I wrote a comment on Deaf Mom’s World this weekend about why I’m always partaking in social bluffing.
Usually it’s because I think I’ll catch up to the conversation and by the time I realize I’m not going to they have moved on I something new. The most frustrating part is catching a useless phrase perfectly and missing everything else. For example I can hear someone say “I couldn’t believe it!†but the rest is blahblahlah.
I do great one on one. It takes two to communicate and I can be number two. But make me number three or four and I might as well not be there.
Well I spent the weekend with Don and two new friends and they left me in the dust for at least half of the conversations. No offence to them, they are wonderful, and I didn’t even tell them or ask them to repeat anything. I think part of the conversation I got was about how their family had gotten the cabin we were staying in and scuba diving kept coming up along with skiing. Skiing made perfect sense, there were two resorts within sight of the cabin. But scuba diving? West Virgina? What??
Well, today I was randomly browsing real estate in that area (Canaan Valley) and whenever I browse real estate I inevidibly end up looking for waterfront property. I looked at a Google map to see if there were any lakes in the area and two caught my eye: Stony River Reservoir and Mt Storm Lake. Well the reservoir doesn’t have any access roads, so I looked into the other.
Mount Storm Lake (also known as New Stony River Reservoir) is a 1,200 acre (4.9 km²) reservoir created in 1962 on the Stony River in Grant County in the U.S. state of West Virginia. Mount Storm Lake serves as a “cooling pond” for the Dominion 1,600 megawatt Mount Storm Power Station, which provides electricity to more than two million customers in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle and various parts of the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area. The reservoir stands at an altitude of 3,244 feet (983 m). Mount Storm Lake is a popular local and tourist destination. When Dominion Virginia Power is using the reservoir for cooling, it keeps Mount Storm Lake at a warm temperature that makes it perfect for swimming, boating, and water activities even in cooler weather. The reservoir’s water is also extremely clear, with the light available on an average overcast day allowing swimmers to clearly see its bottom at depths of at least five to six feet.
Interesting. Kind of like Lake Anna in VA but with a coal power plant instead of nuclear.
And then I saw this part:
Mount Storm Lake, due to the temperatures, is a popular diving destination and training ground for scuba divers. The reservoir, which is in the upper eighties to nineties in the summer and rarely drops below fifty in the winter is outfitted with dive platforms at 30, 50, 75, and 120 feet and is regularly used by divers as a place to test equipment, maintain skill, enjoy a dive, and further training.
HA! Now I understand. Two days later. I don’t know if they discussed the lake in their conversations or not, but now it all makes sense to me. 🙂
For more about Mount Storm Lake check out: http://www.mtstorm.com/
Another thought I’ve had – Mt Storm always shows up in my Weather emails about storm totals in the area. They get a lot of snow. I wonder if it is lake effects?
