Bezabor: Catch-up from the Holidays... (posted from home)

Hey, there!!! I’ve been neglectful of my blog entries. Time to recap what Labashi and I have been doing for the last couple of weeks…

Sunday, 1 January 2006-

We took it easy in the morning then went for a walk in the afternoon. We took a 3-mile walk at Wildwood Wildlife Sanctuary north of Harrisburg. This was out first visit to Wildwood and we enjoyed it very much. Weather was overcast and cool at 40 degrees. The walking trail was a good one—we’ve got to come back here and explore the side trails and see the area as the seasons change. Today we had vees of Canada geese wheeling overhead at low altitude—very cool!

We also learned there’s a good six-session lecture series coming up. The first lecture on 17 January is about what it was like to travel the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal in its heyday in the 1840’s. I’m a fan of the old canals and am especially looking forward to this one. The second lecture, on 31 January, is about the loss of the American chestnut tree and efforts to develop a disease-resistant strain of chestnut.

After our walk we had an early supper at Romano’s Macaroni Grill, our first visit there.

Monday, 26 December through Saturday, 31 December-

We headed home on Monday morning after Christmas. Travel wasn’t bad until we got to the PA turnpike section between Somerset and Breezewood. We hit dense fog and snow at Somerset which slowed traffic down and started traffic surges. We averaged 15 miles per hour until we finally dumped all the DC traffic off to I-70 at Breezewood. Our trip that took eight hours going out took ten and a half hours coming back. But all it took was a little patience to get through.

We recovered from our trip Tuesday, then worked on our basement pantry area Wednesday through Saturday. It’s just the storage area under the stairs but we wanted to finish it off, both to encourage us to keep it well-organized and also to fully insulate the walls of the stairway leading to the main living area.

Monday, 19 December through Sunday, 25 December- (in Canton, MI)

Things settled down by the 19^th and we picked up Labashi’s brother and his family at the Detroit airport for their Christmas visit to Mom and Dad. That meant Labashi and I relocated to her sister’s house in Canton, Michigan, about 40 minutes away. That actually worked out well. Mom and Dad had someone around to help out and catch up on and we had lots of room and two active boys to entertain us. I spent the first several days exploring the area. I enjoyed going to the local BMW motorcycle shop and talking bikes, particularly the dual-sports. I also spent most of one afternoon in Camping World, getting an up-close look at all the stuff I had only seen in their catalog up to this point. I bought a couple of small items— like the Guide to Free Campgrounds, Eastern Edition— but otherwise I just enjoyed checking out all the STUFF you can get for an RV.

Much of the week was spent in preparation for a big Christmas feast. I was very happy to get a chance to drive our host’s Mini-Cooper S. We shot down interstate 275 at 90 miles an hour on the way to the local Cabela’s to do some last-minute shopping. What a slick little sports car--- I could get used to that one!

Christmas Day was wonderful. We had lots of kids, including two two-year-olds who were so excited tearing open their presents that we all had a good, hearty laugh. We had our big meal and enjoyed the afternoon joining the kids in playing with all the toys.

Wednesday, 14 December through Sunday, 18 December- (in Southfield, MI)

We had several things going on during our visit with the in-laws. While Labashi was having a good visit with her Mom, I was exploring the local area for the first couple of days. I broke out the yellow pages and looked for dive shops and book shops.

I had been to a dive shop called Rec Divers in Royal Oak (Michigan) back in the early 80’s and that’s where I first learned about Tobermory and its great wreck diving. Tobermory, Ontario is the home of Fathom Five National Marine Park. It lies about four and a half hours northwest of Toronto at the tip of the Bruce Peninsula (the Bruce Peninsula separates Lake Huron from Georgian Bay). Off the end of the Bruce Peninsula are many ledges and islands which are the reason for the wrecks. Until the advent of modern navigation systems in the early 1900’s, ships regularly went aground on those rocks and sank, mostly in water shallow enough for sport diving. Because of the cold freshwater, the wrecks are amazingly intact and the visibility there is good.

Labashi and I went to Tobermory with several diving buddies in the early 80’s. I had bought a 15-foot Zodiac inflatable and a 30-horsepower outboard and I converted a small utility trailer to tow the boat and our dive gear behind our tiny little Datsun 210 station wagon. We had a great time at Tobermory and I’ve not been diving since the mid-Eighties so I was looking forward to a visit to Rec Divers both as a pleasant reminder of Tobermory and also to see how foreign SCUBA diving seemed to me because of my long absence from it. As it turns out, the main change is the acceptance of mixed-gasses for sport diving. We were just starting to hear about nitrox and trimix diving in the Eighties. Now it’s possible to be trained to dive using these exotic gas mixtures (and to get them) at many local dive shops. The other trend is cost. I was surprised to see how expensive the higher-quality equipment has gotten.

At the bookstores I (naturally) looked for SCUBA diving books and came up with a good one called “Diver Down: Real-World SCUBA Accidents and How to Avoid Them”. This book has a series of case-studies about diving accidents, many of them deaths. I was very glad to have found it. The case studies serve as a shocking but very useful reminder of how easy it is to make stupid mistakes that can kill you in such a foreign environment. I’ve been thinking about taking up diving again and this book was a well-needed kick in the pants. No, I can’t just get my 25-year-old tanks hydroed and filled and go diving. I would have to start over (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing!). While local dive shops offer refresher courses, they are too short for me--- typically only a few hours. I’m too out of shape, my planning and safety skills are WAY too rusty and most of my equipment would have to be replaced.

My contemplation of getting back into diving was cut short. Labashi’s dad had appeared to come down with a bad cold and spent Tuesday and Wednesday in bed. He had attempted to get in to see his doctor to be checked out on Wednesday but couldn’t get an appointment until Thursday. We took him in to his appointment on snowy Thursday afternoon and we were all surprised when the doctor suggested we take him to the Emergency Room at the nearby hospital right away—there was something wrong and he wasn’t sure what it was. That problem was eventually diagnosed as congestive heart failure. Her dad was kept in the hospital for the next three days and our schedule was changed to include twice-daily hospital visits. Fortunately, he responded very quickly to treatment and needed only some adjustments to his medications to recover.

I also spent some of my free time working on Mom and Dad’s new satellite TV system, setting it up to make it a little easier for them to use, adding a new DVD player, and solving the problem of the remote not working properly from the kitchen. We kept very busy!