This is an offical shout out to some good ice cream. In Philadelphia this wonderful woman who was running the Haagen-Dazs tent would bring us Ice Cream every now and then. They were pushing a new light flavor dulce de leche and I have to say that was some good ice cream.
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.
Hey everyone,
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.
Well unless you’ve fallen off of the planet or I haven’t talked you, you might have not heard that today Steve Irwin, aka the Crocodile Hunter, has died. This morning I was checking my email and a friend had sent me a link. Here is a link on cnn.
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.
Well I’ve got a cold!! Two days ago I drove over to the dive shop to try out wearing a dry suit for the first time. I woke up that morning with a little bit of a runny nose but I thought it was just due to too much Air Conditioning in the room. Well I left work early last night and this morning at 7:00am when the alarm went off to get ready to go scuba diving today I knew there was just no point. I wasn’t going to be able to take enough Sudafed in order to make me feel good enough to dive. So this morning I slept until just now and I am about to get in the shower to get ready to go return all of the unused scuba gear to the dive shop. This means I’ll have to rent a car again next weekend and try this again, hopefully the instructor can come that weekend and my cold will be gone.
ttys, cough cough 
Well this morning I rented a car and headed to a local dive shop in Kentucky, it’s just the other side of the river you know. The reason I went there is because I am going to be taking a dry suit class on Saturday and I needed to go in to try the suit on and get in the pool and make sure it fit.
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…
Well for most people it probably isn’t that significant but for me it is quite because it signifies the last day of my work week. Tomorrow is the first day off I have since I started to transfer from Philadelphia to Cincinnati 19 days straight so far.
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…
Hello everyone,
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
Well I just heard from the HR department in Las Vegas. I had interviewed for the Technical Director job at the Zumanity show and HR called me today to let me know that they decided to go with someone else.
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.
Hello everyone,
I’m back online. Actually I’ve been getting onto the internet for a couple of days now from the hotel but just for short periods of time to check my emails.
Today is Saturday and it is our fourth day of setup. Today was the day when I actually got fairly involved in the process because it was my day to set up the artistic tent. This tent is where all of the artists warm up, have dressing rooms, there is a Physiotherapy area and also a wardrobe area. It has been my task to set all of this up for the last two + years and today was a good setup. Reason being is I had someone else working with me this time, Neil one of our fly-ins is going to start taking over this process for me in case I end up leaving the show and we had great temps.
The setup so far, and overall, has been a good one. We have been hitting our daily goals and things are moving along. All of the major scenic pieces have been installed and now we are working on the smaller ones and the finishing touches. Automations is about set up and that means thing will start moving soon which is always a good thing to see.
I haven’t really seen that much of Cincinnati yet because I have pretty much just been working the whole time that I’ve been here. Tonight I think I’m only working until 5:00pm so if I can stay up late enough after I get home I’ll try and do some laundry, I’m out of white socks, and then go to bed. I spoke to my Aunt and Uncle who live here in town, Don and Linda, and we are hoping to see each other in the near future. I might even catch a baseball game on this coming Wednesday with Don which would be very fun. Just typing that reminded me that I need to get a baseball and glove for Monday because one of our Characters is going to throw out the first pitch on one of the upcoming games and he needs to practice throwing the ball in costume.
Not a whole lot else going on. I had my second interview on this past Wednesdaywith Zumanity and I hope I was coherent enough because I was quite tired. I think I managed not to yawn during the interview. Our luggage is in town and I’ve picked up all of my stuff and I hope to have my bike together soon to be able to start riding it. One of the reporters that was here for the big top raising was telling me one place to go ride which is not to far from the site.
Well I should get back to it, ttys.
Hello,
So tonight is the last normal night I’ll probaly have in about 8-10 days. Tomorrow night after the show we start the teardown process here in Philadelphia. By Tuesday morning there will be pretty much nothing left on the site and it will be back to being a parking lot soon after that. Tuesday night I fly to Cincinnati and Wednesday morning at 8:00am we start the process of putting the tent back up and the scenery up inside of it and we’ll be finished 8 days later with Premier.
I don’t know when I’ll have internet back up and running but I’ll have my blackberry with me so if you send emails to my Gmail account I’ll get them while I’m at work. If you send them to my work address you won’t hear back from me because tomorrow night our servers go down and once that happens I can’t see my CDS email at all. So again either send me an email to my Gmail account or give my cell phone a call.
A big shout out to my niece Madelyn who gets Christined tomorrow. I’m sorry I can’t be there, I truly would be if I could.
ttys
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