New Year’s Day the last couple years has been spent diving. I have yet to dive on New Years but that’s besides the point! I seriously debated it this year, but in the end, I didn’t. I’m a chicken I guess or maybe I’m smart… you decide.
I’m not the best passenger in a vehicle. I sat near the middle of the bus and decided sleeping was best for me. Deb has been sick and Rachele I guess was tired? I didn’t ask :).
Pete decided he wasn’t staying home. They tried to get him off the bus, but he wasn’t having it. This was really the maiden voyage of the bus since it’s been in our possession (except the trip to the gas station…) and Pete wasn’t about to miss out on the opportunity to ride on the bus and go to the lake.
When we stopped for breakfast, he curled up in the drivers seat. He was just keeping it warm for Jared.
After the December flooding, this is what the lake looked like. Hubs said it had about 2-3 foot visibility if that.
Wow, today got away from me. I spent most of my day learning about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Quite an interesting story, not gonna lie! What’s even more interesting is people don’t want it taught in schools because of some of the language. It is considered racist… written by a guy who was pretty much anti-slavery. Interesting in deed!
Anyway last weekend was the annual Underwater Pumpkin Carving. Since getting certified in 2013, hubby has participated and Tbug has participated but I never had. Writing a scuba blog I figured it was about time that I try too, right? Only fair!
I was a bit nervous about the water temperature since the morning started out in the upper 40’s… but I thought, what the heck. I still think I want to do a New Year’s Day dive just once too. I couldn’t the first year we were certified because they don’t let you dive while pregnant and the second year I chickened out. Maybe this is the year, but enough on that… we’re talking about carving pumpkins underwater!
We beat Deb and Grady there. When we left the house I asked hubs why so early. He told me that this is one of those moments you say yes hunny and just go with it. I said whatever and went to sleep in the front seat of the car. :).
When Deb and Grady got there we started helping them unload the truck/trailer. That’s when they realized they forgot some things. I asked what they needed, got the list and Memaw, Abug and I headed back to Seligman to the new Walmart store. So nice that it is so close, but I’d have gone farther if needed.
When we got back, Grady and Dan were gearing up with their dive students to go out and certify some new divers.
Deb stayed on land to get food ready and get paperwork done for the underwater pumpkin carving. On the menu, Chili, Spaghetti Red, Hot dogs. Karen and I took care of stirring the chili, making the noodles, etc, anything that involved the food so that Deb was free for paperwork. We had 2 gals that were from out of state, Alaska and California. They’d never heard of Spaghetti Red and said it must be a Midwest thing. By the way if you haven’t heard of that… it’s chili on spaghetti noodles.
The water has gone down some since all the rains this summer (not complaining) but it is still rather on the high side. We didn’t get to go to the normal dive side, we went off by where the camping area is. Grady also told me that there wasn’t a thermocline in the top 30 feet which is a good thing. I know my dive computer said 68 degrees when we started diving. It really wasn’t that bad. I know, right?!?!
Once Grady and Dan were done certifying students, they came up and got dressed in regular street clothes. Don’t you just love their dive socks?
All morning I walked around and people asked if I was going to carve a pumpkin. I kept responding with Hubby says I am. LOL. Dan and Tiffany went and camped elsewhere (our normal site is closed for the year). They had their camper on behind the truck so I went and changed in their camper. I forgot to take my dive boots up with me so I was walking around in my regular boots. I got a lot of funny looks, laughs, and head turns :). Whatever, I’m a country girl, it’s all good.
Now I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried to get a pumpkin underwater, it’s not easy. They are extremely buoyant. Boomer thought he’d put his in a mesh bag with they said about 40lb of rocks. Didn’t work. His pumpkin came out of the bag and I hear it was a riot to watch from land.
I lucked out because they over weighted me so I could get my pumpkin down but it kept floating me to the surface so hubby had to take it down for me. I put it against my chest so that my over weight would take it down. No such luck. Hubby got it down for me though. Then he held it while I cut it open. Once the top came off we weighted it down with water and rocks. While I was carving I broke 2 knives. luckily we took 4 down with us. (You’ll know me underwater by my yellow sleeves although in the green murky water they don’t quite look yellow)
The joke back up on surface was that now that we’ve carved pumpkins we have to go get all the insides and get them out of the water. Yeah right, good luck with that!
Abug played soooooo hard up on surface. Memaw followed her around checking everything out and picking up acorns. She soooooooo wanted to get in the water and couldn’t understand why she wasn’t allowed to. Memaw couldn’t get her to sleep so finally Karen took her and walked away from the crowd and she went to sleep fairly quickly.
While Karen was putting her to sleep, I went and used their truck and a blanket to change back into my street clothes. Then we had to vote for whose pumpkin should win. This time I left my boots down with everyone else so I got to walk across the campsite area barefoot. Man I never had the right shoes at the right place.
So Mike won for Ugliest Pumpkin
Annie won for Best Effort
Tiffany was 3rd. And the blogger was fired for this out of focus picture.
Justin was 2nd.
And Dan was 1st.
Mine is pumpkin #2 (third on the top row)
and our 3rd, 2nd and 1st place winners. Dan and Tiffany are married so Justin wound up in a family sandwich :). haha.
Let me tell you, this wasn’t bad. Water was great, visibility was great. And it was a lot of fun! Back on land, my pumpkin lasted one day. There’s something about that lake water that ruins them. oh well… such is life I guess.
Let’s just state for the record… if you don’t like pictures, today’s post is definitely not for you… we’re looking at 33. It’s just a days worth of photos and truthfully, there were more, I weeded it down to 33. FYI over. Now let the post commence.
