And then, finally, Lya’s wedding day had arrived.

Wow… *pinks away a tear*.

The newlyweds looked gorgeous, the weather cooperated brilliantly, the locations were as from a fairy tale.

Last Saturday our diving class had the first outdoor open water dive at the SDMP in Maarseveen. After suiting up we went down, paired one-on-one with an instructor. This shows us suiting up, I’m the one on the right.

I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the underwater conditions. Visibility was fairly good at 5 meters or so, and there was plenty to be seen. Under water I’ve seen various fish, from nearly microscopic to fairly large (40 cm of pike, for one). There was also a very clearly visible thermocline (separation layer between warm and cold water; the temperature drops about 10 degrees passing this). All in all it was great fun, and I want to do more of it :D.

Had a busy weekend. It started Friday night with a diving exam for my Scuba course, which I passed easily. I scored 20.5/23, but I did feel it was more like 22.5, as I answered some questions correctly, but my answer wasn’t correct from a divers point of view. Given the score, I don’t really mind though. Following the exam we had to fully dress up in our outdoor gear, to get the ballast weighting done. This wasn’t my best diving session; to accommodate the 14mm wetsuit I undid the straps of my BCD, which resulted in the tank trying to pull me over as it shifted around a bit on my back. In itself not a big deal, if annoying, but I also had too little ballast on me, which ment I couln’t even bottom out to pull the straps tight. Add that to the fact that 14mm is way too much for a warm swimming pool environment, and I wasn’t exactly happy. I did manage to get my ballast sorted out - a whopping 15 kgs.

Saturday I got up early, and met up with my diving class in Nieuwegein, from where we departed to the diving tower in Enschede. This is a huge tank of water, about 10m in diameter and 10m deep. Rumour has it this tank is officially part of the firefighting strategy for that industrial park. At any rate, after moving as the stuff up to the second floor, we dressed up, and went down for our first deep dive. Everything went fine, and it’s quite different somehow from the previous swimming pool stuff.

After the diving session and a welcome lunch, I drove towards Loosdrecht to meet up with Arno and the rest of the gang for his Bachelor party. We had booked a laserquest package, which was quite fun. I’m still not sure which I like better: paintball or laserquest. Both have their pros and cons. Paintball has the sensation of actual bullets flying, downside is the physical pain of getting hit, and that fact that when you ‘die’, it’s game over for that round. Laserquest has the advantage of being computer controlled, so all kinds of parameters can be tweaked, like ammo, clips, reload times and so on. Anyway, we had a blast, and afterwards we moved on to Zoetermeer, were we met up with Wendy and her Bachelorette group for dinner. They had booked some wild water rafting deal, which they enjoyed as well.

/Went to see Les Miserables in the new Luxor theatre last night. What can I say? It was an absolutely brilliant show. While they had modernised the score somewhat, they kept fairly close to the original. While the Dutch lyrics took some getting used to (I’m used to the English ones), they are very well translated. We had almost all the big names in the cast last nigt, except for Jamai Loman. Too bad, as I was curious how he would do. Based on the reviews I red he does now his stuff, though.

The cast performed very well, only Cosette (Suzan Seegers) wasn’t really convincing. It wasn’t bad, but not compared to some of the others there. Nurlaila Karin (Fantine) and Celine Purcell (Eponine) performed their roles very well, as did their male counterparts. Carlo Boszhard was  pleasant surprise as Thenadier. The student leader Eljoras (Freek Bartels) ws also very impressive. Obviously the main roles for Valjean, Javert and Marius were well taken care off.

Definately worth seeing.

Spent a lot of time the last few days working in my garden. Most of it was simply weeding, as the garden was (again) heavily infested by Ground Elder (Zevenblad). Had to go quite deep to get all the roots of the damned things. Other than that, basically removed almost all old plants. I relocated the Buddleja, but I had to cut it down quite a bit. I hope I didn’t have to cut it down too far.

Als removed the old garden door that was still in place, and replaced most of the old wooden dividers, which had mostly rotted away.

I somehow managed to get both my eyes inflamed… very annoying. As a result they’re both bright red.

Queensday was fun. I spent the day at Vince & Petra’s place, playing a game of Paranoia and Colonisten, as well as meeting the new player for our tabletop RPG campaign: Marcel. He fits in nicely :D. Petra had made her excellent enchiladas and home-made salsa, so the food was great too :D.