I gotta tellya…this whole quarantine thing pretty much sucks…we’re gettin’ pretty dadgum bored with da whole thing by this point…but hey; whatcha gonna do.

So…since my last post 11 days back…well, we had Easter. Connie found a nice Mass on the TV with some music to watch and we had my own personal cantor here at Long Pond Road. After that…dinner was lamb chops that Neil marinated in some Good Stuff© and grilled…they were so good that we had the leftovers the next night and then for lunch on Tuesday. Along with a nice bottle of wine…we had this more expensive (like $15 which is pretty expensive for us)…Pinot Noir that turned out to be so turrible we poured it out and opened a bottle of Connie’s favorite Malbec instead. It had spoiled or sumtin…if we had just not cared for the taste we woulda drunk it anyway but it was like it had been filtered through week old gym socks and then flavored with whatever dirt ya scraped off the bottom of your shoes…really nasty stuff. 

That’s about it though…we did get out Thursday this past week for the first time in almost 2 weeks…drove north on US-41 to the next freeway entrance, back south on I-75 to Bay Shore where we get off for Seminole Campground…then stopped by the Winn Dixie and got a bit of produce and some pastries so we could have something different for breakfast.

Neil’s been cooking some pretty decent meals…nothing overly fancy ‘bout any of em but while we’re not able to do anything fun we’re at least eatin’ decent.

Our two eaglets are going on 3 weeks old now…growing fast but still have the down they hatched with, we should start seeing some real feathers in the next couple of weeks I guess.

We ordered our subscription renewal for the Sarasota Orchestra for next year’s concerts…since the last 2 this season got cancelled we had a $200 credit so we told them to upgrade us to the front orchestra section…after some discussion and looking at the seating layout Neil gave them a 5 row deep and 9 or so seat wide section we would take but if not we would just keep our existing seats in row 19…the front orchestra season tickets are $200 more per seat and it’s not worth $400 if we’re only moving up a row or two.

Back last month as ya will recall we ordered a china cabinet via Amazon that arrived broken so we sent it back. Once that got credited to our card we ordered a different one from Rooms 2 Go…it will get delivered this week but they’ve got a local warehouse so it’s not really getting shipped a long way…the first one came from Malaysia and had clearly gotten something dropped on it along the way. We also ordered a new desktop scanner…with more space now one that has a sheet feeder is way more convenient than doing it with your phone…the phone works but it’s a bit of a pain if you need to scan a couple dozen pages. Also ordered a large hard drive for our iMac/file server and he’s going to reorganize his Lightroom photo management catalog and shift photo processing to the (a) much faster and (b) much bigger screen) desktop computer. Travelin’ photos will still get some initial processing on the laptop but it will be setup for easy export from the laptop catalog and import into the desktop one. He paid for and watched a 10 hour $28 Lightroom Importing video course and while a lot of it was review it also explained what some of the tools really did and how they worked…there are several that until somebody really explains how you should use them don’t really make much sense. He’ll need to go through and keyword all of the existing 75000+ photos in his catalog which will be a longer term project but again now has some ideas on how to use the available software tools in Lightroom to get that done more quickly than he was able to do them before. The new drive of course will mean new backup routines…but that’s pretty easy to setup. He’s also got to update our “We Got Hit By The Bus” folder that the human kids have access to…now that we’ve moved into the house and aren’t living in the rig the “where are things” and “what to do with our mangled corpses once they get extracted from the Amazon basin or wherever” documents need updating.

As you can see…not much is really happening…he gets out for a bike ride 2-3x a week and is still scouting out new routes he can take as just riding around Magnolia Landing gets pretty boring pretty quickly. Most days…the highlight of the day is either the “Official Long Pond Road Weather Report and Forecast” that Connie does while making coffee in the AM or the “Wildlife Report” that Neil does several times per day from the bayou out back. Heck…one day this past week Connie gave serious thought to dressing up to go out and see if there was anything in the mailbox for us.

Let’s see…what else is going on in the news.

The whole virus crisis is the President’s fault naturally…Ms. Pelosi griped yesterday that his delay had caused “thousands of lives to be lost” and his attempt to reopen the economy…ya know, that whole optimism and let’s not completely torpedo the economy unnecessarily thing he’s trying to do…would again cost thousands of lives.

Up in NY…Governor Cuomo said last month that the state only had 12,000 ventilators in hand including the ones that were in the state emergency stockpile…and demanded that the feds send him more…he stated several times that the state would need 30,000 to 40,000 and that they would run out of them by April 2. Turns out…not so much. Late last week he announced that the curve had turned in NY and that the worst was over as cases are apparently falling quickly there…and that they still had 6,000 or 8,000 ventilators in stock and were sending them to other states…like MD and CA who are also not of on hand ventilators.

All ya see on most media is how wrong Fox News anchors and commentators are…but then I kid you not this is what CNN had to say last week.

Come on guys…I understand you want to criticize the President…and that’s politics as usual…but at least admit that you’re really not looking for truth/facts here but looking to complain about whatever he did or didn’t do. I can’t and won’t say he’s done everything right…but it’s leadership’s job to keep morale up and be optimistic while taking care of the problem…and from what I’ve seen I don’t think any other administration would have done anything significantly different…they would just have been canonized by their media friends instead of condemned.

OK…a couple of pics for ya…this is Lagatha…who may or may not be actually a cow instead of a bull…the only way to tell an alligator’s sex is an internal examination of their ladybits or manbits…although once they turn into “Leviathans with a quarter sized kill spot” as the voice over guy on Swamp People says…anyway if they’re really big…more than 10 feet…then they are more likely to be male as generally females are almost always smaller than 10 feet.

Anyways…we call he/she Lagatha to go along with Ragnar who is 3 feet or so longer than she is…but speaking of Ragnar we’ve not seen him in almost 2 weeks so he might have moved over to another pond…apparently the gators in Magnolia Landing move back and forth between ponds at night sometimes.

The shelf she is on is sort of on our side of the pond…it’s about 50 feet from the corner of our lanai and maybe 25 from the corner of our lot and Lagatha is the only one we’ve seen there…Ragnar generally hangs out over on the other side farther away. Lagatha is about 6-8 feet I guess…I didn’t go close enough to put a tape measure on her and she is much more skittish than Ragnar is. He doesn’t respond at all to movement on our side of the pond along the houses or to the lawnmower or gardeners doing their thing…but she is in the water almost immediately if she sees any movement…Neil tried to get outside and get a slightly better angle after the two shots above and at the creak of the door she was gone.

OK…interesting stuff found on the net…and in our email as well.

This one needs a little explanation…first off…your eyes do not deceive you…this is actually a weasel riding a woodpecker.
Onward my noble steed as the article is headlined reports that amateur photographer Martin Le-May was walking through a park in London hoping to show his wife her first Green Woodpecker and they spotted this one. This is actually not a scene from the Lone Ranger bur rather a failed attempt at lunch. Weasels are voracious hunters and the woodpecker landed 25 yards or so away from Martin and his wife…when the weasel jumped on it and attempted to kill it. The woodpecker naturally took exception to being lunch and flew a couple of yards before landing again with the weasel on it’s back…when it landed the weasel was momentarily dislodged and the woodpecker took advantage by flying up into a nearby tree.

How you gamble during the lockdown.

TP rationing.

You just have to have a positive attitude.

And remember…Bad Things© can happen during the isolation.

Cyas.