Sunday, March 8, 2015

Alligators - And Skateboard Quilts


Currently I am working on more boys' quilts for the April 4 wedding.  Thank goodness for negative space!  I have finished one top and have the other to put together this morning.  Here they are.  They will be oriented as such, and even though similar, they will be different.  I only had one child so we had none of the bickering that came with more than one wanting the same thing.  It was nice.  Although, with my low tolerance for anything uselessly ridiculous as that, it would have been fixed in a hurry!

 More photos from the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans.

There are several ways to be an alligator in Louisiana.

We eat them.  Not withstanding the sauteed Alligator Sauce Piquant and the Alligator Over Grits we had at the wedding; which are not my choice of good cuisine.  But if you are here you really should try it.  And we also fry them.

Tastes  like chicken!



We ride alligators.  This is one of the old carousels in the city.  There are two; one is in City Park and the other here in Audubon Park.  We call them Flying Horses.  Actually, I don't really remember all the alligators and leopards on this one at all.  All I remember are the horses.  When I was young, my mother's parents raised me for the first 5 or 6 years of my life.  They lived 2 blocks off the Audubon Park and we would go to the zoo and ride the ponies and play on the Flying Horses.  I have many many many wonderful memories of them and few of my mother.  Less of my father even.  But that was the way it was even then.  I certainly had a lot of love from my grandparents, my mother was their only child and I was their only grandchild for 5 years until my brother came around.  He didn't have the relationship with Ganny and Papa like I did.  I miss them to this day. 


And we look at alligators.  I don't  really like to look at them, they remind me of some prehistoric monster that ate my fellow cave dwellers. 

Look at this fat old tail!  Some would think that would be some good eating!  That actually looks like McGee's fat little short legs!  I wish there was some point of reference to show you how huge these two were.  I would say the one on the bank was a good 15 feet long.

Do you notice something different about these two alligators?  They are albino.  Rare, so they will escape the fry pot.

Unlike the somewhat more common regular albinos, leucistic white alligators have brilliant blue eyes. The first leucistic alligators were discovered in a swamp near Houma, Louisiana in 1987. Their bright coloring makes it impossible for them to survive in the wild since the sun would burn them, so 18 leucistic hatchlings were brought to the Zoo. International media attention quickly turned them into the Zoo’s most enduring symbol. A single female was discovered in 1994, and two more were found in 2009. All have become part of the Audubon family, although some of the gators are eventually transferred to other facilities around the country. These three discoveries are the only documented cases of leucistic alligators in recorded human history.

So you learned something new today!

3 comments:

  1. Skateboard tops are neat! The boys will still quarrel since 1 has 4 and the other 3.

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  2. The skateboard quilts will be so fun! I can't wait to see how you quilt all that negative space. I have been watching reruns of Miami Vice and Elvis, Crockett's alligator, had quite a bit of screen time!

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  3. I've never heard of such a thing....leu caustic alligators. Gonna google that one!

    It's interesting how different we all are. I grew up surrounded by hills and mountains.

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