Sunday, May 5, 2019

Watery Thankfuls Plus A Few Others

It's still Sunday (barely), so, without fanfare, here are my Ten Things of Thankful:

1. Tuesday was a rocky night. We had severe thunderstorms all afternoon and evening, and those spawned tornadoes. Welcome to spring in Tornado Alley! Fortunately for us, the tornadoes skirted around us, and we got nothing more than gallons and gallons of rainfall, high winds, and lots of lightning and thunder. 

2. Okay, so others weren't so lucky. So far, the National Weather Service has confirmed there were 26 tornadoes in southwest Missouri. Fortunately, there were no deaths, and while there was damage to homes and businesses, the tornadoes went through mostly rural areas that were not very populated.

3. Mother's Day programs at preschool were this week. I'd like to say no one cried, no one threw up and no one wet their pants, but I would be lying. I can say no one threw up and no one wet their pants, so two out of three ain't bad.

4. My terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad kittens made a gigantic mess in the living room Wednesday night while I was trying to write my Six Sentence Story for the week. One broken snowglobe, one shattered picture frame, much glycerin water, glitter and glass all over the wood floor, and one very displaced tablecloth later, I was able to turn the whole fiasco into a pretty decent Six Sentence Story that you can read right here.

Part of the carnage was MY PICTURE.

5. My husband fished off the dock today and caught this:


Check out the size.
And check out how FREAKING CREEPY it is.

We have fished in this lake my entire life and never before has anyone caught anything that looked like it, so I posted it on Facebook to see if anyone could identify it. My childhood friend Nancy said it was a fish. We all need more friends like Nancy....

6. My son, another friend's husband, and my cousin all came back with sculpin, which I never heard of before. We all need more friends (and relatives) like them, too, especially since I was wondering if this creature was actually a sign of the apocalypse.

7. My daughter said it looked like the baby version of the creature from "Shape Of Water," which was EXACTLY what I had been thinking. Great minds....

8. When there is heavy rain in the area, it eventually finds its way into the area lakes. That happened this week. Several years ago, the water made it into my parents' lake house, and this was not a good thing. We kept an eye on the lake levels all week (I'm really good at sandbagging, but it's not something I ENJOY being good at), and glory, glory, the Corps of Engineers kept the water from rising too high! The forecast for this next week is for thunderstorms and heavy rain....

9. The lake upstream from our lake is so full, they have had to run water over the floodgates of the dam. When the flooding was very, very bad several years ago, they had all ten floodgates open as far as they could go, which is 3 feet, I believe, with over 70,000 cubic feet per second going over the dam (that equals nearly 539,000 gallons per second). There are only 5 floodgates open currently, and they are only open a foot each. That's just over 5,000 cfs, which is still enough to be impressive. My dad and I drove to the dam to see it:


The view from the south side of the dam.
I don't know the official name for this road
and lookout, but it used to be knows as
Lawn Chairs and was a party place

Me and my daddy

This is from, kind of obviously, below the dam
next to the fish hatchery. The water is loud
as it pounds over the dam. It's 200 feet from
the bottom to the top here.

This is from the Table Rock Lake side of the dam.
The water is 200 feet deep right here. Well,
more than that, or it wouldn't be going over
the floodgates (which you can't seen from
this side, as the openings are underwater).

10. A bird has built a perfect little nest in the wreath on the front door of the lake house. It is fortunate for this bird that we don't use that door and instead use the one in the carport. I got a chance to peek in the nest and count 6 eggs when I looked through the blinds and mama birdie saw me and FREAKED out, zooming out of the nest and into a nearby tree. She's getting a little more used to me peering at her through the blinds, and she doesn't fly away, but she does give me the stink eye. I'm pretty sure she's a house finch, and it's going to be pretty cool to see those six babies hatch, even though I have a feeling there is going to be a lot of bird poo to wash off the door by the time they all fly away.

Six little eggs.

If you look closely, you can see
mama birdie glaring at me.

Always count your thankfuls.

Ten Things of Thankful

10 comments:

  1. Awww 🐦love! Sweet ttot! That's a weirdo fish. Looks like a hybrid.

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    1. Apparently this fishy is very common in this lake, but in 58 years of being on and around said lake, no one in my family has ever seen it before!

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  2. Stay dry and safe!
    The fish looks like a little pleco. They are commonly sold in pet stores, and they get HUGE! (Ever wonder why I got a 50-gallon tank? It was so daughter's fish would have a place to swim.) Maybe someone realized they made a mistake by purchasing it and decided to turn it loose!

    Your kitties. Wow. They sure are cute, though. (Unlike that fish!) :-)

    BTW, the link stays open until Tuesday night. I might take a poll sometime, though. I'm not sure we need to be open 5/7 days each week. What do you think?

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    1. Thanks! We dodged the bullet again!
      Thank goodness those fish only grow to be a couple inches long! They are creepy in miniature; I can't imagine them BIGGER!
      The kitties are sooo cute and sooo bad!
      I think I'd just do the link from Friday to Sunday night like we used to. The smaller the window, the more driven I am to get a post done. When I know I have five days, I will put it off and then forget about it.

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  3. funny thing that fish... they have a salt water version. Back in the day, on the boat, they'd on occasion be in the pile of fish from the net. thing was, they had (the salt water version) two spines projecting off the back of they heads... sharp they was, go right through your boot. and hurt? I'd say so...
    I remember when the height of destruction was when Norah (as a small catlet) would climb up in the Xmas tree and mess with things and decorations.
    Looking kinda civilized in comparison, non?

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    1. I asked my husband if the one he caught was sharp, and he said he didn't touch it bare handed but he didn't think so. It was creepy and gross, though. The salt water version of this fishy sounds dreadful!
      Yeah, we thought Nora was horrid with the Christmas tree. Imagine TWO of her! Plus, she STILL climbed the tree, so at times, I had THREE cats in the tree.

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  4. I never ceased to be amazed by the grand scheme of things in nature, especially when it isn't the norm. The Mississippi and it's tributaries provide a lot of water, but when the time is just right, a lot of damage too.
    What fun to be able to get such a close up view of the finches when they are hatching. I think those little birds are going to give white washing a new meaning. LOL

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    1. The lake at our house is part of the White River and the lakes were built for flood control. There are five lakes on the chain, all of them pretty large except for the one at our house, and it looks more like a river than a lake. Eventually, the water flows into the Mississippi, so when the Mississippi is flooded, they can't release water from the bottom lake into it, so they can't release from the one above that one and so on. That's how we get flooded. So the floods in Nebraska have an effect on the entire mid-section of the country. Crazy, isn't it?
      Three eggs have hatched since I wrote this. Don't know the status of the other three in there and I'm afraid to find out!

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  5. OK, so I totally misread that and thought that, "My son, another friend's husband, and my cousin all came down with sculpin" and I shot out of my chair so fast, I almost pulled a muscle.
    Fortunately, I re-read, so my urgent and immediate NEED for a dictionary settled back into a more moderate, "take your time, Jz" kind of curiosity. For which my back was profoundly grateful.

    But that was a bizarre-looking little sucker...

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    1. See? My daughter and I both thought it looked like the baby version of the creature from Shape of Water, and if my son, my friend's husband and my cousin came down with sculpin, then we'd have a movie sequel. Or is "sculpin" one of those Jz things that I need to look up in urban dictionary...?

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