Mastodawn

🫠Jul 7, 2024

@JustOneMoreThing I was a dive instructor briefly so I’ve seen a few. The creepiest was my wife and I doing our deep water certification. We dove down to a wrecked ship about 100’ underwater. The instructor gave us a random heading and we had to swim 100 strokes out in that compass direction and then navigate back.

We headed out in the direction he gave us and right when we hit the point when we were to turn around a 6’ bull shark came into view. We both signaled “big” “fucking” “shark” and we slowly turned around and headed back to the ship while keeping our heads on a swivel trying to look everywhere at once. Thankfully the visibility was great that day so he was probably 50’ away from us and just kind of gave us the eyeball and then moved on. When we got back to the ship he was nowhere to be seen.

The craziest story I heard was from another instructor in the Bahamas. We had a shallow cove where we would take tourists for what was a one day basic scuba class. It let people who passed dive in up to 40’ of water with an instructor. The final part was to preform basic skills in “open water” meaning not in a pool.

So we took people to this cove in about 4’ of water. Shallow enough that if they panicked they could just stand up and be safe. The visibility was usually awful because of the surf. This particular day when the instructors hopped into the water and looked around just to make sure the spot under the boat was sandy and not like coral or rocky they realized that they’d dropped into the water next to a 12’ tiger shark. 😬 It was annoyed at being disturbed but just swam off before any of the students hopped in or saw it.

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B. C. Harper

🫠May 10, 2024

@RickiTarr We live in northeastern Oklahoma. We never planned on moving here but it’s where we ended up.

I always pictured those old dust bowl images from the history books whenever I thought about Oklahoma when I was growing up or the musical. That’s not here. North East Oklahoma is called “Green County”. This part of OK, NW Arkansas and SE Missouri are all in and around the Ozark mountains and is great for outdoor recreation with many lakes and rivers and lots of places that support camping, hiking and fishing.

You’re also in one of the reddest states (both politically and the dirt). Politically they are not friendly to LGBTQ+ people, Women, minorities or basically anyone who isn’t a White CIS male. They are anti-abortion but also anti-social support for children born in the state. Weirdly they are also one of the few states that successfully sued the tobacco companies and have a well funded grant to help with tobacco cessation programs. They also approved medical marijuana and the medical requirements are “your doctor believes that you would benefit from using it” and is ridiculously easy to get approved and dispensaries are everywhere. In general OK government also gives the Federal government the bird🖕every opportunity they get so they refused to join the federal health care program until forced to, they refused to join the Real ID program (and even now it’s optional). Basically anything federally they won’t participate in unless they have to (or if it will benefit rich people).

When you meet someone for the first time one of the most common questions is, “What Church do you go to?” If you order tea you need to specify sweet or unsweet and will likely be told to, “Have a blessed day!” when they leave. It also gets hot in the summer with 100+ degree days not uncommon. The humidity makes the heat worse for sure. It’s so humid here year round that the towels from your shower will NOT be dry when you take a shower the next day. You have to close up chips/cereal/crackers right or they go stale in days.

Day to day I don’t mind living here. The big metropolitan city in this area is Tulsa which really is a pretty great city. It’s big enough that they get lots of major concerts and festivals but also small enough that it only takes 20-25 minutes to drive all the way across town, even the bad traffic isn’t that bad.

Overall I don’t *hate* it here but I also am looking forward to getting out of here as soon as my kid is out of school.

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B. C. Harper

🫠Apr 23, 2024

@sundogplanets Just a nerd. I did have to guess that that’s what the poll was about because I forgot the name but my internet search afterwards confirmed.

B. C. Harper

🫠Apr 22, 2024