¡Rayos! ¡Rayos! ¡Rayos! Stop petting the Pufferfish

Oh, I guess I should mention that I´m in Ixtapa, Mexico this week, trying to have what in common parlance is called a vacation. But I think I need to rethink my vacations and go to more cultural epicenters, because it´s low, really low season here and I don´t want to spend more time talking to Pat and Lori from Minnesota about how Pat hit a deer with her truck the day before coming. It was nice to be able to split the cabe fare, but the crowd is not really what I hoping, friendly as they are. Cabos. Cabos. Cabos. Enuf sed. LOL. (Spelling per the American coed vacationing in Cabos, who is not in Ixtapa/Zihuatenejo at the present moment. Like oh my gawd!)

My first mistake was going ahead and choosing an all-inclusive. To keep food quality quasi-decent while maintaining an all-you-can eat proposition, the food is the exact same thing every day. Please kill my taste buds now. I have no use for them. ¿Obsoleto? I have no idea if that´s Spaglish o no.

The scuba diving here is so-so, but I´ve cut down on the number of dives I was expecting to take based on my initial two dives. The scuba company I went with with through my hotel was very professional and by the book, other than the assistant dive master kept on petting the pufferfish he ran into, and trying to touch every animal in sight. (He also grasped at a lot of rocks rather than manipulating his bouyancy to descend and ascend, which made me think he hadn´t had the experience to find his hand on a poisonous stonefish to teach him a salutory lesson. Talking to him confirmed that he started three months previously.)

The undersea wildlife in the region is similar to Puerto Vallarta, but in the shallow dives I took, there were scores and scores of two to three foot wide rays on the sandy shallows. One first is spotting a sea horse in the wild. The water is fairly cold right now for diving, and I was the first to do the James Bond entry into the water both dives. They asked me how it was. I went ahead and spouted out all the Spanish curse words and asked them for some more, which got a few laughs and a few new words.

Diver talk

Miguel, the divermaster gives his briefing. He reviews the sign language for sighting an eel - make squiggly lines with your hand. Sighting a lobster - make as if you have two antennae on your head.

I say,¨What´s the sign if you see a mermaid?¨ ¨Like this!¨ Taking the set-up, Knute (sp?), a German expat quickly made the sort of indicative hip gyrations that Elvis would have made if he were a contemporary with Britney Spears.