I'm SCUBA Certified!!

For the past 2 months I've been on St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands...

The first 2 weeks were pretty crazy...what with a few big unit shutdowns, my first hurricane (Hurricane Omar - which ended up being a Category 3) which caused a shut down of the entire refinery, the entire refinery starting up the next few days, and then a fire in the refinery. During Hurricane Omar I stayed in the Administration building at the refinery and besides one slight thud on the roof, I couldn't ear the storm at all. This made me decide: 1. That I don't want to live where there are hurricanes; and 2. That if I have to be in another hurricane I want be hunkered down in a building just like the one I was in.

Other than the hurricane...David came down for a week about a month ago and we had a lot of fun. We went SCUBA diving (which I am now certified in, as you can tell from the title of this post), jet skiing, hiking to a cool beach, and snorkeling! Jet skiing was so much fun, although if you go, I recommend purchasing a pair of goggles (so much salt water gets in your eyes otherwise), putting on a lot of water proof sunscreen (apparently water washes off sunscreen or something), and not going for too long (I was seriously sore for several days because I was bracing myself from the waves for about 2 hours). I have pictures up on my Picasa website that you can access here and David has some pictures over here (his are much prettier).

I just got SCUBA certified Sunday, after doing 3 dives in the ocean...talk about a long day! It was pretty cool though...I saw a total of 4 sea turtles, 1 sea horse, and 1 live conch just sliding along the ocean floor in its conch shell!

My family's (Mom, Dad, sister, brother-in-law) coming down for Christmas, which I'm pretty excited about. I'm trying to get all of them to go SCUBA diving with me (you can do a Discovery Dive without being certified and go to about 35-40 ft.)! Otherwise, I'm sure we'll cook some good food and at least go snorkeling all around the island.

First Assignment

Going to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands!!

Not Since Xanga

I "gave in" to getting a blog. Of course there wasn't too much peer pressure on me to create one, but that's besides the point.

The point of this blog is to post (hopefully frequent) updates on my travels. This way, anyone who's interested can read this and others don't have to get boring emails. I plan on posting my pictures to my Picasa website, but ideally I'll write something on here saying that there are new pictures up. Of course, this is all theoretical as I don't know how busy I will be on the road or how many exciting places I'll want to wander around.

As of right now, I am supposed to find out on September 26th, where my first assignment will be located. Cross your fingers for a good location!!