4/9/10 Rodeo Clown Swims Again!

Greetings Internets! I trust you are all having a fabulous day doing meaningful and world-changing things? Good. Good.

Me? I'm trying to buy snorkel gear online.

Which surprisingly, isn't as easy as you'd think.

I told you about how I had decided to learn to swim, right? And that my sister-in-law taught me? And how I foolishly thought that once I got the technique down, everything would be all hunky dorey because how hard can it be since EVEN BABIES AND DOGS AND SINGLE-CELLED ORGANISMS CAN SWIM?

And did I mention how I tried it, and then immediately broke myself by throwing my neck out, and how it took weeks and weeks to even be able to support the weight of my own head without having to hold myself up by my ears? Or how after I finally healed enough to turn my head without resorting to using my hands to pose myself like an action figure, I immediately jumped back in the pool and broke myself again?

What about how I went to the doctor, who sent me to a chiropractor, who set me up with the massage therapist, who pummeled me thoroughly and gave me a lot of technical sounding explanations about repetitive neck stains at unusual head angles and blah blah blah she knew exactly why I kept throwing my neck out. And if I didn't want to spend my life doing a 24 hour a day interpretation of the robot dance, I'd best quit turning my head to the side when I swam.

And I, face mushed into one of those massage table doughnuts, thought about that for a second before going, "But...if I don't turn my head, how am I going to breathe?"

And she said, "Honey, your neck is a mess. You've got the neck of an 85 year old man...who has suffered several car crashes...and was possibly a rodeo clown in his youth. If you want to keep swimming, you better get a snorkel".

So a snorkel it was, because when someone tells you that you're a bad driving, rodeo clown octogenarian, you listen.

Except all of that happened a few months ago in the winter, when absolutely NO ONE stocks snorkel gear, so I had to wait until it got warm enough for stores to carry the required mask and snorkel. (Fins are not necessary for head stability, and may I just say THANK THE LORD, because I will look like a big enough dork as it is, snorkeling along in an indoor pool).

But finding snorkel gear in a landlocked state is not as easy as you'd think. Oh sure, Walmart had a cheap kids' snorkel with Sponge Bob all over it, and the one dive shop in town had a very professional one that they'd be happy to sell me for $350, but other than that, the pickins were slim.

So despite the fact that all the snorkel buying guides insist that the number one thing you must remember when buying gear is that FIT IS EVERYTHING, I turned to buying a snorkel online.

(Have you ever looked at snorkel gear? It's worse than buying a car. I figured that they were basically just breathing tubes, but nononononno! Those suckers have more bells and whistles and dohickies than the International space station. There are purge valves and submersion flaps and slash guards and space-age polymers. You need several advanced engineering degrees and a plumbers license just to figure it out).

But nonetheless, I think I found one. It's a nice mid-range dry snorkel (an obvious sounding contradiction in terms, I know, but that just means that it seals itself off when submerged, thus allowing me to dive under for my turns), and it's winging its way to me through the post office as we speak. Plus it's clear, so that may drop the indoor snorkeling dork factor from a 10 to a 9.5.

Maybe.

Either way, this old rodeo clown is back in the pool, just in time for summer.