The Seaweed's Not Always Greener....

Diving and "working" in a dive shop is exhausting!  I've been showing up around 7:30 at the dive shop to help with gear set up, tear down and putting gear away as well as doing 3 dives/day and leaving around 8 or 9pm and it caught up with me today with a vengeance!  I showed up this morning at around 8:30am to do a Nitrox dive at 9am, feeling a little tired but ok.  Last night I was thinking... I would rather sleep in and lay on a beach than go diving today, but instead of listening to that instinct, I just showed up.  I knew I had made the wrong choice when Ari, my mentor, told me that I should get there a little earlier and my eyes immediately welled up with tears :(. I think it's a culmination of two weeks going pretty flat out with a new activity (scuba diving) that my body isn't used to or trained for yet.  Coming from a landlocked province and stress from work then stress from prepping my house for renters, then straight into the Divemaster Training (DMT) with no downtime has proven a bit much for my system.  The solution, a day off... maybe two... and to treat myself while I try to recover.  I think a pedicure, foot massage, and full body massage would be a good treatment program and will likely cost me less than $50. 

I recognize now that I am allowed to and I NEED to give myself some down time too.  Most of us, myself included, come from such a culture of achievement and goals and schedules and deadlines that we don't know how to shut down and power up.  Ha ha, as ironic as this is, I am going to make learning to power down a new goal.  Wish me luck!

On a lighter note, the diving is amazing.  Some of the cool new critters I've seen under the sea this week include:

Juvenile Midnight Snapper (bottom left photo), very cute and dramatically different looking than the adult Midnight Snapper!

Blunt Decorator Crab - saw this guy on a night dive despite his amazing camouflage 

Another master of camouflage, the cockatoo waspfish (bottom right).  This guy was tiny and looked like a dead leaf floating around the sea floor

Reef Stonefish - this is one ugly, grumpy-looking mutha', so grumpy looking you can't help but want to flip him the bird when you see him underwater.  Oh yeah, he also is poisonous and camouflaged so he's hard to see...  a real "A-hole of the sea"

Mount Rinjani on Lombok looked beautiful this morning

Had a nice pizza dinner and a nice evening out with the team from Blue Marlin to celebrate the birthday of one of the instructors, Daniel (in black, longsleeves)

Owen, one of the instructors at Blue Marlin has been calling Chrissie and I team America since we arrived as a joke.  We got our payback today....  HAPPY CANADA DAY!