Yes it's after midnight, and I'm still sitting here pecking away. I guess I just got motivated to do some household work on the old website tonight. I went through and blew away all the old photo albums, and shortly will be removing the Photo Albums link from the Navigation pane, leaving just the Flickr link to my page over there. It's just easier that way.

Before I finished deleting all the old stuff, I thought I'd share a couple new/old pictures that you might not have seen before.

Fluffy! This is a pic of Fluffy, a little Cayman mutt puppy that Jenny organized a big rescue/cleanup for one weekend. There was a stray/West Bay Mutt who had puppies out in the Goat Yard by the Magnificent Dive Dump and the puppies were suffering for it. Jenny, Wendy, Mindy and another girl who worked at Soto's with me at the time got together and HazMat Jenny went and crawled under a shack and pulled the puppies out one at a time. We bathed them, gave them flea shampoos and 4H Jenny removed their ticks. After that, we managed to find homes for three of them. Wendy kept one of them, and I was going to keep this one, Fluffy. I couldn't have a dog at The Ranch, so the next week, Jenny found a nice home for Fluffy, but because they were so ill already, Fluffy didn't make it. The dog that Wendy kept made it, but had all kinds of issues that finally got sorted after huuuge vet bills. Wendy and her boyfriend Bob moved back to the US, and took the dog with them.

This is the most infamous picture that I've ever had on my website. I actually had this picture posted on http://www.candw.ky/cay05802/index.htm (if it's still there) back when I lived at The Ranch the first time around, before I even had Docjelly.com registered. That link was the BS 1mb "free web hosting" space that Cable & Wireless gives you for free with a dialup account. Yes, I said dialup. Since then, every iteration that docjelly.com has gone through, this picture has survived the trip. It was even up on the front page for awhile, right before I switched over from a manually-updated FrontPage site to this DasBlog engine. Every now and then I have to bust it out, just to remind him that I still have it... and every now and then he punches me for it... again.

John's a trooper though. Not only was he passed out with his head in the toilet bowl when this picture was taken, but he's still got a beer in his hand!

John got his revenge, eventually. When Jenny and I were in Cuba in May, 2004, I finally released a LOT of job-related stress that was wearing me down. It only took one whole bottle of Havana Club rum. In one night. At the Tropicana Cabaret. Apparently not only could I salsa dance that night, but I was fluent in Spanish and Italian. If only I could remember to be such a cunning linguist when I was sober... Eventually the 20-or-so ounces of rum started a revolt in my system, and I spent the evening praying to the porcelain Gods. I was vaguely aware of a camera flash or two, but was in no state to even protest. I spent the whole next day in bed, only getting up so housekeeping could come in and change the sheets and give us fresh towels (as you can see, I used a lot of them that night). When I finally emerged from the hotel room on Sunday afternoon, our travelling companions amusingly asked what happened to "that charming Italian fellow who shared a cab back to the hotel with us Friday night..."

This picture looks better smaller. It's a video screen-grab from a video I had posted a few years ago about a freedive that I did in August 2000. Elspeth was sitting on the bottom of the ocean with a video camera and was shooting video of us duck diving down and sinking to the bottom and then back up again. The depth of this dive was 74 feet, just out in front of DiveTech at Turtle Reef. What you couldn't see in the video was me coming within milliseconds of blacking out as I ascended to shallower water, as I was just out.of.oxygen in my blood. I got to the surface, signalled I was ok, and passed out. Apparently I was out for about eight seconds, but it seemed like no time at all had passed to me. My lips were blue and my whole face was rather pale. As I got up into shallower water, maybe about 20 feet from the surface, all of a sudden my legs turned to bricks. Uh-oh. At that point I mentally willed my legs to keep kicking. When I got up to about ten feet, I could feel the tunnel-vision of blackout coming in from my peripheral vision. Just as it was about to meet in the middle, I popped to the surface and took a huge breath of fresh air (and a little seawater) but it was too little too late. There wasn't enough time for that oxygen to get into my bloodstream and my eyes rolled up into my head and I went limp like a rag-doll. I was done for the day, but went back out the next day and did another half-dozen dives & skills to get my certification.