hustle, and flow.

First day of classes today.

When I returned from my 2-week holiday visit to the upper midwest, I assumed I'd have oodles of time to myself: for library visits and reading, for hanging out with friends, for sleeping, for biking, for outings of uncertain intent with my crush, for preparing for the swim eval, for researching possible career paths, for registering at school. Time passed all too quickly, as it is typically wont to do, and so yesterday found me scrambling to accomplish all manner of school-related tasks at the last minute. During the day, I hunted for parking with a good majority of the 17,000 returning SBCC students, I registered for classes, visited with Financial Aid and learned of the glitch du jour explaining the heretofore absence of loan check, and I had maintenance checks performed on pieces of equipment. Late last night found me populating my dive bag in preparation for my first diving class today, searching for those items purchased specifically for the program so many months ago, neglected all these months.

Today began Advanced Scuba Techniques, the class which explains the necessity for some of the skills in the swim eval: the class focuses on retraining the diver from the basics up (including skills used in skin diving, a sport in itself, and a world apart from scuba diving), regardless of class and rank. Today we worked on finning at the surface and underwater, some breath holding, and a few types of dives used in skin diving. For the scuba portion of the class, we assembled gear while listening to the instructors discuss the dos and don'ts of gear assembly. Once in the pool, we practiced basic scuba skills like mask flooding, mask removal, and regulator recovery. It felt good to be in my gear again. When I work in the harbor, I breathe from a regulator, and I wear my wetsuit/mask/fins, but that's about where the similarity to scuba diving ends. I felt at home in my own gear, from my ridiculous pink gauges and my amazing ScubaPro S600 to my super sweet new BCD. I'm excited to be in the class. Even though now, post-swim eval, I find myself wondering how I didn't pass the swim eval in the first place, I know I wasn't ready before. It feels especially good to be in the class now that the skills are a fun physical challenge, rather than the scary impossibility they seemed before. I'm also quite happy to be focusing on diving this semester, having finished the rhetoric and theory last semester.

I also started First Aid for the Dive Professional today, a once-a-week, 6-hour-per-day, 4-week-long class, after which I'll have qualified for just about every dive-related first aid cert ever conceived. It's very, very intense, so I'm already counting down the days.

With that, I'm off to bed. Something about the breath-holding skills gives me a mad headache.