Hi!  How are you?

I’m still around.  Not much has changed in my life.  I’m still fat - but for the first time, I’m actually okay with being fat. (Well, maybe about 90% okay, but I’ll get there).

It’s interesting - once I really gave myself permission to be the size that I am, I started to realize just how much of my brainpower I’ve wasted over the years berating myself for being heavy, for not doing enough to be thin, or dreaming of all the ways life would be better once I got thin.  Finally giving myself a break has been a relief in a lot of ways.  (And, I admit, NOT a relief in other ways that aren’t really blog material.)

So here are my new year’s non-resolutions:

• Not step on the scale.  It’s just a number, and I don’t need to know it.  I know what size clothes I wear, and I know how I feel, and those are what matter.
• Not diet.  I will not count calories or attempt to restrict my food intake in any way.  I will try to incorporate more healthy foods into my diet and eat in more often, but with the goal of exactly that: eating healthier, not getting thinner.

Although I am nearly-ok with the fat thing, I’m less okay with having let myself get rather out of shape.  For a variety of stupid reasons I stopped my gym routine back in September.  But I eased back into it over the holidays, and was on the track at 6am this morning, and it felt great.

Once I get over the hump of adjusting my schedule to accommodate the workouts, I really do enjoy the excercise.  Plus it more than pays off in the diving department.  But again: if this does not make me thinner, so what?  It’ll make me healthier.  At this point in my life, I am ready to accept “fat but fit” instead of “a thin person who just needs a little help to come out.”

I will buy clothes that look good on me, not just clothes that make me look thinner.  I will not begrudge myself dessert when I feel like it (or vegetables when I feel like it).  I will be grateful for the body I have and the things I can do, instead of hating myself for not having the “willpower” to change it.

Those of you who are thinking “what the hell - she clearly needs to try harder to lose weight!”… see here, here, here.

And that’s pretty much all I have to say on the subject.  I promise future posts will be more about fun things like diving.

2009 will be good.

Prop 8 passed. Looks like about 52% of the state voted to redefine marriage in the state constitution as between only a man and a woman, vs 48% against.

I have always been a fan of this state - I pretty much think it’s the best one there is. But right now, I feel like I’ve been stabbed in the back by the people of the state I love. And my disappointment is nothing compared to the disappointment of my recently married gay friends.

I’m finding it hard to be happy about an Obama win, when my state just took such a hurtful, backwards step. I expect this from Arkansas…. but California? I expected better.

Last night, Jeff and I attended a pumpking carving party hosted by my officemate.  In the 8 years we’ve been together, I don’t believe Jeff and I have ever carved pumpkins.  The last time I tried was in college.  Neither of us has even tried to get much fancier than your typical eyes/nose/toothy-mouth pumpkin.  But this year we decided to have a crack at doing the more three-dimensional kind of pumpkin, where you carve into the flesh but not all the way through (at least, not everywhere) for a textured, “fancy” look.

Except mine ended up looking kind of like, oh, NOTHING, and so I hacked out most of the pieces in the end after all.

Here is my pumpkin:

Is it:

a) A tiki mask?
b) A skeleton with acne?
c) a screaming SCUBA diver?

Jeff brought a printout of the shark “Bruce” from Finding Nemo, and declared he was going to sculpt a Bruce pumpkin.  I fully expected his pumpkin to just be a hacked-up blob.

Turns out I’m married to the Pumpkin Whisperer:

Luckily, mine looks somewhat better when placed next to Jeff’s for context:

In case you don’t believe that’s actually a pumpkin, here’s how it looks in normal lighting:

One of our friends brought her 4-year old son.  He instantly recognized “Bruce,” and then completely cracked me up by saying - in a tone of genuine wonder - “I’ve never seen an actual shark before!”   You still haven’t, kid.  But I can’t blame you for being fooled.

I know it’s been a while since I posted, and I promise to start regaling you with more diving adventures soon.

But first, I need to talk about Proposition 8.

Here in California, voters can get initiatives put straight on the ballot for the public to vote on, rather than going through the normal legislative procedure.  Prop 8 was a predictable reaction to the legalization of gay marriage this past June.  It’s the shortest proposition on the ballot; it states simply that the state constitution should be amended to define marriage as between a man and a woman.

This is, put simply, horseshit.

If you know me, you already know I dream of a day when we look back and laugh that we ever thought gay marriage should be illegal in the first place.  A few decades from now, I hope we find it just as silly as old laws that prevented interracial marriage.

