Interlude 5: The Land of What The...???

Good evening everyone.

I have been in the middle of a lot of travel and business and it's creating havoc with my blogging.  This will be my fifth interlude since the last time I put out a proper post.  And that doesn't even take into account the couple weeks of no posts at all.

I'm a failure and ask your forgiveness.

I am as of this sentence, sitting in a hotel room in Springfield, IL.  The state capitol.  The land of Lincoln.

I have been here only once previous to this since the times I came her as a child.  The last time I didn't get a chance to drive through it.  This time I did.  As a result, I noticed something I hadn't really considered before.

Springfield is tiny.

Now, I know that comparing to Chicago, the place where I reside, is not a great way to compare city sizes.  But this is the state capital.  I was expecting... more.

On the plus side, it is actually very nice.  The downtown was clean and well kept.  Plus, there is a number of historical buildings and sites to see.  

But, it has been an odd trip.

It started this morning after I finished teaching my class as we packed up and jumped in the car.  I google app'd the route here, and, usually, my app is super good with letting me know construction and traffic problems.

I take the way anyone would take to get to Springfield and manage to make all the way out of the city with virtually no traffic.  As we get just south of Joliet, which is the beginnings of nowhere, traffic just stops.  Over the next 1.5 hours or more, we manage to travel about 1.5 miles.

I live in Chicago.  I'm used to traffic.  It's never like that.  

As it turned out, there was a bridge that has been under construction since forever, but it didn't register on my construction finder until we were already in the traffic.  This functionally ruined any chance we had of actually visiting historical sites in springfield while they were open.

Speaking of Springfield, once we drove into downtown Springfield, we decided to drive past the historical places.  

It took all of five minutes.  Maybe 10.  It's so tiny.  Did I mention that already?  

When we left Chicago, we decided to grab some food on the way because we wanted to get to Springfield early enough to actually visit the historical sites.  (I think I've covered the futility of that decision.)  My wife and I have been vegetarian now for almost a year and half.  We've learned to find our way around menu's pretty good.  We try hard not to be those people who just nitpick the menu apart and give the waiter or waitress or drive through person a terrible run around.

I figured to make it simple, I'd just stop at Burger King and get their veggie burger.  It's ok, but not amazing.  Probably not overly healthy, but you do what you can.  What you don't understand is that when I start getting hungry, I start getting grumpy.  There is a direct proportion to my level of hunger and grumpiness.  I figured I'd wait till we got out of the main Chicago area traffic before we found a place.

However, by then, I was really getting desperate.  Not because I was going to die of starvation, but because my wife was afraid I might accidentally murder her.  (this may be an exaggeration.)  So, I see the BK of my desires, pull in, and find out they are out of veggie burgers.

The one place I stop at, and they don't have what I need.  Go figure.

So, we had to find some other place that had veggie options that were more than just fries, so that we could make to Springfield.  (Again, not realizing it wouldn't matter because google and construction killed us.)

We finally find a place with food, and once the ingestion process begins, my wife decides to put her bladed weapons of defense away.

Once we arrived at Springfield, got checked in to our hotel, managed a quick tour of downtown, all was right with the world again.

It turns out that our problems really weren't problems at all.

We walked across the parking lot to the Mexican Restaurant next door to have dinner and giggled about our day and how sometimes things just don't go the way you want them to.

Oh, did I mention how I ran over an entire truck tire?  Ok, not the entire tire.  But the entire circle of treads from a truck tire.  I was in the process of changing lanes when the car in front of me swerved and all I had to do was definitely NOT shout profanities... um...

But, no harm, no foul.  Our little buggy is tough.

We finished our food, and walked of the restaurant and headed across the other parking lot toward Target to grab some bottles of water.  As we past the Mexican restaurants sign, they had their special on the sign.  Salmon in the style of "Conzumel."

For those of you who may be wondering, "Cozumel" is a Mexican island.  "Conzumel" is apparently what happens when someone doesn't use spell check before hanging a sign.

We had a good laugh about that, especially as we had just come back from Cozumel a couple weeks ago.  We commented about how, apparently, Mexico has been spelling it wrong all these years.  (ahem...)

Sometimes, things just don't go they way you hoped they would.

And you know what?  That's ok.

Sometimes that just makes the stories all that much better.

