Got Da Hookup!!!

I don´t remember what exactly i wrote last but i think we left off with Ahnna and i in a crummy hole in the wall hotel room with a very nice Italian girl named Martina, and i was about to go look at a room in a house. I did see the house and it was very nice. Hard wood floors, fully furnished. We would have been living with one of the instructors at the scuba school i´m diving with. His name is Marvin, but everyone calls him Bob Marvin, picture dreaded red hair and deeply tanned skin with a spatering of freckles. He keeps his house very clean, and we would have had a large room with a full sized bed and a bunk bed and penty of space. I told him we were going to take it because it was only 200 dollars for the both of us and the only other place we had looked at was a VERY nice studio for 600. But the universe apparently wanted us to have the very nice studio to ourselves so it worked things out for me. Here´s how that story goes.

Ahnna and i were walking back to our hotel after i had chosen my dive shop and ahnna says to me ¨I may just have to take up midday drinking¨ apparenty she had seen a little sign for ¨the best margarita on Utila¨ so with my encouragement we retuned to the sign and followed the little pathway off the main street under small intermitent aches that opened into a nice tropical setting and a large yellow building overlooking the bay. We went up the stairs to the Cafe Mariposa and sat down. The seating is all on a covered deck with a spectacular view looking northwest over the bay. I said to Ahnna, ¨wouldn´t it be cool to work here¨. She replied in the affimative, so when the waitress came over with menus i asked if they were hiring. she said she would ask, and just then the owner/manager of the restaurant walked up. His name is jeff and he´s from seattle. He sat down right then and there and asked ahnna a bunch of interview type questions. I did my best to be a fly on the wall and keep my mouth shut. Then he had the lead waitress come over and continue interview while ahnna thuroughly enjoyed her margarita. the end result being ahnna will work 2 shifts with no pay (though she keeps any tips wich is where the real money is anyway) and if ¨she is half of what she says she is¨ she will get a few (2 or 3) shifts per week. Later, as we were trying to finish one of the best plates of nachos i´ve ever eaten, Edie, the kitchen manager, came and sat down and had a little talk with ahnna and I. When we had been talking with Jeff earlier we had mentioned that we were looking for an appartment, and that was when he told us about the studio just under the restaurant that was available for 600 dollars. Edie told us that he had just talked to the owner of the buiding and she said we could have it for 450. still too much but we went and had a look in the windows. the place is big! (keep in mind i just moved out of the trailor) all open space with a kitchen and a bathroom in the corner, a leather sofa and a rack for hanging clothing. there are wooden pillars at intervals throughout the space which i think is 30X40. the front door opens onto the deck overlooking the water. I will post pictures later tonight maybe. anyway, we are trying to be frugal so we turned eddie down. Later i was walking and thinking about where i could do massage in the house and i realized i proabably wouldn´t do any massage there and bringing my table down would have been a waste, so we returned to the Cafe Mariposa to find Shannon, the owner of the building cleaning the place. i proposed a deal, she knocks off 100 dollar of the rent and i give her 10% of any money i can make doing massage out of that space. Its set up perfectly to hang some sheets between the wooden posts to separate an office space from the bedroom space and kitchen space. she agreed and we started hammering out the details. everything seems to have worked out for everyone. I am paying 350 per month for ahnna and I to have a beautiful waterfront appartment as well as a work space. Shannon has a new source of income. I will be charging 30 per hour, 15 per halfhour US. Shannon will be my receptionist so she can keep track of everyone i work on and knows that i am paying her the 10% and she has inscentive to help me advertise around the island. I already have my first appointement when i open for buisness next week. I´m going to talk to Jeff about working on him and his staff at a discounted rate in exchange for a free lunch every day. I´m very excited for the possabilities.

So i know this is getting really long, but i can´t leave without telling you about my dives! I signed up for the Advanced open water class and have done 4 dives already. The first dive we did was our ¨deep adventure dive¨down to 100 feet to experience the effects of nitogen narcosis. we went to a cliff face that descends 7000 feet into the abyss. It was AMAZING. as we descented through a soft coral forested trench we emerged into the cliff face and i was face to face with The Big Blue open ocean. we did some mental and motor skills testing and then enjoyed touring along the cliff, then back to the shelf at the top and up to the boat. Our next dive was less fun but quite informative, we did underwater navigation using compases and counting our fin kicks to move in a square and a strait line. then we swam away and had to use landmarks to find the boat. Then that same night we went out for our Night dive. I was a little nervous about being in the water at night, it was cold(for the carribean) on the boat, but once we got in the water i forgot all about fear and cold. we dropped down with our flashlights on and did a few tests then we went and found a small wrecked fishing boat. there were lots of enemenies out, but the real treat was the octopus. maybe 3 feet long if you had spread out its tenticles all the way, it ignored us as it moved from coral formation to coral formation sucking its food from their homes. One of my fellow divers, a dready kid named Luke Olson from California had his digital camera with him and got a great video of the whole thing. later we turned out all the flashlights and thrashed the water around to see the phospherescence. it was cool, but not as bright as i was expecting, apparently if you want the water to glow like i was expecting you should go to the sea between the baja peninsula and the mainland. but it was still cool to see some, and to be in the total dark of the night-time ocean. I went on one more dive the next morning, the naturalist dive, where i got a chance to identify some of the awsome fish i had been seeing the whole time. i also got to see a several hundred pound snapper of some kind. BIG FISH! all in all its been an amazing experience. Unfortunately, i´m having some trouble with my sinuses and getting nose bleeds when i surface, so i´m taking a few days off, i go out again tomorrow at 1:30 we will see if it clears up. Thats it for now. I´ll come post some pics later so you can see where i am... maybe i can get that video of the octopus to show you all too.