In April, when the state supreme court ruled that it was unconstitutional to prevent gay marriage, I couldn’t have been prouder of my state.  Friends of mine who’d already had “commitment ceremonies” and were married in all senses other than legal went out and took advantage of the new law.  Some had enormous weddings that would have been the envy of any straight couple; others just went before a judge and signed a piece of paper.

They all reported that they were surprised just how much of a difference it made to be able to say “we’re married.”  No, “domestic partnerships” or “civil unions” do NOT cut it - they’re not even “separate but equal,” since they do NOT come with an identical set of rights as marriage.

Frankly, the only reason I can see to be against gay marriage is based on religious arguments, or on some vague idea that gay marriage will somehow make straight marriage less meaningful.  Again, I call horseshit.  Gays have been getting married in California for 5 months now, and my marriage seems to be doing just fine.

But what really gets my goat is this: the prop 8 folks are PULLING AHEAD in polls.  They have an insane amount of funding pouring in for advertising, mostly from Utah-based Mormon groups.  They’re putting out commercials which are misleading at the best, and outright lies at the worst.  For instance, the “Yes on 8″ folks claim that:

If gay marriage is legal, schools will have to teach it to your children. 

FALSE.  Schools cannot teach any health/sexuality/family issues without parental consent.  There’s no curriculum requirement to discuss marriage AT ALL, at least not on a state-wide level.  Local school boards make some of these decisions.  Of course, maybe one day social studies classes will teach about the legalization of gay marriage as an example of a civil rights issue.  (My own opinion is that it would be just great if schools would teach about it, but it seems like a lot of Californians are afraid of having awkward conversations with their children on this subject).

Churches that refuse to wed gay couples will lose their tax-exempt status.

Not only FALSE, but so obviously ridiculous I’m amazed this argument is working.  Churches regularly refuse to marry people for all kinds of reasons: Mormon churches won’t wed non-Mormons, Catholic churches (usually) won’t wed non-Catholics, etc.  California state law PREVENTS the state from withdrawing tax-exempt status for these reasons.  If your church doesn’t want to wed gay couples, that’s fine - odds are, gay couples would rather find a better church anyway.

These two arguments are getting a lot of traction, and the latest polls show that prop 8 is going to pass.  Not by much, though - there’s still time to turn it around.

So please, if you live in California, vote no on 8.  And pester all your friends to do the same.

And wherever you live, consider making a donation to one of the “no on 8″ agencies.  I’ve been donating to Equality California, a pre-existing group promoting equal rights in California.  There’s also a group specific to defeating this proposition: NoOnProp8.com.  Both these sites have more news and information, and clearer arguments than I can make on why it’s important to defeat this proposition.

I’m going to be on pins and needles election night, hoping that my friends’ marriages are still intact the next morning.

Thanks for listening.

My blog has moved to anastasialaity.com.  If you browse to the old address, it should forward you over here.

If you use RSS to read my blog, I’m pretty sure you’ll have to edit your feed to get it to work.  To sign up for the new feed, go here:

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Wow, two months without a blog entry.

I have nothing to add at the moment, but if you want to look at pretty photos and video clips, check out:

New photo alums: Catalina in July, Farnsworth in August

Video clips: Baitball at Catalina, Torpedo Ray at Farnsworth Bank

I’ll try to get my brain back into blogging mode.  I don’t know if anyone misses reading it, but I do miss writing it.

I started jogging in January, after years of insisting I was incapable of - and uninterested in - anything resembling running. Someone insisted that jogging was the best exercise, and that the pounds would positively melt away if I started jogging. Plus, it seemed like a good portable workout that I could do anytime, anywhere, without worrying about whether the elliptical machines were all taken or whether I was even near a gym.

I started out walking four minutes, running two, and slowly worked my way up.

The pounds did not melt (in fact, I’ve been steadily gaining weight), but whatever. Last week I reached a milestone: 30 minutes of solid jogging. Not very fast (2 miles in that time), but without breaks. Yay me!  At first I thought it was a fluke, but I’ve repeated the feat several times and I think it’s now fair to describe myself as a jogger.

I began to gloat about this to the someone who pushed running so hard in the first place, only to find out that he, in fact, never made it all the way through the training program to the 30-minutes-solid mark. I will never let him live this down.

Oh, and also, I turned thirty last week. Someone was joking that I’d wake up on my thirtieth birthday and hear my ovaries jangling like alarm bells on the proverbial biological clock. Thankfully, they remain silent.

Saturday was our last day in Bonaire. Scuba divers call this the “surface interval day,” as you need to allow at least 24 hours between your last dive and flying - so, you have to come up with something other to do than dive!

