Roatan Rowdiness

Two weeks ago I flew down to Roatan, Honduras for a week of sun and scuba diving with Uncle Bex.  For those who like geography, Roatan is an island 36 miles off the eastern coast of Honduras in the Caribbean.  It's part of the "Bay Islands" and is well known in scuba diving circles for its good scuba diving.  The whole island is basically ringed in a coral reef.  Yes, the U.S. Department of State does not recommend traveling to Honduras because of potential violence like kidnappings, carjackings, etc.  However, the mostly applies to travel on the mainland.  Roatan is fairly safe, and they even speak English there because the island was occupied by the British at one time.  Just be careful which ATMs you use as some signs warned against card copying at them.

Here are the highlights of the enjoyable vacation:

1. Scuba diving
2. More scuba diving
3. Even more scuba diving.  We dove until our ears couldn't take any more of that kind of exercise!
4. We are now Advanced Open Water certified.  Yay!  It took 5 dives to do it:  Deep diving, wreck diving, night diving, peak performance buoyancy, and navigation.
5. We went on a night dive and saw the string of pearls.  That was cool.  How can bio luminescence not be cool?  The lobsters were also out in full force during the night dive.
6. Snorkeling.  There is quite a bit of coral just off the beach, and we saw lots of cool stuff without going deep.
7. Jumping off the "swinger"
8. Honduran boyfriends - we got pictures of a couple of them.  We didn't get one of the guy who liked my hair and said my face was "muy bonita".
9. Driving tour of the island
10. The people we were renting one floor of a house from made supper for us two nights.  We ate some delicious risotto, key lime pie, and chicken and rice.

Really, other than all the water activities, mostly we chilled out when we could, so I don't have lots of crazy stories to tell.

Fire dancers on the beach.

Live music at the place where we ate supper the first night (Beachers).  Check out his stunt where he's playing his guitar with a beer bottle.  Also home of some very good shrimp.

Baleada - a traditional food there.  They make the tortilla fresh - even at the gas station.

 

Cleaner shrimp.

 

Gold spotted eel.  We saw this guy while snorkeling.  On one dive I saw two free swimming spotted moray eels, which is very cool.  Bex saw a giant green moray eel.  I had trouble spotting him though.  We saw tons of other cool stuff - lobsters, lion fish, huge parrot fish, huge sea urchins, and so much more.

 

Our breakfast and supper nook looking over the town of West Bay.

The hot plate where we cooked our breakfasts.  Also the exterior door to my bedroom.

The beach at West Bay.  It doesn't look very inviting, does it?  ;-)

The Rusty Fish - my Honduran boyfriend's place of work.  A sign there said, "Don't feed the artists.  Buy their art and they'll feed themselves."

"The Swinger"  I took a couple jumps off it myself.  Some people told us some squid like to hang out underneath it, but we didn't see any there.  Bex did see one squid on one of our dives.

Tropical Bex.

The "iron shore".  It's made up of old coral that died a long time ago.  That stuff is jagged and super sharp.

Hermit crab.  We saw quite a few crab under the sea while diving too.  The key is to look underneath the rocks and stuff.

Construction zone.  Almost everything is done by hand.  They mix the concrete on site in those concrete mixers.

Sunset view from our deck.

The dive shop where we did our training and rented our gear.  To get from West Bay to West End, quite often we took the water taxi, which is kind of fun and more enjoyable than the road drive.

The dive shop's dock.

See that blue house high up on the hill?  Yeah, that's where we stayed.

Because the ocean floor drops off quickly after the reef, the cruise ships leave the island while sailing close to the shore.

The fruit and veggie truck.  We bought a few things from him.

On the boat headed to a dive site.

Supper on the beach.

The restaurant had crabs.

MelBMarvis diving and practicing peak performance buoyancy.

Pipe fish.  This guy was only 1-2 inches long.  The dive master said it was the first one he had seen this year.

A taste of the large variety of coral we saw there.

We saw this turtle sleeping under some coral.  The dive site was called "Turtle Crossing".

My boyfriend Diego harassing Bex.

Bex's boyfriend Denver holding her hand with ALL his hands.

On the driving tour - looking toward the west end of the island from the center of the island.  The island is about 36 miles x 6 miles.

Oak ridge.  It sounds like an uppity suburb in California, but it's actually a city mostly built on stilts that is best navigated by water.

Oak ridge also has mangrove forests with trails through them.  We paid for the boat tour.  It was fun.

Watusa.  They kind of looked like big squirrels without tails.

