What an exhausting week this was.

But first, over the weekend, I got to stay a night at my co-worker’s condo on Lake Maitland, which was really nice. It had a pool, too, which I was more than happy to check out.

On Saturday, I had the pleasure of having dinner with the editor-in-chief of Scuba Diving and Sport Diver, Patricia Wuest, and her husband. They were very helpful, and shared some good local spots and restaurants for me to check out during my stay. Patricia also shared some alternative bike routes I can take to work to avoid the busy streets, which proved handy.

On Sunday morning I went to check out a farmer’s market Patricia and her husband told me about at a lakeside park nearby. However, as I arrived, police were sectioning the place off. I later learned that they were closing the place down after someone found a body in the water! An interesting first weekend, without a doubt.

I found another place to have breakfast, and that afternoon I took a dip in the pool, which was nice.

After the weekend, week two started off a little more slowly than the first. Which is not to say that I didn’t have plenty to do- I’ve just started to settle in more at the office.

On Monday, I learned how to post content from the print magazine onto the Scuba Diving website, and published a story on the website about turtle conservation & marine pollution. I also began research for a new story about Goliath groupers in Florida.

Homesickness started to kick in this week, which made it a little hard to focus at the office the first few days. After struggling a bit Monday and Tuesday, I took a mental health day on Wednesday to catch up on sleep. Nonetheless, I worked a bit from home, where I watched the Netflix documentary Chasing Coral, and wrote a review of it the next day.

Some minor medical issues on Thursday put me behind on my work, so the Goliath Grouper story I was supposed to finish on Friday ended up carrying over to the next week, as did the Chasing Coral review.

I wanted to get caught up over the weekend, but in my tiny Airbnb room, it just wasn’t happening. I decided weekends are for resting and having fun, so I went out and saw the new Spider-man movie.

After a weekend of rest, I’m looking forward to starting next week fresh. I’m a little disappointed that I’m starting the week behind on my work-especially since I have a fairly large story due on Friday that I haven’t started. But I’ll make do. The editors here seem to be pretty understanding, as long as I keep them posted.

One last thing- I also got to see one of my pieces published in the magazine, which was really cool. It was only a tiny summary I wrote, but still. Here’s a picture.