Left as an Exercise

Due to a combination of a storm front coming in (no rain, but lots of turbulence and fog so dense we couldn’t see the shore, let alone the horizon), any SCUBA plans for the day are off, and are likely to remain off until the weekend. The local SCUBA shops — down to the individual boat captains (Yes, I’m that thorough) — are all booked solid on the weekend, and on Monday the rest of the family’s heading home. Looks like any plans will need to be suspended until next week. I may end up diving around Cape Canaveral itself. Awesome as it would be, there are no shuttle launches scheduled for the time I’m down here. The first time I visited Florida, in 1995, we were in Canaveral when Endeavor was scheduled to launch, but due to weather it was delayed and we missed it.

On the upside, I did find a 40-mile bike trail nearby, and a shop that not only rents, but rents recumbents as well. I already convinced my dad to join me on that in the next couple of days (no idea when, except “not tomorrow”; he’s heading to Disneyworld with my cousins, giving me time to catch up on work and write), and I may be able to get the others on ‘bents as well. No tadpole trikes, unfortunately (plenty of retrofitted delta cruisers, which are popular with the older folk here), but they still have an order of magnitude more recumbents than any dealer in Edmonton.

Wildlife note: I was wandering earlier today and saw two separate pods of dolphins. One was probably one of the two I saw on the last couple of days (roughly the same size), but the second definitely was new: it had a calf, which is something I’ve never seen in person before (captive or wild). Didn’t get a very good look, and didn’t have my camera (damn you, Murphy), and they were rather languid (to be expected in a densely populated harbour), so it wouldn’t have been very exciting to most folk. Unlike, say, the pod of commons I encountered in the Bahamas in 2001, which were racing the boat we were on and leaping from the water.

On an administrative note, I’ve updated the About page with something worth reading. The blog lags it a bit (naturally), but will catch up.

On a metacommentary note, there was a lot of April Fool’s gold flying around today. Ian’s submission about a hostile takeover at Fermilab was a winner, as was Kirk Cameron taking over the Atheist Experience or AIG merging with AIG to form AIG (which was probably the one that caused the most laughter around here). Several of the climate-related ones were rounded up by Mike Kaulbars at Greenfyre’s, although he missed Michael Tobis’ epic (which is particularly cutting after you hear about what happened in Texas…), and in my opinion the reigning champ in that department is either the 2007 RealClimate “sheep albedo” paper or Atmoz’ “social experiment” of 2008 (read the post he linked). However, I would like to single out Mike Dunford here as one worthy of personal attention — see how well you do (I got 5/6, although the machete-juggling abstinence clown had already crossed my desk). Personally, I convinced my cousins that there was a hurricane going to make landfall in Florida sometime tomorrow and their Disney trip was going to be cancelled. (This was a lot less funny after the turbulence kicked up and the fog rolled in…).

Hopefully I’ll have something more substantive — and outside the damn Travelouge category — to put up tomorrow. Once I get some work done, I’ll sit down on the balcony and write something less self-indulgent.