Whoever heard of or thought of getting up before 7am on a Saturday is out of their mind. This is probably why I didn’t marry a farmer… lol :). This last weekend a huge group of our friends went down to the lake. Hubby and I decided we’d meet up with them Saturday for a day at the lake. (the rest were camping!!) Abug woke up her cheery normal self and was eating animal crackers to start her day. This kids momma didn’t raise a fool. lol :). Then on the drive down she took in a little snooze. Again, her momma didn’t raise a fool!
Earlier last week sometime plans were made for Tbug, hubby and I to get up and go to the lake Saturday morning. They were certifying some boyscouts and we were going down too. I have been fighting a cold, plugged ears, etc… lots of stuff to keep me from diving… but I recently got my new fins in and I wanted to dive and try them out… so I agreed to get up an some unknown hour that turned out to be 5:30am. Did you know that time exists? This wasn’t quite 5:30 but close. I have no idea what time we left the house…
Hubby decided we should stop to get some donuts to take with us.
What do you do when it’s been raining for almost a week straight and you finally get a reprieve in the weather? Sunny and 80’s+=Girls Road trip!
Friday morning my mom sent Abug and me a message and asked if we wanted to go to Springfield for the day. I suggested going to Rogers instead and she was good with that. On my way to my parents house I wondered if Tbug would be able to go too and we could just make it a girls day so I got a hold of her mom (especially since it was our weekend to have her) to see if it’d be possible to get her early and it was. Score! We picked her up and made a day of it!!
So when we got to Rogers to the mall area we love to go to it was time for lunch. Normally we go to 1 of 2 places, Fish City Grill or PF Changs. This time around we chose Fish City Grill. I surprised Tbug that I chose this place. I only chose it for the dessert and I’m not a big dessert person… does that tell you something? (Mom’s not pictured because she refuses to be in photos…)
While we were waiting to place our order we took some selfies to send to Dad (hubby) just to be ornery since he was stuck in doors at work today. Shame on us, we’re mean, but it was oh so fun!
Jump forward to 2014 and I was 38-39ish weeks pregnant and banned from coming down to the lake because they didn’t want to have to duct tape my legs together and drive like a bat out of hell to get me to a hospital if I went in to labor.
So now it is 2015. Plans were to either dive with the divers who were hiding the animals so I could get pictures, or else dive with Tbug when she competed. Enter in what may have been the flu… I’m not really sure. I was out of commission and couldn’t/shouldn’t/didn’t dive. But, that didn’t stop Tbug from diving! She either has to dive with a parent or a dive instructor so we asked Doug if he’d be willing to dive with her so she could compete. He was happy to. Hubby would have dove with her but he volunteered to help with cooking food.
That morning we headed down to the swim beach around 8am because they were having open water check out dives for current students that morning. Also the water levels are up so much that we were afraid there wouldn’t be enough room for people so we had to stake out our spots early on.
So I planned on doing Memorial Weekend in one post… but I’m at like 36ish photos already… and that just gets me to Friday. Oy!
I pretty much spent my whole week at the lake last week, which was all well and good, except… the weather forecast sucked. I started watching the week before and there was pretty much chances of rain all weekend long. And I’m pretty sure it rained at some point every day. Luckily a friend of ours let us borrow their camper and it had a slide out so it was like having a nice house. That was great for letting Abug down on the floor to play. Whew!
It was a long story as to why I wound up at the lake the whole week but we went down Tuesday evening when hubby got off work and I camped out. He drove from the lake to work and I spent my days alone with Abug or with my FIL who came down to stay Wednesday afternoon.
When we got to the lake we had to fill the camper up with water. Then it was time to go park it. Baby girl had never been to the lake so we definitely needed a documentation selfie!
Once the camper was set, we decided to go eat dinner at Short Stop. Luckily we did because Tbug and hubby got sick Memorial Day (Monday) and we didn’t get to stop on our way home.
Last Sunday Tbug took her chances at carving a pumpkin underwater. I stated that Saturday night she tried her hand at pumpkin carving on land since it had been a year since she’d carved a pumpkin. Our local dive shop hosts a yearly underwater pumpkin carving and she wanted to participate. Her dad and I had to divide and conquer that day, he took her to that and I went to a baby shower with baby girl.
Since I couldn’t be there I told everyone to make sure I got lots and lots of pictures. (more…)
Let me tell you, camping while being one month from your due date… oy! But we had fun this weekend. We spent the weekend down at Beaver Lake. Tbug was working on getting her Scuba Open Water Certification. So all weekend was eat, dive, eat, dive, repeat. Hubby helped with some other classes that went happened and I was the shore man… or woman. Basically I stood in the water waist deep and anything anyone forgot on shore I waddled up and grabbed for them. Yes, I waddled. I did get to ride the diveak and deliver flowers out to the flower garden, otherwise I stood on shore most of the weekend. On the last day there (Memorial Day) we went and toured Pea Ridge Battle Ground from the Civil War.
Tbug and I butted heads a few times. She was a bit nervous about diving and with her dad spending most of his time under the water I had to deal with her nervousness. But being pregnant I finally got tired of it all and grumbled at hubby for not being there for her. Yup, the wonderful life of pregnancy right? But we all got it accomplished and the following weekend she finally got certified!!
When we got down to the Pinnacle Hills Shopping center, we walked around Dillards and then our favorite jewelry store, Versona Accessories. As we were leaving Versona, I asked mom when we were going to eat. She asked what time it was and I answered 11:50 and I was hungry. She grinned at me and asked AC & Neela what they’d like to eat. As we rounded the corner up by where the restaurants are, AC saw the Fish City Grill and asked if we could eat there. Everyone knows me and my “love” of fish, but I said as long as they had shrimp or chicken I was game so we checked it out.
As we entered they told us to seat ourselves and brought us the menus.
