Thanksgiving

We had a fun Thanksgiving visiting Florida. We stayed with Dave and Carol around Ft. Lauderdale -- Carol is expecting in March but managed to find the energy to host Thanksgiving dinner. Ben and Sara drove up from Miami with baby Chloe, and Elaine and Bill came down from New York.

While we were in the vicinity of warm waters, we managed to get our advanced scuba certification. We had originally gotten certified on our first visit to Thailand, in 2003. The motivation to do something a bit more came from our visit last fall to Israel and Egypt. At the most well known site in the vicinity of where we went diving in Egypt (the Blue Hole), local dive shops would only take divers with advanced certification.

Other than having to do some reading and excercies in advance, the certification basically consisted of 5 dives over 2 days, each highlighting one aspect in particular (wreck dive, deep dive, night dive, navigation, peak performance buoyancy). It was fun, the weather was good, and the visibility was very good. Although most of the rest of the people on the diving boats seemed to be locals who didn't feel the weather was as warm and balmy as we did. A bunch of them had gloves and hoods (we just wore full wetsuits), and felt the need to put on wool caps at the surface.

Last weekend we hosted our annual holiday beer tasting cocktail hour on Friday, and Lorien's company holiday party was on Saturday. And this coming weekend is SantaCon.