Snorkelling!!

I know, it's been just a little too long, but I finally got my scanner up and running, so I thought that I would at long last post the pictures I took while I was snorkelling in the Bahamas. Here they are - well, at least a few, I'm not posting all of them so if you want to see more let me know. But these will pretty much give the idea. (See the post a while ago for the actual description of what happened during snorkelling).

PS - as you'll see, since the underwater camera I bought for the day was obviously not of great quality, the colour in the pictures isn't anywhere near as amazing as it was in reality. So just multiply all the colours times like 100, and you'll get a better idea!



Some neat-looking coral, at the first dive site.










A bunch of fish, including one really bright blue one at the bottom of the photo - again, the picture just does not give it justice.






If you look closely at the fish in this picture, you can see that it had a very colourful tail. If you'd seen it in real life, the number of colours on one little fish's tail would have blown you away!







I think this picture hopefully gives a better idea of how brightly blue that one type of fish was.







Another picture of a bunch of fish.







This is the only picture I took at the second dive site, because I wanted a picture of the plane (it's a movie prop, used in Jaws 4), but otherwise the fish were all the same kind. There were supposed to be Eagle rays there, but I didn't see any.




So here are the sharks that I dove with!! The lighter coloured fish are just regular fish, they were only about a foot long but look a lot bigger because they were so close. The sharks were about 8-10 feet away. You can see the rope that the dive/bait box was dangling from in the center of the picture.




Here's another picture of the sharks, when the bait box was first lowered and they were still all just interested in that. You can see the bait box in the bottom left of the picture.





Here's one more picture of the sharks. I left the yellow thing in the corner of the picture, because it's the rope that we had to hang on to while we were in the water, so I wanted that showing.




This is the sharks after the bait box was taken out (after we came out of the water!). You can tell they didn't like that the bait box was gone, because they're all right at the top of the water which apparently they don't usually do - they just had followed it right out of the water.






And here's the sharks when the guys started throwing the fish off the boat. That was the only time I really felt scared, when I saw them all frenzied. Even though I had just been in the water with them, I did not want to get anywhere close to the edge of that boat!!!








See, I told you this post would be less depressing than the one before this one!

Warning: extremely depressing

I've been putting off doing this post forever, but it needs to be done because it's a little bit too important to not let people know what's been going on with my life.

On April 5, my ex-boyfriend and good friend Chris Catling was killed in a car accident, just about an hour east of Sault Ste. Marie. His best friend, Jeff Beach, was also killed in the accident. No wrongdoing on anyone's part, just terrible northern Ontario winter weather, as always.

This means that of the 3 serious boyfriends I've had in my life, men that I have actually loved, 2 of them have been killed in car accidents. And that's enough to give a girl paranoia, as I'm sure you can imagine, so of course now every time Adam drives anywhere I make him call me to let me know he got there safely!!

Chris was a brave soldier who really wanted to go fight in Afghanistan, and who was doing really well with his course in the air force. He had really grown up and was being incredibly successful with his life goals. He loved his family, especially his niece and nephew. He was a great guy who loved to have a good time, and who wanted to always make sure that the people around him had a good time too. And I have to admit that it was nice to know that there was someone out there who loved me so much, even years later (besides Adam, obviously!). He did have a girlfriend, though, who he was serious about and loved very much, and was planning on moving to Alberta with when he got sent to the base there. The feelings that he had for me (and that I had for him, too, to a certain extent) were more based on just caring for each other, but I think we both knew that we would never work as a couple for many reasons.

I heard about it on the 6th, and I went home on the Sunday, the 8th. Jeff and Chris' wake and funeral were done together, which is nice since they were so close. The funeral was a full military affair, with the bagpipes and everything, which would have meant so much to Chris because he loved being a part of the Canadian military. It was so hard to see Chris' family looking so sad, and it was also hard because it also brought back all the memories from when my other ex, Mike Barker, was killed in a car accident in 1999. But I went with my friend Robert, who I had met Chris through, so it was nice that we had each other for support.

Since then, it's been strange, because it's almost getting more realistic and sad for me as time goes by, because I didn't see him or talk to him everyday, but I would talk to him about once a week on msn. I keep signing in to hotmail and half expecting to have an email from him, which is weird. I made myself delete him from my msn, because I felt like I had to kick in the reality of it, but I really didn't want to because it just made the whole thing so final. But I do feel like one good thing came out of this: I think that I finally dealt with my feelings over Mike's accident! I know it's strange, but I don't think I ever really dealt with that properly - I couldn't even make myself say the words 'he died', I would say 'fatal car accident', or maybe even 'passed away', but that was as close as I could get. So dealing with those emotions is probably a good thing for me, although obviously I wish that it wouldn't have come about in that way!

Anyway, sorry to write such a depressing post, but I had to do it. Now I'll post some pictures of him, just a few.


This is a picture of Chris and my friend Robert, when I was in OAC (when Chris and I were dating). I know he looks like he was about 12, but I promise he was only 9 months younger than me.





Here's me and Chris at the Eaket Christmas Formal, winter 2000. Awwwww.








And here's Chris (on the right) and his friend Gord (on the left), in their fatigues.





All right, that's all. I promise the next post will be happier.