We piled into one of the trucks and began a day-long loop around the island to see some of the topside sights. It was sunny and gorgeous as usual, with just enough wind to keep it comfortable.

Our first stops were at some dive sites along the coast north of town, just to get some photos of the sites with our cameras outside of their clunky underwater housings. We checked out 1000 Steps (there aren’t actually a thousand, but I’m sure it feels like it when you’re in full gear), and then went back to Karpata. Karpata has a nifty little snack shack right at the top of the stairs now, though it was never open while we were there.

Next we headed east along the southern edge of Washington Slagbaii Park. You drive past a lake which is home to most of the island’s resident flamingos, but there were only a few in evidence today. The big excitement came just past the park, where a few little farms were set up. A sow and her furry little piglets went dashing by the truck, and then we spotted a donkey in the road just up ahead. Naturally, we insisted that Jeff stop the car and roll down the window so we could photograph it.

He came a little closer than we expected!

We followed the road back through Rincon to Kralendijk, and then headed east to Lac Bay, a big windsurfing spot. It’s a huge shallow area, only a few feet deep, protected by a large sandbar. We could see enormous waves crashing at the edge of the bay, but inside the water was flat and calm - except, of course, for all the windsurfers swirling around on it.

There’s a terrific little beachside bar there, so we grabbed lunch and enjoyed the view. And by “the view,” I don’t just mean the gorgeous beach and the windsurfers - I’m also referring to all the European guests in various states of undress. There’s a popular nudist resort at Lac Bay, and although it’s shut off from public view, the laid-back attitude towards clothing doesn’t stop at the borders of the resort! (No pictures of naked, sunburned people - sorry.)

As we drove south along the eastern coastline, we were absolutely amazed at the size of the surf pounding on the shore. On the west (diveable) side, you might occasionally see a wave up to your knees. Over here, with the full brunt of winds slamming into the island, the waves were constant and powerful, sending enormous sprays thirty feet hight.

There were also lots of these driftwood piles - I guess you could call them art. People had stacked up wood in different formations, with various bits of trash attached as decorations.

At the southern tip of Bonaire, we stopped to look at the lighthouse. Sadly, you’re no longer allowed to climb up inside.

There was a neat little crumbling building there which we were able to clamber around in, though. I think my favorite part was this “shoe room”:

On the southwest part of the island are several clusters of old slave huts. They’re exactly what they sound like: huts that were used to house slaves brought here for the salt trade. Even I had to crouch down to get inside these tiny concrete structures, and I couldn’t stand upright once I was in. I’d like to say we pondered the bleak history of these places and took a moment to reflect on all the suffering that people had experienced there… but frankly, they’re gorgeous photo opportunities, so we were mostly thinking about that!

Up next was one of our favorite Bonaire sights: enormous piles of salt! We’d gotten a pretty good glimpse already on our southern dives, but now we were here to photograph. There are some really amazing color contrasts by the salt piles: brilliant white salt, crystal blue water, and bright pink salt pans in between.

Sadly, there are big signs warning you that it’s a crime to crawl up the salt piles, or we’d have even cooler photos.

By this time we were all pretty tired and sweaty, so we decided to stop in town for some ice cream and shopping. The ice cream was better than the shopping. But, we all found the various knick-knacks we needed for ourselves and friends back home, so we were happy enough.

More topside photos from Jeff here.

Back at the condo, we all retreated into our rooms to get started packing. No small chore when everyone has camera gear and all the associated trinkets to keep track of! Carol officially wins the prize for slowest packer, though; the rest of us were all packed up and lazing around (or napping) while she was still laying things out into neat piles. And I thought I went crazy organizing while on travel!

We polished off our day with dinner at La Guernica, a tapas restaurant, where we consumed a frightening amount of food and booze. Then it was time for bed… in preparation for a painfully early rising the next day: 3am in order to get to our 6am flight.

I get up pretty early for diving sometimes - 5am is not uncommon, and 4:30 has been known to happen. But anything before 4am just feels like the middle of the night to me. 3am? That was just ridiculous. We all trudged down to the trucks with our bags, and managed not to drive off the road on the way to the airport.

Carol and I were dropped off with our bags while the menfolk went to return the cars to the rental agency - which had mysteriously moved from its on-airport location in the previous week, and was now across the street.

When Jeff finally showed up, he was in a foul mood - apparently, the rental folks wouldn’t check in his car until 4am. They were checking in cars for another, earlier flight, but not our flight. Jeff grumpily left the keys on the counter, said maybe he’d come back later, and joined me for the airline check-in.

