Else what's a heaven for?

I have no cope this morning, and my head is itchy and I can't wash it, so you get a post.

Jon and I went to a scuba refresher last night, just in case the dive shop on Grand Cayman decides to be anal about things. Last time I'd been scuba diving was almost 3 years ago and those people got all pissy when we were on the boat to the dive site and discovered I hadn't been diving in 6 years. That had been some of my best diving ever, skill wise, bc I was older and wiser, but whatever. Rules.

The refresher sucked. The pool was 78F, which is chilly for sitting around at the bottom. There was a n00b with us for the first third of the pool part, who was having issues, which meant Jon and I were sitting at the bottom making faces and lewd gestures at each other. (Every adventure is better with Jon.) The combination meant I was shivering and losing sensation in my fingers and then we found out Asphalt Green does not provide towels, unlike any reasonable gym. I also hadn't realized that our refresher course would include retesting on every single thing from the original PADI course, which includes the bit where you remove your mask completely and then clear it, which is actually a really horrible experience bc stuff gets up your nose and you can't see. I also found the bit where you practice having a broken regulator that's streaming air more unpleasant than I remembered. I suspect the instructor saw I was going to start screaming if he nitpicked any more and let us go home.

I was very impressed when I took my original PADI course 13 years ago at how they structure the course so that you slowly but efficiently learn all sorts of skills, so that by the time you're going under the sea, you're focusing on skills and get to the bottom before you notice you're 60' from your natural environment. When I took the course, I'd never climbed outside and I barely knew how to belay, so I didn't think about risk much. I horrified a friend of the family at dinner by telling my brother that scuba is perfectly safe: apparently her nephew died in a scuba accident.

With over a decade's experience in risky sports, I started trying to figure out what could go wrong in scuba. I realized that scuba is somewhat comparable in risk to ice climbing. Scuba is pretty safe if everything works right, which it usually does, which is why they take unlicensed people, but holy crap would I not want to deal with someone losing their shit bc their mask strap broke and they can't see. (I consider ice climbing almost safe, in that the environment is trying to kill you with the dangers of falling ice or avalanche and there's always hypothermia, before you get to human error.)

Even before last night, I knew scuba would never be my sport: it's a way to go somewhere to see stuff no one else gets to see. (Some people scratch that itch by finding new brunch spots, but whatever.) The best things I've ever seen in the water were seahorses (in 10' of water) and penguins (while snorkeling in the Galapagos). The rest are fish and fugly sharks.