When we woke up this morning conditions looked epic. The trees and flags were still. The water was as flat as you can reasonably expect the ocean to get. We were worried if we let our excitement show that we might jinx it. Both dive spots this morning were on Molasses Reef, which is a fairly shallow reef, so I hoped the calm water and shallow depths would lead to some good pictures. When we arrived at Spanish Anchor, it wasn’t as clear as I thought it would be, but it was as calm as anywhere I’ve been diving. ...

We hit two spots on French Reef today. We started things off at Woody’s Ledge. The surface was calm, but the visibility wasn’t good – 25 to 30 feet at most. They put us in a group with a bunch of folks that hadn’t been under water in a while and needed to do a weight check before we got going. So we all jumped in the water and Alison (our dave master) started helping them do their neutral buoyancy checks. Charmaine popped her head up and yelled “a huge turtle!” and immediately descended to check it out. I decided to follow her instead of staying with the group. The group was going to be fine, but I needed to stay with my buddy. ...

It rained again last night. I worried that the water would be rough again today, but it wasn’t. We bought some dramamine yesterday and took some before bed. We took another round this morning before heading out. I’m not sure if it was the drugs or the calm waters, but we were both fine all day. We did our second deep dive today. We decided to do all our deep dives before Brett and Jess get here. I don’t think Jess enjoys going deep and there’s certainly no need to go deep to see anything other than wrecks. The wreck we saw this morning was the USCG Duane. I took the camera down inside the enclosure for the first time. I brought the big flash because I knew there wouldn’t be a lot of light at depth. That full rig is pretty heavy. Speaking of heavy, I took 18 pounds of weight today, which proved to be way too much. It’s easy to compensate for too much weight, but there’s no way to compensate for having too little. Tomorrow I may try a little less. ...

I really like how Rainbow Reef runs their scuba business. Everything is top-notch and professional. The rental gear is always high-end and brand new. They make you do some of the work, but it helps you do things right. I really like them. They are why we came back to Key Largo. We were so impressed with the way they did things when we were here doing our Advanced Open Water certifications last year. ...

We took a taxi to the airport. It costs about $40 each way (after tip). Parking at the airport is $15 per day, so the $80 taxi ride is a money saver for any trip longer than 4 days. This trip is going to be a bit longer than that. When you hire a taxi to take you to the airport, you never know if they’ll pick you up or drop you off on time. Will they drive the same route you drive? Do they drive faster or slower than you? So you plan on a little extra time. We also allowed a little more extra time because we knew we would be checking a bag filled with our scuba stuff. We had scheduled the driver to pick us up at 9:30. He called at 9:20 to make sure he had the right address. He showed up right on time, drove the shortest route, and got us to the airport by 9:50. We walked straight to the self-check kiosk, checked in, turned in our bags, walked through security without stopping (there’s never a line in San Jose) and sat down at our gate. I guess we didn’t need as much buffer as we thought. We had nearly two hours until our flight was scheduled to leave. ...

Car marketing teams try to come up with model names that make people think the best things about their cars. They don’t want you to think they are just good; they want you to think they are the best. It’s always about the superlatives and being superior. As I ride my bicycle around town, I’ve started noticing these feelings of superiority migrating from the cars to the drivers of the cars, or at least there are drivers out there that believe they are superior, simply based on the car they are driving. ...

I was updating some ID3 tags on a few songs today when I got an error saving the new tag. The mounted file system to my music share had become read-only. I checked the exports file on my server. It was read-write. I checked my fstab. Everything looked good. I checked the file system itself on the server. Trouble. One of my drives had failed moments earlier. Luckily, the array was configured for RAID-5, so no data was lost, but it’s still going to take a long time to rebuild it. ...

Wow. I didn’t expect to find a place like this in Burley. My expectations for food establishments in Burley were set very low by a terrible experience I had at Wendy’s on my way through town several years ago. But this town has come a long way in my eyes since I started participating in the annual Spudman Triathlon. I have come to realize just how beautiful it is to be right here on this part of the Snake River. And now I’m finding great places to eat. Burley keeps finding new ways to impress me. ...

I live in a part of Utah County where there are very few businesses of any kind. We can’t even get pizza delivered to our house from any website other than Dominos.com, which is just sad. So when Charmaine’s little sister, Lisa, wanted to go to a local restaurant, because it was so good, I was more than a little skeptical. When Charmaine confirmed that she had been there previously, and that it really was quite good, I figured I should give it a shot. ...

I moved from the Seattle area to Utah County about four years ago. One of the hardest parts of that move was the extreme lack of good food in Utah. I grew up in Utah and always figured we had good food here, but just in the expensive restaurants. I was wrong. There is no substitute for seafood only a few hours old, and it will never be possible to have that kind of freshness in Utah. One coping method I’ve found is to go on vacations, with the goal of eating great food being high on the list of reasons for choosing a location. ...