cell phone.



I tried a fake smile but it didn't work out too well.