Clear skies and chilled temperatures this early Thursday on California’s north coast, and another day in the life.

In this particular case and in this particular life, seemingly I’ve picked up some bad shit from somebody/somewhere this week, and awoke this morning feeling like the before-mentioned shit — ‘come down‘ with a touch of a cold, I think.
Hitting the Airborne, and keeping up with BC powders, not much else to do.

And in a place where there’s still way-much else to do, the Gulf of Mexico, the National Wildlife Federation released a report Monday that nearly five years after the infamous BP oil spill/disaster, ‘wildlife are still struggling.’

BP released it’s own report earlier in March, which claimed no “significant long-term population-level impact to species in the Gulf.”

(Illustration found here).

Yeah right, assholes!

The NWF survey says 32 percent of laughing gulls have died as a result of the oil spill, between 27,000 and 65,000 Kemp’s ridley sea turtles died during the oil spill, and despite being on the upswing prior to the spill, the number of nests discovered every year since has gone down. Among a shitload of horrible stuff.
From The Times-Picayune in New Orleans:

“Given the significant quantity of oil remaining on the floor of the Gulf and the unprecedented large-scale use of dispersants during the spill, it will be years or even decades before the full impact of the Deepwater Horizon disaster is known,” the report said.
“It is clear that robust scientific monitoring of the Gulf ecosystem and its wildlife populations must continue — and that restoration of degraded ecosystems should begin as soon as possible.”
Collin O’Mara, president of the environmental group, told reporters during a telephone news conference Monday morning that the 20 species targeted in the report are only a small portion of the 13,000 species in the Gulf.
…
Muth (David Muth, who heads the federation’s gulf restoration program) said he and other federation officials visited Cat Island in Barataria Bay last week and found the mangroves that had been used as a rookery by pelicans and other birds before the spill were almost all dead and not being used by the birds.
The island itself is eroding, which Muth said was exacerbated by its being washed over with oil during the spill, and remaining birds have moved to other smaller islands nearby.
The island’s erosion is just one of a number of locations in Louisiana’s wetlands where oil or the cleanup of oil has speeded up the erosion of wetlands, he said.

The region will never be the same. I grew up on the panhandle of Florida, and know the squeaky-white beaches and warm Gulf water.
And the oil-platform drilling process is ludicrous in our age of carbon-based climate change. Yet disasters are still waiting to happen — from ABC News:

An explosion and ensuing fire on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico today left four dead and injured 45 others, according to the Pemex oil company.
Pemex, a Mexican state-run oil company, said 300 workers have been evacuated after the fire broke out on their Abkatun Permanente platform.
Pemex said in a statement tonight that no spill occurred. “The fire that broke today at the Abkatun processing platform in Campeche did not cause an oil spill in the sea. Authorities only registered a runoff, which is being contained by specialised vessels,” Pemex said.

And so it goes…another day in the life…