So, after the painfully slow crawl through the line to get our boarding passes and pay our departure tax, Michael and I went back to the car place to check in. We got there around 3:55, and our counter wasn’t open. But there was a crowd of employees who’d just gotten off a shift, sitting around drinking beer and smoking. They waved us over and offered us drinks from the (closed) bar, on the house. We thought this was a fine way to start the morning: free beer at 4am on a Caribbean island.

Pleasantly buzzed, we finished off the check-in process that Jeff had aborted with no further problems. (In fact, they waived a fee for our returning a truck with a half-empty gas tank, because of the issues we’d had with the battery.) We rejoined Carol and Jeff at the airport, who seemed pretty bemused at our tipsiness.

So that was how we finished off our trip - sleepy and slightly drunk. The ride home was long but uneventful; I’m officially a fan of Continental’s new Bonaire schedule. Hopefully I’ll have the chance to take advantage of it again soon!

Naturally, 8am the next day rolled around and there was no sign of anyone by the truck. I started calling the rental place around 8:30, and was told someone was on the way. By 8:45, I tracked down a cell phone for that person and called them directly - turns out they were looking for the car over by the Sand Dollar office, even though I’d clearly stated several times the night before that it was parked by the dive shop. He came and gave the battery a jump; I left it running for a while and then parked it back by our condo while we went off to do a dive.

Just to be on the safe side, we piled into the other truck to get to the dive site. Our destination was the wreck of a sailboat named Our Confidence, located somewhere south of Eden Beach and possibly near Harbor Beach Resort. (We found conflicting information in the books on the best entry site, and none of the Sand Dollar DMs could give us any useful tips on finding the wreck).

At Eden Beach we got decent directions from their dive shop: enter off the dock and head south past a couple of buoys, and we should be right on top of it. We discovered a pretty strong current pushing us back the way we came. Luckily, that’s the way you want the current to be running, so we forged ahead.

Eden Beach is on a very rubbly area of reef, so there wasn’t much to see on the way besides sand and occasional piles of rock. As we were cruising along, I noticed a funny-looking object sticking out of the sand; I thought it was an old styrofoam cup or something. Jeff was on the other side of it, and started taking pictures so I went in for a closer look. Turns out it was a big snake eel sticking his head out of the sand!

Snake eel in the sand:

We pushed on over several ridges, every time thinking the wreck must be just out of sight. After about 15 minutes of swimming, we finally saw the hazy outline of a sailboat.

Wreck of the Our Confidence (photo by Carol Yin):

I have to say, I’m astounded that this wreck isn’t more popular and that more divemasters didn’t know how to get there. The current was a bit annoying, but not frightneningly so, and it was definitely worth the effort. The wreck sits in about 50 feet of water, which gives you plenty of time to hang out, and also means decent lighting for photography. It’s a wooden boat, so it’s rotting away in interesting ways. There were a lot of old ropes and cables strung around, so perhaps it isn’t very publicized because it would be an entanglement hazard for new divers. But we all loved it!

It was especially good for video because of the current. While the photographerss struggled constantly to maintain their positions, I would just swim against the current to the bow of the boat, hit “record,” and let the current take me from bow to stern in a long, smooth pan.

On the way back to shore, we stopped under the Eden Beach pier to wave hello to the ReefCam:

Being upstaged by a fish at the ReefCam:

Then it was back to the condo… where of course, we discovered that the battery in our other truck was dead again. Argh.

Carol and Michael opted to have a relaxing lunchtime before our afternoon dive, so we left them to deal with pestering the rental agency again. Jeff and I hopped back in the water for one last dive at Bari Reef. I was tired of dealing with my camera, so I went video-free on this dive - and thoroughly enjoyed it!

We puttered around mostly in the shallows, heading north in search of the “Reef Balls,” big cement spheres used as artificial reefs. On the way we passed several moored boats, which provided shade for huge schools of jacks swirling around in tornado-like formations.

At one point, Jeff suddenly started pointing his camera at me and taking pictures, which seemed odd since he had the macro lens on. It finally occurred to me to glance behind me - where a big snaggletoothed barracuda was hovering just outside of my peripheral vision!

After the dive, Jeff dunked all his gear in the Sand Dollar rinse tank. Almost instantly, his hands began to itch and burn. We think someone rubbed up against fire coral on their dive and then rinsed their gear in the dunk tank, leaving little fire coral bits behind for the next innocent bystander. Ouch! I made an emergency stop for some vinegar so Jeff could finish out his diving day.

