Stomach Flu and Manatees

The awful thing about a blogging gap is that the longer it persists, the more earth-shattering I think my next post needs to be to break the gap. Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot of earth-shattering stuff going on in my world lately, so the gap keeps getting longer and longer as I wait and hope that I’ll come up with something blog-worthy to write about. It’s a vicious circle. I justified my laziness about posting for awhile by telling myself it was just as well to leave up my Obamapost until nearer to the election. But the election has now come and gone, and I haven’t posted on my blog for the past month and a half. How long does it take for a blog to go dead?

The sad (or happy?) thing is that my viewing stats haven’t really changed much. I’m not sure what that means; probably that nobody actually reads this blog except people searching for information on pressing questions like the dangers of hubbly bubbly (unless you, my faithful readers, are coming back day after day in the vain hope of reading something new). There was one really weird day last week when I had a bizarrely high number of people visiting The Great Bumper Sticker Poll, but then none of them even voted. What’s up with that?

In other news, we had a bout of stomach flu last week. Axa was the only one affected, so we’re hoping it doesn’t spread. We also went to Blue Springs State Park in pursuit of manatees. We wanted to go back in April or May, but it was already too warm. The Manatees retreat from the open sea to the warmth of Blue Springs only when it gets too cold in the ocean.

It’s a really lovely spot, with a built-in boardwalk through the jungle.

It was also a perfect place for Tony to wear his new aviator shades.

The wooden boardwalk goes straight down to a metal landing over the river, and the manatees are right there! You can’t see it from the picture, but I’m looking at a manatee that is resting almost right under my feet.

I feel like I’m trying to sell a picture of the Loch Ness Monster, but here you can see some actual manatees:

OK, here’s a closeup. Does that make it more clear?

And here is a little baby manatee. He kept rolling all over the adults, and we’re pretty sure we saw him nursing. So cute!