Have a great night.

Interlude 4: The Vacation Post

Hello and welcome back.

I suppose, technically, I was the one who was gone, but who's keeping score?  All of you?  Ah.  Right.

Well, as promised, I did, in fact, take a vacation.  To Cozumel, Mexico.  Cozumel was everything that home was not.  Warm, sunny, and lacking in snow.  I was pretty ok with that.  We (my wife sized unit and I) enjoyed ourselves thoroughly.  There were some friends down there with us which made it even more fun shaped.

There was a lot of time spent in the actual sun.  No surprise there.  Tans and burns did abound.  As did food and tiny lizards.

One day we all went and took a "class".  It was called "Salsa Salsa."  The purpose of this class was "salsa".  We learned how to make different kinds of a salsa and, in the process, ate a LOT of salsa.  We also learned how to Salsa dance.  I am pretty confident that what we were being taught was "Salsa" dancing in the most loose definition of "Salsa" dancing. It was similar to salsa dancing in the same way that "blueberries" and "steak" are similar foods.  

We didn't care.  We all had fun.

We also wandered through the touristy downtown of Cozumel.  That was... well, let's just say that there are many wonderful reasons to go to Cozumel.  This was not one of them.  But if you are looking to take home some souvenirs for friends, family, and co-workers, that's where you need to go.

Completely unrelated.  Am I the only one who is always tempted to say the word "co-workers" as though it is spelled "cow-orkers"?  

Every.  Time.  I have no idea why.  But it amuses me to know end.  I've always wanted to walk into the office and, with my best knight-of-the-round-table voice greet them with, "Hello, my fellow cow-orkers!  It does warm my heart to see you well and refreshed for the days battle!"

There is literally no scenario in my life where that would be appropriate, or make any actual sense to anyone.

And thus my sadness.

Hmm...

Where was I...  

Oh yes.  Cozumel.

One thing I got to do was go scuba diving.  I was able to make four dives over two days.  Scuba diving is a ton of fun.  It's like flying.  Except, you know, you are under water.  And there are fish.  Which makes sense because of the underwater part.

The water is super clear there, and it turns out the bottom of the ocean (as if I was down miles and miles...) is quite beautiful.  We spent most of our time at depths between 40-60 feet, but did spend a little time as deep as 90 or so.  

There is a lot of white sand down there.  In that white sand is coral.  Some of it purple.  Some of it brown.  Some of it yellow.  The fish down there where colors like blue, and yellow, and black, and orange.

On one dive, we dropped into the water right in the middle of a... school?... of jelly fish.  I know what you are thinking.  "Isn't that bad?" I hear you say.  Well, usually it is to be avoided.  These particular jellies were pretty harmless.  They didn't bother you and they didn't have the long "stinger tentacles" that you usually think of with jelly fish.  Although one brave little jelly (they were all about the size of a nickel) tried to eat my friends finger.  And by "eat", I mean it basically enveloped the tip of one finger, wiggled a little, than swam away.

Not very ferocious.

They were pretty cool.  

That said, I was definitely wary.  We all know the legends of jelly fish.  The ones that sting you in horrible ways.  There are jelly fish off the coast of Australia, I think, that are pretty small, but have super long trailing "stingers".  If one even touches you, it sends so much pain into you that if you don't die before they get you out of the water, you wish you had.  The pain is so bad if you survive that no amount of pain meds even scratch the surface of it.  Unless they do a spinal block, you basically suffer in incalculable agony for days or weeks till it goes away on it's own.

Most jelly fish aren't that dangerous.  But if you get stung, you know it.

So, I was pretty wary at first.  Later on a different dive I kept seeing this... stuff, floating by.  At first I thought it was those "floaties" you get in your eyes.  But as I looked closely, they were these completely transparent... somethings.  Something akin to jelly fish.  Long and thin with long trailing "stinger tentacles."

I tried to avoid those.

I did not succeed.

Being that they were mostly invisible, I inevitably had one graze my hand right between two fingers.

Those two fingers immediately burst into flame under water.  At least, that's what it felt like.  Both fingers felt like they had been zapped by large amounts of electricity that did not immediately stop flowing.  

If you shout profanity underwater through a breather and no one can hear you, does it still count?

Probably.

