I was trying out different work ideas such as working as an extra on film sets and personal training at the gym. I got a couple of modelling jobs as well. I managed to get a five thousand dollar grant and attended the Cooper Institute of Aerobics Technology which was a very good and very expensive two week personal training course. I enjoyed doing personal training at the gym but it was very difficult to make any money at it. I had requested my fathers naturalisation record and finally received it. I realised at that point that I had dual British and American citizenship so I applied for my British passport and received it. This was something handy for me to keep in the drawer and made me feel as though I was expanding my options in life. I had been interested in commercial diving so I attended a commercial diving school in Houston, Texas. I had applied for a grant and received it but needed to qualify for a second grant in order to pay for the course in full. My ex-wife was not helping with the course costs but I managed to get her gas card from her and charged all of my meals to a service station while I attended the course. I was lucky that they had a McDonalds restaurant in the gas station where I could use the card. I did not receive the second grant so I was unable to pay for the course in full. The course provider explained to me when I left that I could have my certificate once I paid them the rest of the money that I owed them. I heard that a company was hiring British commercial divers on a big job in Libya and that British citizenship along with British diving qualifications were required. I applied for a bank loan to attend a commercial diving school in Fort William, Scotland and received it. I then flew to Scotland and attended the school but ran out of money once again and was told that I would receive my certificate once the course was paid in full. I flew back to Dallas and was determined to get hired as a commercial diver with or without my certificate so I began checking with companies. My ex-wife had just left Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous after fourteen years because the show ended. She said that she wanted to move to Los Angeles and had been speaking with my uncle who was a lawyer for NBC studios there. We rented a house in La Canada near Los Angeles. My sister had moved into my grandmothers house in Carpinteria, California which was up the pacific coast from there towards Santa Barbara. My grandmother was beginning to get forgetful because of her Alzheimers disease so my sister became her guardian. My sister and my uncle began arguing about inheritance matters when my grandmother died. My sister was in charge of my grandmothers money and was supposed to be using it for her care. She looked after my grandmother along with her hired help. My sister then bought some properties which eventually went into her name. She also bought and sold a small business, a boat and a sports car amongst other things and put the money from the sales into her own personal bank account. She then somehow managed to get her hands on the house which was supposed to go to to her and I along with our two cousins following my grandmothers death. She said that she was consolidating assets for my grandmothers care as she only had one hundred and forty thousand dollars left. I went to my grandmothers funeral but was to upset to speak. I dearly loved my grandmother and her loss was almost as bad as losing my mother. I did not receive any inheritance after she died and my cousins stopped speaking to me because of arguments that they had with my sister. I assumed that my uncle and cousins received some inheritance but obviously not as much as they expected. I did some checking and found a document at the hall of records office where my sister told the court that she did not know my whereabouts. It appeared that she made a claim to my share of the inheritance at some point after telling the court that she did not know where I was. I could never understand how she could treat me so coldly. My sister was extremely selfish when she was a child right through her adulthood. I guess this comes from being spoiled but she took selfishness to another level. She never even saved me a souvenir bit of clothing or jewellery from my mother. I treated perfect strangers better then she treated me. It was like the entire concept of brother and sister was unknown to her. I would question her from time to time about these things and she would ether lie or make some sort of excuse that she really seemed to believe. The point is that I was obviously never a high priority for her. I think that she loved me but I was never a high priority if that makes any sense. Most people would have made far more of an effort for their brother but not her. I know that I was not the best behaved brother but did my best under the circumstances of my upbringing. I could understand it if she could not help me when we were young but I always imagined her wanting to help me and expected much more from her once things got better for me. I think on the contrary, that she saw me as more of an embarrassment or somebody that might stand in the way of her getting something that she wanted. I have never given up on her though and have done my best to try and forget everything that she has done. I always wanted the best for her even after the way that she has treated me. My sister got a job with American Express and then married her new boyfriend that she had been going with for some time. They eventually sold my grandmothers house and bought another one in the area. I had landed a diving job in San Diego, California at the naval base, building some underwater slip ramps. I told my ex-wife that I was going to get a temporary apartment there for the job and come home on the weekends. I got an apartment on Coronado island across from the naval base which was just a twenty minute drive. I was doing well on the job and was making good money. My ex wife did not seem to like the idea of me being self sufficient though. She was accustomed to having me depend on her. I came home one weekend and she was really nasty with me. She started hitting me while I was eating dinner so I broke my plate over her head and she phoned the police. The police came and put both of us in jail. I got out of jail and she had taken out a restraining order against me so I went back to my apartment in San Diego. The job finished up and I received my divorce papers from her lawyer which I signed and I did not ask her for anything. I realise in hindsight that it was probably a pretty stupid thing to do but I felt as though by taking something from her that I would be taking something from her son as well. I couldn’t do that since I had helped raise him for the past five years. I could not get anymore diving work because they were tightening up on health and safety. The companies were beginning to get asked for their divers qualifications which I did not have. I managed to get a job as a maintenance person in El Capitan state park which is north of Carpinteria, California. I moved up there and rented a room in a guys house from an advertisement that I had seen. I began working and making a little bit of money. My boss was a forest ranger there and he was dating another female employee. They broke up and I started seeing her. We had very casual