Alligators

Alligators / Children — 2 Comments
27
Mar 12

Born free. Small amphibians fight for their right to be green.

Kids.

Kids want critters in the house. As a child, I chose the common toad as my critter of choice to stuff in a jar.

More frog teeter trickled across my palm as a 8 year old than as an adult with three infants combined.

My eight year old son brought back a boatload of anoles (your common outdoor lizard) with us from Florida on Spring Break.

They went straight in the tank with our tortoise and turned brown as pine bark — because that’s what they lived on. Well, coconut bark. They existed on that and water for we hadn’t managed to catch any crickets in two weeks.

Today before school my son said, “I’m going to let my people go.”

Not really, but it was rather biblical. Freeing the captives from the desert into a land flowing with crickets.

So today after school, we set out to free five anoles.

The Beast — or one of them.

I couldn’t do it. It freaked me out. They bite. Now they might have been so weakened they couldn’t bite a mini-marshmallow or they could have been really cranky and crank out a nasty flesh wound.

What to do?

What would Ross Allen do? What would the Crocodile Hunter have done?

What would the Swamp People do? (Oh yeah, they’d just pull out a pistol. I hate that show and every male in my house LOVES it.)

I channeled my inner reptile wrangler and grabbed a…

 

Yes, it might look like a common athletic sock but in reality it’s a high tech tool of the anole wrangler.

 

 

Anole Whisperers around here? Heck no.

We take care of business.

They all are roaming free as we speak. And turning green.

 

Well, once they make it off the driveway.

What was your critter of choice?

Alligators — 2 Comments
2
Dec 11

Musing on #Urban Meyer. #Gators #OSU

Number six.

I saw a good friend out at a restaurant the other night.

“I can’t believe you haven’t blogged about Urban Meyer,” she remarked.

Hmm. This was coming from a kindred spirit. Another lifelong Gator fan living 22 miles due south of Athens, Georgia.

Therefore, I shall blog about Urban Meyer.

~       ~        ~

Doug Dickey, Charlie Pell, Galen Hall, Steve Spurrier, Ron Zook, Urban Meyer and Will Muschamp.

Urban Meyer is number six in the line of University of Florida head football coaches since I have been rooting for the Gators.

He brought the Gators two national championships and two SEC championships. Three consecutive ten game win seasons.

Meyer is a great college football coach and was great for the University of Florida.

That’s it.

I figure it’s like being a member of a denominational church — ministers come and go, but your church and your church family is what matters.

What about winning Jamie? Doesn’t that matter?

Of course. But last season, I sat at Florida Field (that’s what us old timers still think of it as) and watched Florida, an Urban Meyer-coached Florida, get humiliated by a Steve Spurrier-coached South Carolina 36 -14.

With my nephews before that 2010 game. The game where the Gators played the worst I had seen them in 20 years.

Just like a Muschamp-coached team got humiliated by FSU last weekend.

There is no magic formula. Sometimes the hard work and breaks fall your way and you win a championship. The vast years in a lifetime, you don’t.

This is not like when Spurrier left.  That was First-Wife-left-for-a-younger-hipper-model scorned. Why the difference?

Spurrier taught my beloved Wait-Till-Next-Year Gators how to win. And they won big like never before. He made Gator football exciting.

When they won that first national championship in 1996, I read a quote from a lifelong Gator saying he was going to take the sports page headlines down to the cemetery and read them to all the Gators who had passed on before that monumental day.

How dare he leave? I felt the stab of betrayal when Spurrier left.

Because I loved him so.

There I admit it. I still love that scowling, visor-wearing ball coach.

Urban was great. And I wish him all the best.

Spurrier said he didn’t like recruiting because (I’m paraphrasing here) “I don’t want to have to beg anyone to come play ball at the University of Florida.”

I feel the same way about coaches. If you’re done coaching the Gators,

See ya later.

No hard feelings.

Well, except for the number four.

The one who broke my heart.

 

Alligators / beach — 2 Comments
27
Apr 11

Musing on twigs that submerge.

This was my view for most of the day yesterday. It really was that blue.

And here’s what will really make you mad.

The water was warm. Okay, not middle of August bathwater warm but warm enough that I really enjoyed swimming.

The kids and I are visiting my sister for spring break.  If the kids weren’t at the beach this is what they were doing. 

 

 

Sitting outside last night, the kids were across the lake in the kayaks.

My sister sat up and said, “What is that?”

I saw a bitty twig.

“It’s a twig,” I replied. She thought it might be an alligator. Well, no way to know unless you investigate. So I got up and walked toward the lake. As I got closer and closer to the floating twig, it started to change shape..or was that my imagination?

I got almost up to it and yelled, “If it was something, it would have disappeared by now.”

And with that it submerged.

Later we saw him (or her.)

 

My sister said in Tampa  the other day a woman went into her bathroom to find a 7-foot alligator in the bathtub.

Do you know how big that it? She said it was hissing at her…she shut the door and put a table in front of it.

They surmised it came in through the dog door.

Are you believing this?

All I can say is I looked under my bed last night.