mindless.

The beauty of this semester, beyond that I'm diving, is that I have class only 2 days a week. Never mind that one of those days is 12 hours long for the next 3 weeks, or that class time the other day spans 6 hours, it's lovely to have scheduled class time only on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Today's class and lab combo was Intro to Commercial Dive Equipment. Eventually, I'll be diving surface-supplied equipment, so rather than diving with tanks attached to my back, I'll be diving with a hose attached to an air supply at the surface. Surface-supplied diving requires special equipment, most notably the helmet like the one shown below (and it's pretty amazing to have found a picture of a woman donning a helmet!):

The pic gives an idea of the size. Diving helmets are made from fiberglass or spun copper, with a decent heft, and a price tag of $5000+. Santa Barbara-based Kirby Morgan Dive Systems International's helmets are an industry standard, and, due to the current elevated need for commercial divers, back ordered until 2008. The MDT program has several Kirby Morgan helmets for us to dive, but before we can, we need to know how to rip them apart, and put them back together. This is one of the main objectives in the Commercial Diving Equipment class. Today in class we watched Instructor Dan do it. It doesn't seem so difficult in the beginning, but as the disassembled parts start to multiply, and the mask becomes barer and barer, the task feels increasingly challenging. Fortunately we have exploded diagrams to help us determine which parts go where, which I wish I could illustrate to you here in this entry, but I can't find a suitable file format to attach. Rest assured that the diagrams are helpful in their way, but also serve to render the novice extremely cross-eyed in attempting to decipher. With all things Marine Tech though, practice is the key.

I'm not sure if whatever happens to a person post holidays has only just now caught up to me, but I'm about as lethargic as they come. I'm on a 2-week hiatus from diving in the harbor, but still working the other 2 jobs. I only log about 5 hours per week doing office work, and since I still don't have a set schedule at the restaurant, and therefore am only working sporadically, I actually have time on my hands. Which is nice, it really is, but as I've mentioned before, I'm not great at having time on my hands. It makes me feel useless and bored. I know I should really try to appreciate it, and not try to fill it up with nonsensical tasks, but it makes me restless when I don't have much to do.

It's a bit different at the moment though, like some bizarre combination of feeling bored and useless, and also not really feeling like doing a damn thing. I don't feel like going to the gym, I don't care to clean, don't really want to cook food or do laundry, I don't even care to revise what I've written. I really just want to lay in bed and read, which I can do, since I've got some time to do it. I suppose I'll just chalk it up to it being winter, and a delayed reaction to an uber busy holiday season followed by intense catch up upon return to SB.