relationship and were not seeing each other outside of the park yet. I was heading home one evening and overheard her and my boss arguing before I left. That night I received a call from my boss telling me that I was suspended until further notice. I put two and two together and realised that him and my girlfriend must have gotten back together. He phoned me two weeks later and asked me to meet him at another state park closer to my house. I met him there and he had two officers waiting to arrest me. They were charging me for stalking my ex girlfriend who was now his girlfriend again. I said that this charge was completely fabricated and that my boss was just jealous of us. They kept me in jail for two weeks until I was bailed out by some friends. I got in touch with internal affairs at the police station several times and one of them finally admitted to me that my former boss had tried to get me charged three times but they refused because there was no evidence of any crime being committed. They finally relented and charged me anyway. I went to court and plead not guilty and was told that I would need to go through the entire trial process. I thought at that point that it was all to much and booked a flight to Scotland. I went back to Fort William, Scotland where I had previously done the diving course and began looking for diving work. I went over to the Isle of Mull and got on a scallop diving boat with an American captain. I got a room in a hostel and would go scallop diving on the boat every morning. It was not an easy knack to get. We would find a spot that was no deeper then thirty meters and then jump over the side with our net bag. The bag had another upside down bag above it which I would fill with air from time to time to keep the net bag with the scallops up off of the seabed. Both of these bags were tied to a buoy on the surface by a long nylon rope. Two divers would go at the same time and the boat captain would need to follow their buoys. The scallops were on the seabed and were sometimes open and other times closed and dug in the sand. Most of the time they were closed and dug in. You had to immediately recognise their shape as the current took you past them as it was not possible to swim against the strong current. The trick is to quickly get the scallops into the bag. If they sense you coming then they scatter in different directions. This is a skill that takes some time to learn. It is also very dangerous. I had a couple of close calls which was caused by the fact that I had not thought things through enough. I survived the close calls but was not getting many scallops. The skipper took the boat out of the water to do some painting and other maintenance work. We had completed everything except for the painting and scraping. The captain wanted to let the boat dry out for a couple of weeks before we started that. Another boat crew was in the dry dock and they asked me if I wanted to go to Aberdeen, Scotland with them and dredge for clams. I said yes and we left for Aberdeen . We dredged from Aberdeen along the north sea coast to Wick, Caithness where we landed our clams. I left the boat in Wick and met a girl. We split up and I went north to the Orkney islands to do some more scallop diving. This was even more dangerous as the tides were ferocious. The tide was like a river and you could not even hang on to a rock as it swept you along the seabed. I finished with that job and got on a boat setting out crab pots. We landed our crab in Scrabster which is on the Scottish mainland north of Wick. I did a few more trips on crab boats from Scrabster and then met another girl in Wick. I got an apartment and went on job seekers allowance. The girl and I split up and I was struggling to find work. I was just getting a few little jobs in the Wick dry dock. I went to the Camps bar in Wick which is a fishermen’s bar near the harbour and met a beautiful woman and we were married a year later. Our relationship is built on love for each other. We both have nothing to gain from the relationship. We just enjoy each others company. She has a twenty-seven year old son called Piers. He was eleven years old when we met. His father was killed in a car accident while working for a construction company in Saudi Arabia. I got a job in a slate quarry on the outskirts of Wick. The job ended when I ran into a tractor in my wife’s car after work one day. The car was completely wrecked but I was not injured. We had no transportation for awhile until the insurance company finally settled. We got another car but I had already been replaced on the job. I had been trying to get on an oil rig when I was in America but was unable to. I began trying again in Scotland and managed to get on a rig and then another. I was working for the oil companies on rotation all over the world before long. The money was good and I was managing to provide a good life for my family. We were able to afford all of the things that we needed and some that we wanted. We went on vacations to the Caribbean and spent our winters in Spain when my stepson got older. My stepson eventually moved out of the house and got a job in Cornwall. My wife and I continued to take vacations on our own and took my stepson to Cancun again where we met up with my family. The rotations began getting much longer and I did not like leaving my wife at home alone. I was having a few close calls on some of the jobs as well in third world countries. I was working on a Total oil job in Nigeria and there had been some problems with the workers and the local government. Two government employees arrived on the work site one day and explained that they wanted all of us in the parking lot and that we were not allowed to leave until they received an undisclosed sum of money. They had brought padlocks with them and locked all of the buildings and seized the vehicles. All of our paid local security staff had immediately began assisting the two government employees and held their guns on us. We had two of our own private expat security staff and they made arrangements for two crew boats to pick us up on the river which ran alongside the site. One of our managers then kept the two government employees busy while we slowly made our way down to the river and boarded the crew boats. We stayed at our compound for a week afterwards until things were finally settled with the local government. The government kept all of our vehicles along with a two million dollar payment which the company made to them. The next day we went back to work in an old school bus that the company managed to obtain. The price of oil then fell dramatically and I could no longer find any work as the oil companies canceled all of their new projects. They also replaced most expats with cheap labour from third world countries. I am now sitting at home on job seekers allowance with my wife in our cozy house in Wick. I am very happy but hope that some more work will eventually come up with a decent rotation that does not require me to be away from home for too long and is not to dangerous. I have just been contacted by a company with a job proposal in Algeria. The rotation is four weeks on and four weeks off which is good but it is in a very dangerous location. The location is called (In Amenas) close to the Libyan border which is where several expat oil workers were killed by militants in 2013.