Jonder the Sea

To finish off about the last trip, we dove on three different days, and it was pretty nice.  On our last dive day, we got a group together with an Australian couple (the woman also happened to be a teacher in China), a European guy, and Walter, our divemaster, and headed out to Verde Island, which is a marine sanctuary that was about an hour away by boat.

Walter was really into Nudibranchs, which are these little colorful slug things that we'd pretty much had enough of by the second dive.  Anyway, he was great at spotting things, and we saw a whole lot of fish that we would have swum right by if not for him.  The "electric clam" he found was pretty special: it was some kind of creature that had weird moving bioluminescence when under his light, that looked like electricity running around in a circle.  He said he'd only ever seen two in the area, so he took divers to them whenever he could.

Anyway, Verde was pretty cool.  We did two dives there and on the last one, we ended up in a really strong current that took us by beautiful coral walls.  It felt like we were flying, and was probably the most fun I've had on a dive yet.

Ok, so here are a few pictures from our dives:

Sea Snake!

It was THIS big!

Crazy color changing octopus

Lionfish

Scorpionfish?  Rockfish?  I don't know.  These guys were pretty hard to spot because they have great camo and look like rocks.

NUDIBRANCH!

Puffer fish

another lion fish

Electric Clam

Giant Clam

Feeding the Butterfly fish

Feeding some other crazy fish

The rest of the time was devoted to relaxing and reading, and we got to eat some really  good Filipino food.

Other than traveling, things are going very well.  I've been tinkering around with Lucy(fer), my bad-ass gaming computer that I started building in an after-school club with some students.  Check this out:

That's right, she's a beast. She could eat your computer for breakfast.

I've also been running about 5K most mornings, and I'm getting ready for my first ever 10K charity run next weekend.

We found a hidden vegetable market right across the street so we don't have to go to a crazy Chinese grocery store for vegetables anymore.

A rat chewed through my router's power cord last night, so I need to go to the computer market and get a new one.  I think he's still living in my air conditioner, so I hope he's not chewing on anything in there.  I guess I'll find out when it gets hot again.

Be well, do good,

Jon