Adventures of a Tribe

A day to relax

Posted on July 30, 2015

Emma did ‘surgery’ on my foot this morning. I’ve had a splinter for a few days now and we finally had a chance to work on it. She is so cute with the tweezers and needles etc as she works away, and is able to get them out every time!

We all relaxed for a while, Aundrea sang to us on the Uke, and we read and relaxed more while it rained.  I finally got to work doing some more organizing from yesterdays shipment, and then when the rain stopped we figured it was time to go on a Stand Up Paddleboard adventure.

We paddled for quite a while, meandering through the mangroves, under tunnels of arching mangrove branches and and into beautiful little enclosed areas. After a while we got goofy and tried doing head stands, jumping jacks and cartwheels on the boards – always ending up splashing into the water.  We swam around and played for a couple hours, then lay relaxing in the warm sun as we floated with the current. It was heavenly. I kept thinking about how I want to bring Danny to the places we were.

After getting back home again, we all became involved with little art projects, and Aundrea read us a story.

My Father in Law emailed me the most hilarious story, (given my recent encounter with a jelly fish),and I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing it on the blog:

Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana. He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs.

Below is an E-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to radio station 103.2 on FM dial in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, who was sponsoring a worst job experience contest. Needless to say, she won.

Hi Sue,

Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother.

Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you’ve been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it’s not so bad after all.

Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job.
As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It’s a wet suit. This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this: We have a diesel powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temperature.

It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose, which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I’ve used it several times with no complaints.

What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wet suit. This floods my whole suit with warm water. It’s like working in a Jacuzzi.

Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my butt started to itch. So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my butt started to burn. I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened.

The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. Now, since I don’t have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn’t stick to it however, the crack of my butt was not as fortunate.
When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my butt.

I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other divers, were all laughing hysterically.

Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make three agonizing in-water decompression stops totaling sixty-five minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression. When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet.

As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my butt as soon as I got in the chamber.

The cream put the fire out, but I couldn’t poop for two days because my butt was swollen shut.

So, next time you’re having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your butt.

Now repeat to yourself, “I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.”
Now whenever you have a bad day, ask yourself, is this a jellyfish bad day?

May you NEVER have a jellyfish bad day!!

Thanks for the laugh Dad. I thought it was hilarious.

To close a fantastic day in a wonderful way, I did one of the things I really love to do, and that’s bake bread. I baked it using the wheat that the creatures and I ground, and everyone enjoyed it nice and hot with some delicious strawberry jam.

I am so grateful for another day of life in which the creatures and I could experience more of the beauty that surrounds us. I am also grateful for the opportunity to communicate with my Sweetheart – even though he’s so very far away. Life is good.