In the meantime Asnida got certified as an Open Water scuba diver and I got certified as Rescue Diver. We've done only one dive together after she finished her course, possibly the next dive will happen on Saturday.
She definitely needs to practice to improve her buoyancy to avoid killing the coral reefs once we get to the Perhentian Islands in July.
I ordered an underwater housing for my camcorder back in January but its saga hasn't ended yet. It actually has been in Funchal for 2 or 3 weeks now but I don't have it in my possession (yet?). Basically customs confiscated the package and I had to hire a mediating company to release the package. After paying an additional hefty 20% tax the package should now be delivered to M-ITI. That was the message on Friday.
Of course the danger is that the package doesn't get delivered and send back to the US. So I'll check tomorrow afternoon and call the mediating company to bug the local customs again. It's quite annoying knowing the housing is very close to my apartment but I can't simply go there and pick it up. Bureaucracy deluxe.
About a month ago someone emailed me to ask whether Archaic/Vampire magazine has ceased to exist. Indeed going to its URL leads to nowhere. Since I quit back in 2009 I haven't kept track of it and I guess it just went downhill even further until it imploded. Oh well, renaming it from Vampire to Archaic was done ironically and turned out to be prophetically. Kids these days don't read magazines anymore, they just download music and listen once or twice before deleting.
The only downside of the magazine vanishing is that all those reviews and interviews I wrote between 1997 and 2009 are gone too. Though it seems that a few bits have been saved on wikipedia and band websites. For some reason mostly comments from my reviews on early Arch Enemy album.
Oh I don't miss the reviewing and interviewing but it's a shame that this trip down memory lane is evidently gone.
Guess I'll just blast Entombed's "But life goes on" and Dismember's "And so is life"!
