3221

Cogratulations. Forgive the ignorance, but is there such a thing as inpractical shooting?

3222

Do you get a cape?

3223

No, because there’s no such word as inpractical.

I think you’ll find it’s impractical.

3224

Thanks for sharing all that info about heart stuff, helps calm me down a bit to know its not a life-ender. Its hard seeing your parents get old.

And if the zombies ever come, I call dibs on being on Houngans team, we got two other slots, everyone else has to be infected, sorry!

3225

Also, I’m pretty sure that’s a BB gun . . .

H.

3226

Congratulations of course, Houngan. Did you mean that you beat Jerry? If you quit after Nationals people are going to talk about the masked man that came in, whooped up, and left without a trace. Except only 5 people shoot revolver so it probably isn’t very mysterious to them.

And here I haven’t been to a match in months, but then again the season is just starting down in the heat.

3227

Hah, hot air balloon ride… GO!

3228

No, fecking Cliff Walsh edged Jerry, who was obviously in some sort of trouble, by .17%. A few others such as myself managed to get within 3% of their scores, thus the GM card.

But then I beat Cliff at the Ohio Sectional (with Jerry beating both of us) so I did beat the current national champion.

Then I went minor the next day at the IPSC US Championship and Cliff edged me by a fraction of a percent. Boo, 12 hours of joy.

H.

3229

So, let’s see, today was a day with a lot of firsts:

I got sick pretty suddenly a couple of days ago, worked from home yesterday. My wife took my temperature last night, had a fever of 103F. Hot blooded indeed. This morning around six I got up to go to the bathroom and apparently didn’t make it. My wife heard me drop and she couldn’t get me to respond. Naturally she got spooked and called 911 – when they showed up, they checked my blood pressure; relatively normal lying down but as soon as I sat or stood up it dropped. They said they couldn’t leave me like that, so they called an ambulance for me. My first ambulance ride!

I got to the ER and was given IV fluids (my first IV!) and told that I very likely have H1N1 (first person I know to get it! I win!). So, I’m quarantined and so is my wife, who will very likely also get it. So I’m resting, drinking pretty much constantly, and recuperating. Guess I’ll have plenty of time to catch up on movies and Xbox. At least I got Brutal Legend and Sam and Max this week.

3230

Ah, typical A-shooter mistake.

Hehe.

3231

First, get well.

Second, get out there and circulate! We’ve learned in the H1N1 thread that you are being an alarmist chicken little who needs to toughen up. Unless you’re on your deathbed or still sticky from the womb, it’s just the flu! Can’t hurt you, I swear! You have a god-given right to infect others as you please, and if they can’t hack it, tough shit!

H.

3232

Touche. It was a pretty stupid mistake, I changed bullet vendors and didn’t re-chrono my ammo, IPSC 170 pf was too much for me.

H.

3233

Were you upset to get the GM like that in terms of grandbagging worries or are you just taking it in stride?

3234

Well, it’s a bit wonky, but to be fair if you discount Jerry as some kind of UberMaster, then I compete at the GM level. Cliff’s probably the true 2nd, but we were equal in most respects at the Ohio matches. That was the first time I was able to shoot with somebody at that level on my squad, it’s nice to know how you stack up directly rather than on paper.

To be clearer, I compete at matches at that level, so I’m the opposite of grandbagging (I’m sandbagging in A, in other words.)

H.

3235

Get well Pogue…and nice way to get time off work to play games!

3236

I was on vacation on Crete the past week, which while awesome consisted mostly of non-interesting stuff like lying on a beach and enjoying not being at home in the cold.

By chance I ran into a couple of diving instructors and before I knew it I was counting my money to see how much of my vacation budget I’d need to divert to a one-day diving trip. The next day I was on a bus to a small ocean-side village literally crammed onto the side of a hill along with a bunch of Germans.

