If you noticed I put up a post a little while ago saying that I put a number of pictures up in the gallery last night. I thought I would actually let you know what those pictures are about and do some general rambling.

Newport Aquarium
So a couple of weeks ago I joined the Chinese girls and another artist or two and we went to local aquarium. The pictures are okay and I was trying a new camera lens that I had purchased. This lens even has an image stabilizer built in so it is supposed to allow me to take pictures that are more in focus at a lower light level or at a longer zoom distance depending upon how I’m using it. Of course after I bought this lens, I got it from a friend on tour who was upgrading, I went right out and bought a port for my underwater housing so I could shoot with the camera underwater also

Bengals – Packers
A preseason Monday night football game was held here in town between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Green Bay Packers and we scored a number of tickets to go see the game. Through contacts of the Cirque we managed to score tickets about 20 odd rows up on the 50 yard line so about 30 of us went to see the game as many were gambling on it, which is great, although if you also want to gamble online you should try the lucky tiger casino as this site have many options for this. It was a good game in the fact that the Bengals really kicked their butts so we were really having a good time. The weather that night wasn’t that great and the game actually was suspended for a short time due to lightning in the area. At this point we ended up leaving but a couple of people ended up staying, not me, and got to go right down to the edge of the field. I wish I had stayed because then I could have gotten a lot of good pictures of the players and cheerleaders.

Dry Suit
Yep I finally felt good enough and was able to arrange the time off to get and found an instructuor to teach me my dry suit specialty. We drove about an hour and a half to Blue Springs and did two easy dives. Diving in a dry suit is definitely going to take me a while to get really used to and comfortable with but it will be a good thing for those colder water dives I some times do. I’m still looking at buying a dry suit for myself and hopefully I’ll get that done in the future because the one I ended up renting for the class could only be considered a mostly dry suit. This is because the suit wasn’t custom fit to me and had a couple of minor leaks. Really not a big deal and didn’t affect either of the dives. Because this was the first time in a dry suit I’m sorry to say that there aren’t any underwater pictures in this group.

Cowan Lake
My friend Stirling Shelton, someon I know from graduate school, lives in Cincinnati where the tour is at right now. The other day Stirling was on site and one of the artists I’ve gone fishing with before approached me while we were walking around and asked me if I wanted to go fishing on the Monday of our double dark. I of course said yeah I wanted to go and that is when Stirling said he would also. At first we were going to wading in a river for smallmouth bass but then Stirling later in the day sent me an email with a link to a local lake, Cowan Lake. For $110 we could rent a “Fisherman’s special” boat from the marina on the lake and have a good day of fishing. Monday morning I woke up and was ready to go but I couldn’t find the artist that was supposed to join us. I called him and called him and Tristan never woke up. Finally I went and beat on his door and he woke up enough to tell me he wasn’t going to go. So I went and picked up Stirling and we went to the local Bass Pro Shops spent a bunch of money, my fishing gear isn’t on tour with me, and then headed to the lake. We got to the lake and it was a nice little lake and Stirling and I set off to catch lots of fish. The rule of the boat was that every fish that was caught had to have it’s picture taken. You can see in the Cowan Lake gallery how we did. Please don’t forget that a bad day fishing is still better than a good day at work

Mammoth Caves
On the second day of our double dark, this past Tuesday, I took the 4 Chinese girls and the two translators to Mammoth Caves National Park. It was kind of a longish drive for us, about 3 hours, to get there and the weather wasn’t cooperating all that well because it was raining/sprinkling most of the day but it didn’t matter that much once we got into the caves because for the most part they were dry caves. I of course being a spelunker had a wonderful time and I think that the girls did as well, at least that is what the translators said they did We ended up doing two guided tours while we were there and also went and saw the historic entrance to the cave. I think that I got some good pictures and I’m sorry if there are some in there that aren’t in focus or clean. Last night as I was uploading I didn’t take the time to sort through them. In any case enjoy them, cave pictures are hard to take because shadows get eliminated with the flash and things tend to look flat but some came out okay.

Getting ready to leave Cincinnati
Well this might be one of the last posts while I’m here in Cincy unless something exciting happens between now and Sunday when we start tearing the show down to head to St. Louis, our next stop.

I will be home for a day on the 19th of September. Basically I don’t have to work the third day of teardown this city and because I didn’t like how the tour was going to transfer me from here to there I booked a ticket to fly to Chicago eary in the morning and to St. Louis late, 10:20pm, at night. I’m excited because I’m hoping to see my family and especially my nieces for the day before heading to St. Louis.

I have also applied for another job and had a second interview for it the other day. This one is for a new show in Las Vegas in the Luxor hotel. I’m waiting to hear something but I have been told I’m definitely on the short list. I still haven’t had a chance to interview for the job here on tour but I’m hopnig to do that as well soon.

I should really get to work. I hope everyone is doing well. ttys

One might wonder where this post comes from, I had some plain vanilla ice cream tonight and it was just lacking. I really wish I had some Haagen-Dazs now.

A little while ago a friend of mine in Las Vegas introduced me to an organization whose whole purpose is to save the reefs around the world. I really encourage everyone to go to their website www.reefcheck.org and learn a little and if you are so inclined join the fight in saving the planet’s reefs.

From someone who is a scuba diver, trust me when I say it is a worthwhile thing.

This truly is a tragic day. He had a wife and two children and was a strong proponent for the environment and the wildlife in it. I am very sad now that when I was in Brisbane I never made it to his zoo.