It subsided after a few minutes (both the pain and profanity).  But holy electrocution, Batman!  That stuff smarts.

Scuba is fun and the wild life is beautiful, but it is not without it's dangers.  But, you know that going in and you try to be careful.  There is a lot of open space, so, you know, it's not hard to be safe.

Which brings me to the shark.

When you are floating along and look down and see a seven foot shark, should you swim over and take a look?  Or keep on floating and admire it from afar?

Well, it wasn't the super aggressive kind of shark.  It was a Nurf shark, or Nerf shark, or some word that is pronounced like that but spelled completely different.

They leave you alone.  But I suspect that if one felt you were stalking it, it might decide it needed to let you know that's not allowed.

This one played nice.

I also saw some barracuda.  They tended to travel in pairs.  I also left them alone.

The giant turtles were the coolest things for me.  HUGE lazy turtles, just swimming by slowly.  They aren't afraid of you at all.  I had one float by within an arms-length of my head.  I turned around, and bam, there he was.  

No, he didn't run into me.  

They are amazingly graceful creatures.  You just want to hug them.  They seem so friendly.  They might even BE friendly.  But, there is a no touching rule, so, we didn't.

We also saw some pretty huge crab and lobster down there.  One lobster we saw running around down there was astonishingly fast as he run across the ocean floor.  Fast enough I would not have gotten away had it been chasing me.  It was like this huge spider/scorpion thing going after something.  It was the only truly creepy thing I saw down there.

When you are underwater with nothing but a tank of air on your back keeping you breathing, you try to be hyper aware of danger and attempt to be super careful.  And, as I said, for the most part, it's really easy to be safe.

One thing did happen though.  And it's not what you may be thinking.

We were swimming through some coral arches.  No caves or anything like that.  Big, giant openings.  As we were swimming around the coral, I need to dive down farther to go under one part.  Nothing tight, just deeper in the water than I was.  As I dove deeper, one ear started to build pressure.  This is normal.  You are constantly intentionally  clearing (popping) your ears to relieve pressure.  However, for some reason, my one ear didn't want to clear that particular moment.  So, as I dove, it would start to hurt, then I would go back up.  I would try to clear it, dive and clear as I go, and it just wouldn't clear.  I thought maybe I could just live with it and go, but I couldn't.  It just hurt too much.

So, I turned around to head back up.  As I did, I was a little closer to the wall than I thought and bumped my head just a little.  Not hard at all.  Just hard enough to know I'd done it.

The walls are covered with plants and stuff, much of which is soft.  You aren't suppose to touch it, and this was clearly accidental.

I moved away, rubbed my head to make sure I wasn't bleeding or anything, which I wasn't, and after doing a self check, declared myself fine and went on.  

I had a small sore spot on the side of my head, but it didn't even bruise.  No worries.

Once we got into the boat after that dive, I had my dive buddy/doctor friend check the side of my head just to make sure I hadn't "done anything bad" that would leave me not alive soon.

He declared me fine and then we helped each other get our gear off.

As I as bending forward to help him, he saw the top of my head (I'm taller than he) and he said "Whoa, you have a cut across the top of your head."

I had no idea.

Turns out it was just a scratch.  Didn't even leave a scar.  I'm not sure it ever truly "bled".

The thing is, I don't really know for sure when it happened.  It could have happened when I bumped the wall.  That's the most likely time.  But I never felt it.  I never felt anything touch the top of my head.  Was it one of the wall creatures I bumped into?  Was it from coral I don't remember hitting?  Was it some alien jelly fish tentacle trying to bore its way into my brain and take over my mind?

I have no idea.

For all our care and careful diving, for the things I avoided and the things I knew I hadn't, the thing that did the most damage to me was the one thing I never knew that happened.

I'm pretty sure our lives are like that.  We can try so hard to control everything around us and make sure nothing touches us or hurts us.  But we never succeed.  It's always the thing we didn't see coming.  And there is ALWAYS something we don't see coming.  And there always will be.

We can make ourselves mad trying to avoid the things of life.  We can not succeed.  Our control and safety is largely illusory.  

As are most things of life.

So, take heart my fellow cow-orkers!!  (I seriously have no idea what a cow-orker is.)  If you feel you are losing control, it's ok.  It's simply not true.

You never had any control to begin with.

And that's ok.

Night.