See what I’m talking about? I talk about my husband all the time, and I still get called “he.” And I saw those italics, Ginger - you can’t scare me. I’ll just go out into the direct sunlight, where your natural redheadedness can’t follow. 
Welcome** Queen ** of all things Scuba!
Now that greetings have been exchanged it’s time to move onto the one topic everyone on this board seems to be obsessed with. And no, it’s not fighting ignorance. It’s cats.
How many, how old, and how much murderous intention do they posess? Oh, and how come you haven’t posted 30+ pictures of them in MPSIMS yet?
cool. the dive master has done an aggressor trip a couple of times. i’m too newbie as yet. i’ve got maybe 50 - 60 dives to his 1,000s!
i’ve done florida, freeport, turks and caicos islands, and the big island.
we’re looking at a dry tortugas trip in january but that’s still up in the air.
You’re a Yankees fan. What do you expect?
loves me some feline-ness. i have two: a very old tuxedo and a three-year old tortie (i think thats what he is). dive master has two plus a houseful of dogs. big dogs.
somebody tell me how the hell to do a link and i’ll slap up a pic of turk (a walking hummer with fur) and maybe of me and all the dogs. wait’ll you see *that * picture. i’m in there somewhere…
murphy photos will have to wait until i get home. turk doesn’t seem to have murder on his mind. occasionally i think he’s plotting against me, but it’s usually because his food bowl is empty.
Listen here, miss, you forget I grew up around Lethbridge where it’s actually sunny and warm. So HA! to you!
sob I can’t help that I’m white!
But I also have Cats and a Dog and Kids.
I am not all evil. 
I even host a fairly good Jersey Dopefest if Scubaqueen ever makes it back to her home state at the right time.
Jim
i’m not getting a browse button in my post composition window. do i not rate for one or what? 
never mind. i just answered my own question. it appears i’m not permitted to post attachments. you’ll all just have to learn to live without turk and murph pix…
Generally at the SDMB, we have to use some form photo hosting site. I use photobucket. It is free and easy. Then I linked to the photos hosted there in my posts.
This is a source view of my post above with the pictures with one space placed after the opening bracket to avoid resolution of the tag:
[ URL=http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b127/jrfranchi/Beauty.jpg]have [ /URL] [ URL=http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b127/jrfranchi/Velcrothe14yearoldKitten.jpg]Cats [ /URL] and a [ URL=http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b127/jrfranchi/Becky2.jpg]Dog [ /URL] and [ URL=http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b127/jrfranchi/JimKevinGuen.jpg]Kids[ /URL].
Hello Scubaqueen. Be welcome. Enjoy your stay. 
Not all evil?
Piffle. You’re evil through and through.
I bet you’re stalking the neighborhood looking for a very tall ladder and a small child so you can hand them on a telephone pole by their underwear.
By the way, **What Exit?, ** I made gabriela’s initial favorite poster list, so be jealous. Your dirty Yankee money can’t buy that!
here we go. took a minute or two to figure it out.
i give you elsa, dax (just visiting when this pic was taken), rommel, and rontue. nikita declined to have her picture taken. that’s me buried in the background. the cats are murphy b/w, and turk, the furry hummer.
http://new.photos.yahoo.com/hctg2000/album/576460762324112646
That’s plenty of experience to go with Aggressor, or another liveaboard. Diving don’t get much better than five dives a day, the last being a night dive, where you get out of the water to a fresh shower, a fresh towel, and hot cocoa.
I got my start in scuba in the Turks & Caicos, in Grace Bay on the north side of Provo, back in 2001. I went back the following year and did some diving with the Turtle Divers off West Caicos and French Cay.
Nice pups, big pups. You must go broke on dog food alone.
well, piffle.
what happened to the cats’ pictures? may have to rethink this. not good at links, obviously. may go try photobucket when i have a little more time.
fortunately, the dive master owns all the dogs. i just visit. he likes his animals: four dogs, two cats and the biggest greenwing macaw you’ll ever see in this lifetime or any other.
and guess which species runs the household?
totally cool place to dive, isn’t it? 200 feet viz in every direction every day. so much to see, so little time. on one dive i’m hanging off a slope that drops off about 5,000 feet, just checking out the neighborhood, and i look down and there about 200 - 300 feet or so under my fins is a SCHOOL of reef sharks circling each other. who knew they actually schooled? i didn’t until then.
i’d have to go dig out my dive book for all the places we went. we dove five times a day too for eight days. that’s a lotta diving. i could barely lift a beer at the end of the day but wouldn’t trade a second of it. t & c was my first real night dive. very cool, but i still prefer the daylight.
hawaii was okay, kinda crappy viz, tho. florida (key largo) was a nightmare. cold cold cold. we were there in january of 2003 when it got below freezing. water temp never got above 72 - 75.
we’d go back to the hotel room and squeeze into a tub of hot water together because we’d gotten so chilled. and we were in 3mil and 3/5mil wetsuits!!
need i say it was a tight fit? the dive master’s six-two and i’m five-ten. we didn’t care that it was uncomfortable. i would have killed for a hot tub. frankly i don’t care if i never go back to florida!
“Read this in one salty breath –
all you have after your plunge into the good gold sunlight
of the kelp grove taller than you knew –
the stipe and blade of living rope in this dancing
city wave after wave –
wolf eel, dogfish, nudibranch, urchin, anemone, brittle star, kelp fish, rock fish,
coon-stripe shrimp –
your cousins everywhere in the life maze.
Forget their names and seize that shaft of sunlight, that bubble swirl the moon-heart drummed from the deep.
Be the two-world otter at play where you flounder, where you yearn like
octopus, where abalone grip on stone is also yours,
your breath your own holdfast to that other life that finally lets you go,
let’s you dream you have learned
to breathe through skin and live wherever you will.”
Kotick
(*poem from oregonzoo org)
When I was in Turks & Caicos I hadn’t switched over to contacts yet, so my effective visibility was about 40 feet – good enough to see the reef shark coming by us about 15 feet away. (I made sure to put the dive guide between me and it, heh.)
I dove Ft. Lauderdale one July, my 1.5 mil skin was plenty. And a 3 mil wetsuit was enough for me in T&C in December. Maybe you had a cold current, it happens.
My most frequent dive site was Dutch Springs between Allentown and Bethlehem, PA. Below the thermocline, it’s about 55 - 60. Small wonder, then, that I got a drysuit certification along with the Advanced diver course.
(Technical note for non-divers: A wetsuit lets in a small amount of water, and no more; once the water’s been warmed, it has nowhere to go. A drysuit doesn’t let in any water at all, and so provides much better thermal protection. But a drysuit is also a separate skill, where a wetsuit is simply “Here, wear this.”)