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.