I’ve never gone diving before and since I had a plane to catch and no time for a 4-day certified diver course I just sat through the basics of diving with my guide/instructor Hervé which included a mildly horrifying tale of what would happen if I held my breath while ascending. Since all the others were certified divers I was to go out alone with my guide and learn the basics in relative safety of the shallows before swimming out to

I wasn’t particularly intimidated going out but my first ever dive was a scary experience. While going through an exercise underwater to clear my mask I managed to swallow a mouthful of the Mediterranean. If you’ve never had the experience of drinking salt water then let me tell you it hurts. My throat hurt like hell and just as it hit I realised I was stuck under water unless I bailed on the entire dive. I made a motion to surface, for all the good that would have done me, but my guide stopped me in time for me to think it over. I couldn’t even tell him what was wrong. I didn’t want to quit though and that was that. I pressed on and soon I was too busy trying not to float to the surface like a cork while watching the fish to worry about my throat.

Roughly 15 minutes later I made a far more serious mistake. Since I had proved I possessed all the basic skills of retrieving my breather, clearing my mask and so on in the shallows we went out deeper for the scenic tour. At around 7-8 meters my vision started getting blurry and I wanted to alert my guide but he wasn’t looking at me right then so I kept following him, which was really amazingly stupid in hindsight. Just as I saw him turn, maybe 30 seconds later, my vision went black. I signalled to him that I needed help and I just started to tread water while waiting for him, willing myself to stay calm and not desperately swim for a surface I couldn’t even see anymore.

The problem was that I had not equalised pressure in my mask. As we went deeper I felt it pressing harder and harder on my face. It’s easily fixed by simply exhaling a bit of air through your nose but I didn’t know that. I felt Hervé press his fingers on my mask like in the mask-clearing exercise and I blew out air. Suddenly I could see again. Just like that. And after a brief check we continued our dive for another ten minutes or so until the air was running short and we went up for a lunch break.

While eating my lunch at a local tavern with the Germans and listening to them talk about what fish they had seen I was really apprehensive about going down again. The lack of control as I tried to figure out how to move underwater, the sense of isolation, the very real (stupid) danger I had been in, it wasn’t pleasant. But when the time came to go down again it didn’t matter. Everything went as well as it could on that second dive. I did everything right, and suddenly I wasn’t feeling scared. I was in control, I knew what to do. I knew what not to do. Being underwater was an amazing experience and I’m definitely going to do it again.

This turned out to be much longer than I had planned but what the hell. Diving is awesome.

3237

Sometimes scary and dumb can be fun, that sounded like a blast.

3238

Okay. Sorry to be the dick of the thread, but DON’T DO THAT EVER AGAIN.

First, the diving instructors should have their licenses stripped.

Second, diving is dangerous, dangerous, dangerous without training. The training isn’t hard, but it is NECESSARY. The basics of diving are incredibly simple, and the equipment is wonderfully engineered to fail the right way, but there are a few simple mistakes that can get you seriously hurt or dead. Worse, without some experience, you are 10x more likely to panic if something goes wrong, which is what leads to embolisms and the bends.

That said, I love diving, it is very easy to do, and everyone should try it. After you take a course in controlled water, consult your YMCA or local dive shop.

H.

3239

I’m glad you said that, because I was outraged, and wasn’t able to articulate it properly. The fact that you didn’t know how to clear your mask before you went into the water…is simply inexcusable. I’ve been certified, although not in years (i’d need a refresher), and I was really just terrified reading that. It sounds like you don’t even have experience skin diving…that was an incredibly dangerous thing to do. While I’m glad you enjoyed it, never do that again until you’ve gotten certified.

3240

To clarify, I was told how to clear my mask on land and I practiced it in the shallows, along with all the other basic equipment routines. The oversight was that I was not told I needed to equalise the pressure in my mask. So I didn’t, even as I noticed stuff starting to go wrong. Did the instructor fuck up? Sure. And I can certainly see how it could have end horribly if I had panicked. But it didn’t.

A proper diving course is definitely in order next time though.