See the fish that looks like a rock near the bottom of the picture?  It's a scorpion fish.  We saw two of them the last day we were there when we went snorkeling.

We let Flat MelBMarvis guard the rental while we went out and about.  The last day it rained and we saw this rainbow.

Interesting Stuff

In relation to my previous post, I got to thinking about how the "traditional" kneeling prayer pose would probably not be a power pose.   And yet it is......

Did you look at Google's doodle today?  It's commemorating Clara Rockmore, some lady who was a virtuoso on the theremin.  I had never heard of it, so I looked it up.  This website gives a good description of the instrument and a neat video of Clara playing it.  Check it out.  You'll probably recognize the sound of it.

The reorg at work is still a very big work in process, and people are kind of cranky and ornery.  I'm trying to keep a positive attitude, but sometimes it's tough.

My T25 exercise progress is on pause.  I finished the Alpha series before vacation, and then I took a 2.5 week break.  Today I did the Speed 1.0 workout, and it wasn't too bad.  I only had to take 3 very brief rests, and sometimes I couldn't quite keep up with their pace.  There is robotics competition this weekend, so I'll keep it on hold until that passes.  Then on Sunday I think I'm going to try to start the Beta round.

That's it for today I think.

Briefly On Your Body Language

I just returned from vacation yesterday and haven't had time to fully recombobulate and document all of that, but here is an interesting TED Talk that I watched today.  It's about how body language can affect you, and how to some degree your body can change your mind.  It's very interesting, and I think often if probably does work, but I'm not 100% convinced it is always effective.  I can't put my finger on exactly why I think that.  If you figure it out, let me know.

Recent Goings On

So.....the good news is I'm still employed.  Somewhat surprisingly, it looks like my job and what I'll be doing won't change that drastically.  There is a large reorganization going on at work, and the communications were made yesterday to the individual contributors about whether they still had a job or not.  Some of the people who were let go were a bit of a surprise - they let some good, experienced people go.  And we haven't seen all the details yet of what the new organization looks like.  Moods are a little tense at work.

On a more interesting and less depressing note, last night was the end of the robotics build season.  We bagged the robot at 11:57 PM last night.  It was a mad scramble to the end, and the robot isn't completely done, but we think we got it "close enough" that we can finish it in the 11 hours we have before competition.  Plus we have a practice robot built to do some practice on.  I'm feeling too lazy to download a picture from my phone, so I'll save that for some other time.

Speaking of robotics, I think this video is a good description of why I do it.  Besides robots being kind of fun in general.  The video is also a good reminder of how to interact with kids.  My favorite quote from it is, "Kids spell trust T-I-M-E."  I'm thankful I had some good examples in that.

Miscellaneous January and February

I've probably been remiss on keeping you up to date on my current life what with all the old/past posts I've been doing.

Robotics is in full swing.  The robot gets bagged on Tuesday next week, so we're furiously working on it, especially since we have a practice event on Saturday.  We had driver tryouts today.  We're building a second "practice" robot, so even though the official one will be in the bag, the build and practice season won't be completely over.  The game this year is called FIRST Stronghold.  Check it out.

I saw this on facebook today.  I think I need one of these.

During the robotics season, as a way to save time traveling to and from the Y and as a way to try to improve my quickness during racquetball, I've been doing the T25 workout series.  I'm on the 5th week of the Alpha round - the last week before going to 5 weeks of the Beta round.  I think the start of Beta might be delayed by a couple weeks, but we'll see what happens there.  I only missed one day of workouts in the 5 weeks, and that was because of having a cold last weekend.  And because I chose to go watch Home Free live and in concert on Friday night.  I highly recommend seeing them if you get the chance.  They did their popular songs, but then the beat boxer also did a solo similar to the one in this video.  It was pretty awesome.  If you watch the video, be sure to watch the middle part.

Long Anticipated Tax Review

So I went to look at my 2015 posts to see what I posted about taxes last year.  And I found that.....I didn't post anything! What?!?!  I deprived my readers of all those graphs and stuff?  What is the world coming to?

You'll be glad to know that I finished my taxes yesterday and got all gung-ho consolidating and analyzing my graphs, so I'm able to post 2 years' worth of graphs in this one post.  FYI, pretty much all of this data comes from my pay stubs and my tax returns.  Your individual results may vary from the ones graphed here.

First, let's talk about pre-tax benefit costs.  AKA insurance.  Most of the costs have been flat except my medical insurance as illustrated below.  Now I can't blame all of that on the Affordable Care Act, but I think the steady 7-8% increase in the last 4 years is due to that.

