For the last week or so, our house has been having a little make over.  The outside has been rubbed down and painted and I’d say 70% of the interior has painted but they still need to do a couple of more coats in our bedroom and the bathroom still hasn’t been touched.  They’ve put new flooring in the spare room as the other was termite infested, the interior doors have been taken off and moved outside, goodness knows what they’re going to do with them.  They do seem to flitting from one thing to another instead of finishing off one room at a time.   It’s slightly annoying but at least its being done.   
Whilst the work on the house has been going on, we’ve had little or no hot water,  we’re unable to unpack as we’re unsure as to what still needs to be done but it’s all OK.  One of our friends who won a couple of night stay in a luxury sea villa back in April, gave us his prize as he’s not heading back to the island for ages, so we took full advantage.  

This is our latest wreck which was deployed a couple of days ago.  

Crystal 5 was the boat we hired for the day to go snorkeling & diving  ..such fond memories!!

I’m measuring corals at our artificial dive site Junkyard.  We are working with another dive school ‘New Heaven’  on project to record the growth of corals / fouling organisms. 

It’s Tuesday today and it’s pretty grim outside which makes a lovely change as it’s lovely and cool. The last week or so the weather has been pretty odd.  Lovely blue sky in the morning and then early afternoon, the sky has darkened and we’ve had howling wind with rain.   I’m not too sure how long this will last but I hope it’ll clear up soon as we might have a friend, Kevin and his daughter visiting on the 30th.

The weekend just gone both Simon and I had the day off together.  It was so lovely not to have to get up, lie in bed with a cuppa and just chill for most of the morning.  I say that, but Simon is near enough always doing stuff  whether it’s on his laptop or tablet ..but not having anyone around or being down at Crystal, was great!    I love spending the day with my hubby!!

Since we’ve been back, I’ve been pretty good cycling everywhere.  I cycle to/fro work everyday and depending on time and weather I’ll go out during the week and at weekends.   Last weekend I started cycling back up to the reservoir, one of my old routes.  I was quite surprised that I could still make it as it’s really steep in places.   I must be brave and start exploring some of the new roads that are even steeper 😀    During the week, I’ve also started doing a 20 minute workout that Simon downloaded for me.  I’m only doing this every other day to make up for me not swimming as the pool that I usually use (The Regal) is being repaired.  All the other pools are either just too busy or a pain in the neck to get to.

Yesterday I though I’d do a bit of glass cutting with my new ‘glass bottle cutter’.   After several attempts with different size bottles, a DMT, Rebecca and I managed to make 2 glasses in 3hrs.  We need to perfect our scoring technique and I think we need to improve our heating/cooling of the glass.

Today Simon was on the early boat (7am)  filming Open Water students as there were 4 groups wanting video’s.   He woke at 3am and couldn’t get back to sleep so must be shattered.  So before he returned on the morning boat,  I cycled into Sairee to buy him a yummy lunch from ‘Through the looking glass’ ..they’re the only place on the island that do decent bread rolls (Chris & Fi, you’ve sampled their rolls on your first trip here) and cakes  …it’s the closest to ‘Rosies Tea Room’ we have on Koh Tao 😀

Video Tim was out filming too.    It’s lovely to see good ole Tim back in action.  I’d forgotten how vocal he could be when sat with headphones on, editing.   Homer Simpson the 2nd 😀

This week I’ve been in Eco office most mornings and diving have organized dives with the DMT’s in the afternoons.  
We’ve been out collecting debris, Crown of Thorns starfish & Drupella Snails.  The Crown of Thorns starfish & Drupella Snails are corallivores, basically eat the live coral polyps within the coral and kill it  ..so on occasions when numbers are high, we go out and collect them, trying to do our bit for the coral.

We’ve added some toilets to our artificial reef Junkyard. These were donated by the Crystal restaurant.  They’ve been stripped of all plastic/rubber components and the hard ceramic shell will provide and excellent substrate for coral to settle on once it’s been given a rub down and scored as they’re very shiny & smooth at the moment.
Another favourite job of the DMC’s is to measure our Giant Clams in our nursery.  We’ve had the clams since they were 10-14 cm in length and now they’re all around the 22 cm mark, so growing very well.  Out of the 25 we were given, we’ve only 1 fatality.

Simon’s been busy with the bar, diving most days and taking some awesome macro shots with his camera.  He’s also been offered a role to do ‘Social Media’ for Crystal  ..that’s all the FB, Twitter & Instagram ads, blogs etc (I think  )  He’s doing a trial run till the end of the month, so we’ll see how that pans out 😀