“Nah, I’m not tired; just restin’ mah eyes…”
The late afternoon sugar crash hits:
And swept away by the Sandman…
It’s just a little fellow — four footer maybe? (If that.) I don’t think alligators are cute, but they are beautiful in their own way. I mean, look at the amazing patterns in that hide!
This has been a long day since I was up and working before the sun. Pretty soon, I will prepare a shaker of cocktails and go sit on the dock and enjoy the evening breeze. If the gator is still there, my approach will scare it away. (The ones who don’t scare are the ones to be scared of.)
Open thread!
Dorothy A. Winsor
I’ve been listening to Alex Wagner’s podcast, Six Feet Under. It’s part of Crooked Media, the Obama Bros place. There was an interesting one today on how drug suppliers are affected. I’m not talking about hydrocholoquine or however you spell that. The two interview were with a guy who sold marijuana legally in CA and with another guy who sold mostly heroin.
Adam L Silverman
cmorenc
Many spiders can be very handsome to look at too, provided you spot them well before inadvertently stumbling into them. Such as the golden silk orb-weavers who set up webs in the lantana flowerbeds down at our beach house in SE North Carolina.
Mandarama
Nope nope nope nope! ?
mrmoshpotato
Awwwww……wait – gators? (runs away like Scooby and Shaggy)
WaterGirl
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Six feet APART!
WaterGirl
I thought for sure this was going to be a pup/kitty post from TaMara.
JPL
Many, many, many decades ago, I worked for IBM in LA and one of my customers spoke about water skiing among the gators.
There was a walkway out by Hackberry, LA that you could observe birds and a few gators. We would go out there all the time, but one time there was an over abundance of gar fish. The next time there was an over abundance of gators. We grabbed the dog and left to never return.
WaterGirl
@JPL:
My eyes just got very wide. Yikes. Pretty sure I would be busy doing something else that day.
CaseyL
Baby gators are exquisite, looking like jeweled versions of themselves. Every scale perfect, crystalline eyes, and their armor hasn’t taken over their faces yet.
I laid in a modest supply of booze on my latest grocery run, and am looking forward to sipping some after lunch. It’s beautiful and sunny here today: perfect for drinking-and-basking.
JMG
I know Florida is warmer and sunnier, but two things I think Massachusetts has in its favor are 1. Animal kingdom including insects here contains fewer species that can kill you. 2. While weather sucks, it’s seldom fatal.
japa21
When we were visiting friends who wintered close to the Everglades last year, Mrs. Japa got to hold a baby (2 feet maybe) and she was absolutely astonished at how smooth it felt. She almost didn’t want to give it back. I was able to convince her.
trollhattan
I look and all I see: wallets.
So this is a thing that happened in the land of the Sopranos.
I’ll bet they kept on cashing the checks.
trollhattan
Or as I’d put it: “A gator.”
Capri
The wildlife in Florida is amazing and I’ve enjoyed it when I’ve visited. It’s particularly cool that many nature preserves are tucked in the middle of extremely urban places. During my last visit we made it to the Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve in Ft. Myer. They have a boardwalk trail that takes you past lots of birds, lizards, and gators. It’s a stone’s throw from major highways. As it’s south of the flying cockroach line I could never live there permanently.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@WaterGirl:
LOL. Good catch!
Mandarama
@JMG: My husband is a Masshole (word he taught me) and he moved South to marry me, the poor sucker. At one point during my explanation of water moccasins, he said, “Can everything down here fucking kill you?”
Yes. Especially our Republicans.
beth
It must be mating season for the gators because we had one strolling around the neighborhood lawns Easter morning (makes egg hunts veeerry interesting) and a neighbor posted a pic of probably the same one roaming in his driveway at 11:30 that night. Usually they stay in the ponds.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@JPL: When you said LA I was first seeing that as out here, we did have Reggie(now a resident at the LA Zoo).
trollhattan
@beth:
Every time I see video of a 500-pounder thudding across a golf course I remember they do have a useful role after all.
O. Felix Culpa
@trollhattan: The sister of my best friend growing up contracted COVID-19 at that nursing home and died this morning (we lived in the next town over). She had been transferred to the local hospital. My poor friend is in shock. It happened in a matter of days.
Miss Bianca
@O. Felix Culpa: I am so sorry to hear that. My condolences.
O. Felix Culpa
@Miss Bianca: Thank you. Her sister was several years older, so I didn’t know her well, but I feel so bad for my friend. She lost both parents in recent years and now her older sister…it’s tough.
Ken
1B. And the insects die in the winter, rather than growing to sizes normally only seen in museum exhibits of the Carboniferous.
CaseyL
@O. Felix Culpa: I am so sorry.
geg6
@O. Felix Culpa:
I’m so sorry! My sympathies to your friend and to you.
In good news here, my friend from work managed to finally get through to the PA Liquor Control Board website and she had seven wines she wanted to get, so she emailed me and asked if I wanted five bottles to make it a case and get the discount for a case. I’ll just pick mine up from her front porch and drop off the cash (pre-wiped). I’m not a heavy drinker, but John and I do like some wine with dinner. Not every night, but certainly on the weekends. It’s been very difficult to get wine (beer distributors are still open…don’t know why) with the state wine and spirits stores closed. Only one grocery store in my entire county sells wine. And no local vineyards. It’s been my biggest hardship. I know, white people’s problems.
NYCMT
@trollhattan: I had my suspicions (since my wife started her career as a registered dietitian in tristate area nursing homes), and it turns out my suspicion was correct.
trollhattan
@O. Felix Culpa:
Dear Lord, horrible. So sorry!
O. Felix Culpa
@geg6: @trollhattan:
Thank you both. I have to admit, I’m in a bit of shock myself. This is the first person I knew directly who has died, though I know others who were sick and recovered. Hits home hard.
On another note, congrats on scoring the wine, geg6! I might just pour a glass right now. :)
O. Felix Culpa
@NYCMT: Can you expand on that? I don’t know the significance of the owners or ownership structure.
Spanky
@NYCMT: Explain, please.
Achrachno
You’re lucky! Where I am the closest we have are alligator lizards, and they’re only 10-15 inches long.
Achrachno
@Ken: and the insects die in the winter, rather than growing to sizes normally only seen in museum exhibits of the Carboniferous.
Where’s the fun in that?
NYCMT
@O. Felix Culpa: Very many long-term care facilities in the region are owned, operated, and serviced by a network of companies owned by Orthodox-Jewish owners, like the network my wife worked at Brooklyn, Riverdale, and Perth Amboy. Usually they do a better job than what apparently happened at Andover – which did extraordinarily poorly on their last Medicare survey.
LongHairedWeirdo
Flashing back on an old yarn, about a man’s woman asking for alligator shoes, with the punchline “and when he finally rassled that alligator ’til it gave up, and he flipped it over, and… he couldn’t find a single shoe on that alligator.”
Jay Noble
Burning question – Do ‘gators snore?
Gvg
@JMG: funny, I would reverse the weather as cold certainly can kill, you and there aren’t that many creatures that try to kill you here. Really, the alligator hysteria I have never understood. Every northerner wants to go on and on about them, but use a little sense and their fine. They aren’t really that aggressive and they are very cold blooded which means a lot of the time, they just don’t move that fast. They have always been here, and attacks are actually pretty rare. We had to crowd them a lot and start doing stupid things like feed them.
i suppose I have water skied with them. They are always in water so since I have skied, they must have been around, but they hid. When I was a kid, they were actually endangered and getting rare, but their population rebounded after we got pollution under control and limited hunting for awhile. They aren’t aggressive like crocodiles