 

Well.....you might say.....what about keeping up with inflation?  Can you show that as a percentage so we can see how that compares?  See the graph below.  Note that most of the other insurances rarely changed more than 5% in the positive or negative direction, although vision insurance did go down significantly one time.  I think that must mean that dentists and eye doctors either make their money on something else besides routine check-ups, or else they haven't been giving themselves many raises.

My tax software likes to give my effective tax rate.  It actually went down this year, mostly because the corporate bonus multiplier wasn't as good in 2015 as it was in 2014.

The tax software also tells me how the government spends my federal income tax.  See the graph below that compares 2012 to 2015.  Do you believe people when they say the Baby Boomer Generation is retiring?  Well, these graphs seem to support that claim.  The only category whose percentage of spend increased was Social Security, Medicare, and Other Retirement.  It went from 36% of federal spending to 43%.  Everything else stayed the same or decreased.  Yes, even national defense decreased (as a percentage of spending anyway). 

While in federal spending research mode, I looked up some statistics.

                  Spent                   Revenue              Deficit
2012          3.537 trillion       2.45 trillion         1.087 trillion
2015          3.688 trillion       3.249 trillion       439 billion

I'm happy to see the deficit we incurred last year was much less than what it was in 2012.  However......a $439 billion deficit still isn't anything to brag about in my book.  How did the government reduce the deficit?  Ding ding ding!!!  That's right folks, they increased revenue (and did not reduce spending)!  And what method does the government use to increase revenue?  That's right, taxes and fees!!!!  (And maybe selling some military weapons to foreign countries.)

And now, a look at how my gross income gets distributed.  If you look at things as a percentage of my income, the graph looks like this:

You might wonder why there was such a big difference in state and federal taxes between 2012 and 2013.  Well, I think this graph helps explain it a little better.  You can clearly see the huge jump in income that occurred.  I graphed it by dollars instead of percentages.  If you look back at my 2013 analysis, it notes that the large difference you see there is mostly due to a very bad corporate bonus multiplier in 2012.  In fact, I got the highest performance rating possible that year, but it couldn't compensate for a poor overall multiplier.  The additional rise in 2014 was partly due to a promotion that year I think.  And it looks like the bonus multiplier may have been a little better.  I know in 2015 the possible multiplier was looking good until the 4th quarter when things took a dive.

So that's it for this year.  I hope that's enough graphs to satisfy the two year drought you had to endure.

Belated Thanksgiving

Well, I hope your Thanksgiving was good.  I know mine was.  The amount of time it's taking me to post about it does not in any way speak to how good or bad it was.  The number of pictures is also a bit sparse.  So this might be a short post.  It was fairly low key, but it was still good.  The highlights:

1. Seeing family.
2. Making deluxe food trays.
3. Lots of time to read books.
4. Seeing my niece (I know she's family, but a 1.5 year old nieces gets to be in a special category).
5. Some T25 with Muggles.
6. Owie owie owie - this is what Bill said whenever she was physically hurt or if you emotionally hurt her by not letting her do what she wanted.
7. Bill loves black olives.  She ate a whole bunch of them on Thanksgiving day (like at least 15).  And the rest of the weekend we had to hide the pickles and black olives from her until she was done eating her main meal.
8. Bill is quite opinionated and knows exactly what she wants you to do.  She didn't quite have her vocabulary large enough to tell you exactly, but she was still usually an effective communicator.
9. Mole!
10. Reading the book "Love You Forever" to your niece kind of puts a lump in your throat and possibly a tear in your eye.  The ending is a bit creepy in my opinion - the part about the mom going to her adult son's bedroom at night is slightly odd.
11. Eating the most delicious apple pie I've had in years that was made by BIL-Dan's grandma.
12. Hot tubbing.  Bill loves that too.

That's all I got.  Here are some pics.

That's right - 96 hours of GLORIOUS travel by auto.  This is some amusing wallpaper in my sister's basement bathroom.

I think Muggles and I are ready for prime time on Pinterest.

It was kind of fun to make these, but Muggles was right when she said I wouldn't bother to make these if I were the one who had committed to bringing food trays.  I would have stacked them neatly in rows.  :-)

The feet on all of them are the most masterful part.

 

Bill wanting to see the picture I just took of her.

It was an engrossing webinar.  Press the paw pad to hear more sounds!

She was quite upset that her legs barely fit in the bumbo now.

Every young child needs a handy dandy step ladder.

Reading a book by the fire.

Don't worry, the next installment will probably involve even staler news.