In 1983 my mother and I were living in the Oaks Apartments in Gainesville, Florida. I was a latchkey kid. Everyday after school, I let myself in the little second floor apartment, made myself a snack, watched tv, did chores and sometimes played with friends from around the apartment complex. The complex had a pool and I spent a lot of time in the pool. There was a guy who cleaned the pool. He was friendly and knew many of us kids. He also happened to teach SCUBA diving from his apartment and used the pool for training. So I made friends with him, helped him clean the pool, and he taught me to dive. I was just at the cusp of being old enough for a diving license at the time, but on 14 June 1983, I became a certified diver. That changed my life.
I think they changed the pool… I remember a rectangle
I dove a bit with Lloyd Bailey. And then I lost interest. But it came back after university when I was in Turkey for a summer and ended up working on a dive boat and got paid with room and board (barely a room, pretty good board), a leather jacket, and a dive master’s license. From there it was working back in Florida for a dive operation, in Egypt as an instructor and then eventually…. as a marine conservationist. It was a back door, but it worked.
Sometime in 2022, I was playing with a newly downloaded PADI app on my phone and managed to find my account and my original certification and realized that it had been 40 years since my initial certification. Fareea want to plan a big dive trip to celebrate 40 years. She was thinking Palau, Solomon Islands or the Great Barrier Reef. Unfortunately, work pressures and other life events intervened and when the fateful weekend came, we went diving with our local SCUBA club here in Suva and did one dive on the reef off Suva.
But, it as nice to commemorate 40 years of doing something, and something that unexpectedly determined the course of my life….. And it was fun to have Nasreen, Alisha and Sofia on the boat for the 40th anniversary dive.
Posted in Diving
Tagged diving, marine-life, Oaks Apartments, Oaks Mall, SCUBA, scuba-diving, Suva Scuba Club, travel
I have not been keeping up with my reading list here (or anything here) for some time and it’s high time to start again. My reading keeps alternating between my interests in history, natural science, and biography to fiction, science fiction and fantasy escapism.
During the 2023/24 Christmas break, I needed some serious escapism and turned to the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. These had long been on my to-read list and the recent tv series raised them onto the list again.
So, over the break, I started with the first novel in the series, The Eye of the World, and found it to be engaging, easy to follow, and fun. During breaks from the grief of the events of January and February, I could pick it up anywhere when I had a few minutes. I even took to reading it on the elliptical trainer at the YMCA (more on that later).
When I finished the first book, I had some internal debate about reading the next one immediately. Too often this can blur the books together and there was another concern. The series has 14 thick volumes! If I went right on to the next one, would I end up reading The Wheel of Time for the next few years? In the end, I needed the distraction and escapism and read the second one, which as just as good and engaging as the first. The blogosphere says the 8th (???) is the best…. will I get that far?
For a better review of the entire series, visit Esquire.com.
I’ve started putting my underwater photos from diving around Fiji on a Flickr.com account. I am trying to identify all the species in the photos, but am still learning. Please feel free to browse. Some of the photos are still being identified…. it’s a work in progress. See the photo album here.
Posted in Diving, Fiji, Marine Conservation
2020. What a year. Despite it all. There is much that I am thankful for.
Posted in Uncategorized
I spent nearly a year in Suva back in 2003. Since then, my overwhelming memory of Suva was constant rain and clouds. I’ve been telling people for years that Suva experiences non-stop rain. When I arrived in April 2019 again, it started to rain and didn’t stop for 2 weeks, and I thought, “Yep, this is what I remember.” But then the rain stopped and winter set in and May to September were gorgeous… weeks and weeks of clear blue sky, cool temperatures, nice breezes. What a lovely surprise. It shows how our memory can fail us.
This weekend started to get hot. We took a long walk to town, explored some smaller back streets and found this lovely little cut-through.
In April 2019 we moved from the US to Fiji (its a long story and I haven’t been on the blog recently…..). So, I got to start a new tropical orchid collection. I inherited 5 plants from the office helper, Mili. But, I didn’t have a spray bottle and neglected to get one, so they didn’t get watered much for a few months. I thought they were all dead when I finally got a spray bottle and started watering them. They had dropped their leaves and were looking pretty bad.
Then, last week, one of them perked up with some buds and then bloomed – my first blooming orchid. 🙂 Yay!
Dendrobium fimbriatum
There is an orchid species blooming in all the trees around our house. It has big bunches of small, fragrant, white flowers. So nice!
Posted in Indonesia, Orchids, Uncategorized
We have a few orchids that we were gifted when we were in North Sulawesi. They have been up on our verandah and tree for a few months now. A few of them are starting to grow, so I thought to document the growth here. Can’t wait for them to start blooming!
July 2017
Fareea and I have a long list of places we want to visit in Indonesia. They range from national parks to volcanoes to cultural events. Its such a vast and diverse country, I can’t imagine seeing it all. A few weeks ago, I made a visit to some of WCS’ project sites in North Sulawesi province. It was amazing going to the islands between Indonesia and Philippines. Some of them were the original Spice Islands with nutmeg and mace and other spices growing there still.
At the end of the trip, Fareea came to meet me in North Sulawesi and we enjoyed a few days of diving in Bunaken National Park for diving and at Tangkoko National Park to see some birds and endemic monkeys.
North Sulawesi with markers on Bunaken National Park and Tangkoko National Park
We had 4 days of diving in Bunaken National Park. Each day we took a 30 minute boat ride from the resort on the mainland over to the park. The park has a few islands, including one amazing volcano and lots of amazing reefs with deep drop-offs and big underwater walls. We saw turtles, corals, gorgeous reef fish, a few sharks…. and on a couple of the passages over to the islands, pods of 50+ dolphins!
Bunaken National Park and the breakfast view from the resort.
Tangkoko National Park is a small park at the northern tip of the island. We spent two nights, hiked more than 20 km in one day, and saw all the top birds of North Sulawesi!
Weightless in the World 