In the last week of our time in Mexico, I took GUE Underwater Cave Survey with Fred Devos (Zero Gravity), and teammate JY—a mix of classroom work, field drills, and real world work continuing the resurvey of Nai Tucha (Tux Kupaxa).

Spending over 10 hours in the same area opens your eyes to how much is really there, how much you usually miss, and how much you will always find, no matter how many times you’ve been there.

Like taking Cave 1 and 2, Underwater Cave Survey opened my eyes anew.

📸 Photos: Copyright © 2023, Fred Devos.

After Christmas In Austin we braved Southwest Airlines and headed to Mexico—AUS✈️CUN was one of the few flights largely unaffected by the whole mess. Our last trip was late 2019, immediately before… everything.

The Yucatán Peninsula is a huge limestone karst formed millions of years ago and shaped by everything from ice age and glacial melt to meteor impact¹. It’s jungle landscape marked by thousands of cenotes, doorways into another realm, many of them woven into the life and mythology of the Maya.

Once dry, the cave systems are full of beautiful speleological decorations, the remains of ancient mega fauna, fire pits and artefacts from another lifetime, and sometimes the people that may have inhabited them.

We spent two weeks diving and exploring this beautiful world.

I have far too much video to sort though—I’ll post some short clips in the future—perhaps some photos will help explain the draw.

The first rule of cave diving is to always have a continuous guideline to the open water².

Once inside, it’s dark, eery, and beautiful. The lights you have with you the only source of illumination.

One of the most beautiful sites in caves close to the sea is the halocline, an area where the inland fresh water mixes with salt water from the ocean—beautiful and sometimes frustrating when you’re in the rocking chair.

As always, I’m counting the days until we head back to the Mayan Underworld.

For the first two years of the COVID19 pandemic Australia isolated itself from the world, so I had only ever met my partner’s family over Zoom. For Christmas 2022 we headed to Austin and spent time with them, the first time she’d seen them for about 4 years.

We had great fun walking around Austin seeing the sights, visited the capitol, went two stepping at Sagebrush, saw a couple of bands at The Far Out Lounge & Stage, went go-carting at the Circuit of the Americas, drank coffee at Two Hands, Jo’s, and Cosmic Garage, ate Bagels from Big City Bagels and Subs, and had a great Christmas eating, drinking, playing games, and hanging out.

Oh, and we braved that insane cold snap that saw the temperature drop about 40º in two hours.

We ate BBQ. A lot of BBQ. Rudy’s was my favourite.

And checked out some local vistas.

It was fantastic. Great food, great music, great people, and best of all, I gained a whole new family. Three new sisters, their partners, and my partner’s parents.

I can’t wait to visit them all again. ♥️

For a decade and half I used Twitter. Every day. Occassionaly via the website or first party apps, but for me it was always defined by third party apps.

Hell, third party apps and the community gave us the very word tweet, let alone the blue bird logo, mentions, retweets, and hashtags!

I started with the first version of Twitterrific on macOS and iOS, I used Birdhouse before drafts were ubiquitous, Tweetie before Twitter bought it, and of course Tweetbot.

I’ve had both Twitterrific and Tweetbot installed on my devices for as long as they’ve existed.

I stopped using Twitter a few months back when a grifter acquired and rapdily destroyed it. This week he cut off every significant third party app, all but scuttling several businesses, without a word or reason.

Cowardly.

Iconfactory have now discontinued Twitterrific and Tapbots are hard at work on Ivory¹ for Mastodon.

Good luck and thanks. I look foward to seeing and using what you’re up to next.