Steve apparently was swimming on the Great Barrier Reef filming a new show when he swam over a bull ray. Apparently the ray felt cornered and lashed out in a defensive move and happened to strike Steve in the middle chest where it poked a hole in his heart killing him almost immediately.

Being a scuba diver I have seen bull rays before and on a dive in Sydney I saw a big one. In the gallery is a picture of me and a bull ray. The picture isn’t that great but you can see the tail of ray up near my head and the dark grey object to the left of me is the rest of the ray, it was about 6′-0″ across in wing span.

I’m kind of more taken aback by this event today than I thought I would. My thoughts are for Steve’s family and his friends. It truly is a sad sad sad day, the world has a good person.

ttys, cough cough

For those of you who don’t know what a dry suit is I guess I had better start with a wet suit which is probably more widely known. A wet suit is generally made of neoprene rubber and what it does is allow a small portion of water in between the suit and your skin. Your body heat quickly warms up this small portion of water and then the Neoprene insulates that little bit of water from the larger body that you are diving or swimming in. This is great for most diving and can even be used in colder water but the colder the water, even with this insulation, you still get cold. Water has a greater heat capacity than air does so water absorbs the heat from your body 25 times faster than air. So unless you are diving in 93 degree water or warmer you still lose body heat to the point that eventually you will get cold and need to get out of the water.

I have dove in a two piece 7mm thick wetsuit while I was in Vancouver a couple of years ago. The two pieces means that on my chest there is actually 14mm of insulating neoprene rubber keeping me warm. My friend was diving in a dry suit. Well the water temperature for those two dives was a nipple freezing 47F or 8C. After the first dive I was literally blue and my friend was shocked that I was going back into the water. The reason my friend was shocked was because he was diving in a dry suit and was warm and toasty.

What a dry suit does differently than a wet suit, as the name implies, is that it keeps you dry. It is usually a shell of some sort that looks like a giant one piece jump suit with feet that has a big zipper and seals at the neck and wrists. It is the seals at the neck and wrists and the big waterproof zipper that keeps all of th water out and keeps you dry. As I said earlier air transmits heat slower than water so by insulating yourself with air you can stay warm longer, plus you can wear thermal underwear which allows you to stay down even longer.

So I went to this dive shop in order to try and see if one of the rental suits would fit me and to get in one before diving in a Quary for the first time. The first forray into the drysuit was interesting. Sticking your hands through the wrist seals is difficult and pulls a lot of your arm hair. The neck seal is just wierd because there is something tight around your neck. Add all of this to the fact that you are standing in a warm humid room and I think I was getting more wet inside of the suit than if I was wearing a wetsuit and in the water. Once I did get into the water I was much more comfortable. On my first submersion I felt a little bit of a leak down the front of my chest where water was getting in. I came up, we readjusted things and I went back down and again more water down the chest. By now the store owner had stopped in and asked me to hold on for a second while he went and got something.

Basically what he went and got was a tube of neoprene that I was to put over my head and onto my kneck to help the suit seal there. Well the first time on it came off almost immediately because I thought it was too tight and was going asphixiate. After calming down for a second the owner put the tube on, and his neck was definitely larger than mine, and he said it was okay. So I took a deep breath and calmly put it back on and let him adjust everything for me and in the end it wasn’t so bad once it was adjusted. Normally you don’t need this kind of thing but because it is a rental suit they have to adjust the seals to fit a larger group of people than if I was to own the suit myself. I went down again and this time it was just fine.

So now I have a scuba tank, a dry suit and thermal underwear in my rental car just waiting to go diving on this coming Saturday without getting the majority of my body wet. My head, face and hands will still get wet but that is manageable. I’ll let you all know how it goes on Saturday.

I hope you all were able to follow this…

Normally I would take the day and just chill out but since we only get 4 total days off during this city there isn’t a whole lot of time for wasting a day off. Tomorrow morning I think I’m going to go to a water park that is about 1/2 an hour away and then tomorrow night the Green Bay Packers and the Cincinnati Bengals are going to be playing on Monday night football and we’ve gotten 32 tickets to go see the game. Needless to say we are kind of excited about this and are really looking forward to the game. Several of the people we are going with haven’t seen a game before and I’ve only seen one live that I can remember so it is going to be a lot of fun. I’m going to take my camera and I’ve been charging the battery all day long so hopefully I’ll get some good pictures, watch the gallery.

Not a lot else going on right now. I’m hoping to see my friend who lives in town some more as well as my Aunt, Uncle and Cousins. Oh yeah, tonight we are having Technical Department dinner at a local watering hole. It should be fun and hopefully the start to a good weekend. I’m also thinking about going fishing next weekend.

Well back to work…

I have put up some new pictures on my website in the gallery. The pictures are from my trip during the middle of the run in Philadelphia. I took two weeks off and went home to my parents house where I got to spend some time with them, my brother’s families, and friends. Then I spent some time in Las Vegas where I went for a hike with my friend Kim and took a bunch of pictures. Since arriving here in Cincinnati I also went to a Baseball game and took some pictures of that as well.

Enjoy

Needless to say I was and am still bummed. I have put applications in for other jobs and my name is out there but at this point I’m back to the decision as to whether or not I try to get off of the road or if I stay on tour. D#$N I really wanted that job!

I’ll keep you all posted as to what comes about until then I’m in Cincinnati now.