Our afternoon dive was next door with Buddy Dive, on a boat trip arranged by Bruce (who just bought a house in Bonaire with his wife) for all the digitaldiver.net folks. We liked the boat operation there much better. No doubt we were influenced by the fact that the Buddy Dive divemaster was an ace at finding little things, including multiple frogfish:

We briefly considered squeezing in one last night dive, but decided to quit while we were ahead and call it a day. There was a digitaldiver.net evening get-together at Bruce’s - they have the most gorgeous house, with the perfect patio for hosting parties. Funny how everyone we know with vacation homes seems to not have kids!

Afterwards, Jeff and I sneaked off for a ‘date night’ dinner at an Italian restaurant, then joined Carol and Michael back at the condo to make plans for our topside adventures the following day…

Jeff and I got an early start Thursday morning and drove south past Salt Pier. I’d seen the dive site ‘Tori’s Reef’ named on many people’s “must dive” lists, so we decided to check it out. The entry was similar to all the southern dive sites, a rocky ledge, but at this site you actually enter down the sides of a channel cut through to the salt pools. When the gates are closed and water isn’t being sucked in, it’s a little easier to climb down the edge there and walk out through the sandy channel, rather than having to deal with the slippery rocks and urchins along the usual beach.

The dive here started in about 8 feet of water. As soon as we dropped down, we found clumps of coral that were home to all kinds of interesting little fish. They swarmed with juvenile damselfish and bright orange and blue cherubfish, and occasionally with jacks cruising overhead in search of a snack.

We finally tore ourselves away from the super-shallows and headed across the sand towards the real reef, but again I found myself constantly distracted! I spotted half a dozen yellowhead jawfish in their burrows, and even saw my first sailfin blenny giving his signature display off in the distance! (Of course, he hid back in his little hole as soon as I went close.)

Yellowhead Jawfish sneaks out of his burrow:

By the time we reached the slope, we’d already been down 40 minutes just tooling around in the shallows. Here we saw more nesting butterflyfish, a barred hamlet, and of course I found lots of slender filefish.

Slender filefish hides in a gorgonian:

Our next dive of the day was also our first boat dive on this trip; we’d signed up for a boat and picked Klein Bonaire as the dive spot (the only area you can’t get to from shore). I think we were all a little underwhelmed by Sand Dollar’s boat operation. The boat itself was extremely cramped. I don’t expect luxury, but a little room to move is nice - and we didn’t even have a full load of divers, so I can’t even imagine how awkward that would have been.

But more importantly, we didn’t feel like the divemaster was particularly useful. He only “led” the dive insofar as he cruised a little ahead of the divers. We signed up for a boat dive mainly so a local guide could point out cool stuff, but we did a better job of that on our own.  In fact, the divemaster was the first person out of the water - something I’ve never seen before!

We finished off the day with a dusk dive back at the house reef. Carol and Jeff had done a night dive several days before, and followed a DM’s instructions to find a little frogfish. Jeff was able to retrace their steps and find froggie again, though he wasn’t in a very photogenic spot.

We also saw the usual suspects: peacock flounder, filefish. But as evening dives go, this was one of the least impressive I’ve had for some reason.

There was a little bit of adventure at the end of the dive. We bumped back into Carol and Michael as we did our safety stop under the pier. Jeff signed to me that he wanted to go look for the frogfish again, but I was feeling pretty much done (it had already been over an hour, and I was getting chilly), so I waved goodbye to him and surfaced. I put away all my gear and waited. And waited.

Eventually they all surfaced; apparently Jeff had convinced Carol and Michael to go after the frogfish. Except, Carol had thought from all his signing (”frogfish? 40 feet?”) that he meant he needed her to show him where it was, when in fact he was asking if she wanted him to show her. So she reluctantly trudged back to the frogfish, which she actually wasn’t interested in pursuing (end of dive, and she’d already seen it).

Once they were all back on the surface, I went to move the truck closer so we could back in our gear - and it wouldn’t start. Completely dead battery. In the meantime, apparently I missed a rather spectacular fall when Jeff slipped on the dock and landed smack on his back. So we were all in an excellent mood by the time everyone had their gear piled up in our other truck (thank goodness we had two), and I put in a call to the rental agency.

Which went something like this:

Me: “Hi, we’re renting a truck from you guys, and the battery seems to be dead. What should we do?”

Her: “You need to bring the truck in.”

Me: “I can’t bring it in - the battery is dead, we can’t even start it.”

Her: “I’m sorry; what’s wrong with the car?”

… ad infinitum. I finally got the cell number of a manager, who said he’d come first thing in the morning (8am) to replace the battery…