Well, based on the business and politics over at LiveJournal, I think I’ll be doing more blogging here. I’ll still read there, and may link to here on occasion, but (since I’ve got this thing running anyway) I think that this will be my primary blog.

This weekend, Laura and I planned to not scuba dive. Last weekend, the five Advanced Open Water dives wore us the heck out. Somehow, though, it doesn’t feel right to not dive this weekend. Plus, we just bought high-pressure steel tanks today: two 80 cubic foot tanks for Laura, two 100 cubic foot tanks for me. It’d be a sin not to try them out, wouldn’t it? And since we’re moving from aluminum to steel, we need to adjust our weights for buoyancy, and why wait to do that?

We were waffling on the tanks, but the fellow at Underwater Sports up on Aurora gave us a very fair price for them — as good as anything we were finding on the Internet. And so seeing as Craigslist just wasn’t turning up used high-pressure steel tanks, we decided to spring for it.

We’ve never been diving before, just the two of us without a divemaster or instructor. Assuming that we can figure everything out, we’ll probably just go to Redondo, where we’ve been a fair number of times. That’ll give us an experience we’re somewhat familiar with, to transition more easily.

So, it looks like we will be diving tomorrow, at Redondo, after doing the farmer’s market in Ballard. (With any luck we’ll put something in the crockpot to have ready when we get back.)

We’ve spent a bloody fortune on dive gear this year, but almost all of it should last us for many years to come. Over the number of dives we’re hoping to do, it’ll amortize out quite nicely.

We really only need one last piece of dive gear. I’m still trying to talk myself out of it, and hopefully I’ll succeed. But the car’s developed a ripe funk in the last week, and those rubberized floor mats are beginning to sound really attractive. If the Lysol doesn’t kill the dead-sea-creature smell emanating from the trunk, we may be forced to take drastic measures.