Unsurprisingly, and with less obnoxious in-your-face victory dancing than usual, I won at Monopol (Det beromda affarsspelet.) because I always do. Needless to say, it's Britta's prized set from Sweden, so there was quite a bit of domestic tension when we were tidying it away and Dizzy, being Dizzy, spilled his beer on it. We cleaned it up pretty effectively though, Britta's stamp-collecting skills coming in handy (probably the only time in history that ever has or ever will happen) for drying off the money notes.
I spent much of Saturday sleeping off the ensuing hangover, and on Sunday we went diving. This was a double shore dive, at Kurnell and Shiprock into what I think is Botany Bay. There was a motley crew in the van on the drive out there so we were squeezed in quite a bit, but it was an okay trip. The first place was Kurnell, where we halted in a park and got geared up. I had my spanky new gloves and a wetsuit that fit for once and I was looking forward to it. Getting into the sea proved to be mildly interesting, as there was a bit of swell and seemingly-erratic large waves to navigate past along the rocky and unpredictable seabed, but once we were all past that, had managed to get our fins on (always good for a laugh) and assembled it was looking okay and we descended. I was buddied with Dizzy again, and he started having a problem equalising his airspaces (ears and sinuses - you pinch your nose and try to blow through it, and that makes the pressure in there equal to that of the surroundings, so you don't rupture anything) when we started going deeper. He's had this problem before, it usually just takes time and repeated attempts for him to sort it out, but since the whole group were waiting around near the bottom one of the more experienced divers went to help him out, and eventually told me to buddy with the divemaster guy and she'd stick with Dizzy. So off we went and it was really nice, and we saw a sea dragon, which apparently are quite unusual to see. Then some folks were running low on air (the idea was to signal when down to 100 bar, a typical tank holding between 200 and 250 when full, and that'd be the time to turn around) but some weren't (I still had about 160 bar) so the senior divers decided to split the party, and the air-guzzlers would head home and the rest of us would press onward. This turned out to be well worthwhile and I was pleased with my air conservation, because we saw quite a few cool things on the rest of the dive. About a half-dozen Port Jackson sharks lying on the seabed, for example (they're smallish mottled-like-the-top-of-a-World-War-II-fighter-plane guys who typically just lie there), and an octopus under a rocky ledge. Getting back onto the shore after all that was tricky as well, with the waves trying to smack us against the rocks, but as we all know I'm great and it wasn't a problem.
Then we removed all our gear, toweled off, got back into our clothes, packed the van and took off for Shiprock. Then, on the grassy verge outside somebody's house we got back into our cold, soggy gear, donned weightbelts and tanks and all and hiked down a treacherous dirt path (there was a rope to hold onto at one point, and scuba gear is heavy and awkward) to the sea. I was buddied with Dizzy again, and once we'd assembled and done the putting-fins-on-whilst-afloat dance down we went again, and problems equalising Dizzy had again. I waited around for this to clear, and that chick went to help out again, and I must have been fiddling with my bouyancy, either that or ignoring it completely, because Dizzy says that after a few minutes he saw me come rocketing up from the depths past him, to the point where he was considering trying to grab my ankle to keep me down, looking concernedly at a gague on my console. This is a good way to get the bends, or would be if I'd been down there longer... and of course due to physics (damn you, physics!) the higher I went the faster I went, and by the time I was venting air from my jacket I was on the surface. Well I went down again, and Dizzy managed to get to the bottom as well, but for some reason my bouyancy control was all over the place for the entire dive, and my stomach was feeling a bit queasy (presumably related to the sandwich I'd eaten between the dives) and I didn't enjoy myself much (although I'd really enjoyed the first one). Still, when the low-air people turned back I had 110 bar left, pretty borderline, and was asked by hand signals if I wanted to go back or carry on, and I elected to continue, because hell, it's better than being on the surface. When we got back to the start we did a three-minute safety stop (just to be sure you've expelled all that excess nitrogen in your circulatory system), and about halfway through I checked my gagues and had about 30 bar of air left, which is about the minimum you'd want to keep in case something goes wrong. Then we surfaced and I swam to the shore on my snorkel, and when I clambered out I had a mere and decidedly against-regulations 8 bar left. In retrospect, I can only assume that my regulator must have become jammed and free-flowed air without my noticing when it was dragging behind me during the snorkely bit - either that or I utterly chewed through it during the end of the safety stop. Anyway, that was that, a long slog of a climb up that track and we got back into our nice clothes again and went home, via a fast-food place that myself and Dizzy didn't bother with.
The next day I started looking at my airline tickets and stuff to see what the deal is with changing the dates on them, and I counted my travellers' cheques and turned out to have three hundred bucks more than I thought. Huzzah! Milky Bars are on me! That means I probably won't have to break into my one-thousand-dollar reserve. On a vaguely related note, at some stage I also was told that due to the Eircom Employee Share Ownership Programme that had assigned me shares while I worked there until they realised that that was a bad idea and stopped, with Eircom having been sold or whatever's happened to it rumour is that we're going to be coming into a bunch of free money, possibly between six and twelve grand (although I find that a little hard to believe). An end to rental diving gear, for starters...
Anyway, I'm no longer being so conservative about what money I have, I can sustain myself on this quite nicely until I get to orange-picky place. I rented out some videos, something I'd been missing doing (Where Eagles Dare, Get Carter, Death Wish, The One That Got Away, Wings of Honneamise and John Carpenter's Vampires), and bought a load of biscuits for the house (they were on sale, so the more I bought, the more I saved...).
So I've got sort of a plan for the rest of the holiday. Start of August, head to orange-picky place. Two months of that, then start of October, head to Tasmania for a couple of weeks. Mid-October, out to Perth, hang around the city for a while, then head down the west coast. Pick apples, because it'll be apple season there, and make some more money. More coastal travel, then out to Ayers' Rock for early January. Spend a month or so there, then a month or so in Cairns (I could pick more fruit there if necessary) to do stuff like diving the Great Barrier Reef, and then to Japan for the start of March. A month there, and back to Ireland for the startr of April and Sillicon. Now I need to change the dates of my tickets, and I'm not sure whether to do that in a Quantas office or in a branch of the travel agents'. Time to do some research!