Tate's and a basking land shark

We were at a loss for a volunteer today but managed to fill in the gap with an always favorite when no one steps up to the plate...Tate's Cookies.  Fortunately they are for sale at a nearby gourmet emporium so they are easy to grab when a cake hour treat is needed.  If you haven't seen any previous posts, these are quite good cookies made at a bakery somewhere on Long Island.  Unlike the tendency to make chocolate chip cookies mushy or cake like, Tate's sticks with a recipe that makes them good and crispy.  Maybe even a little too crispy because they always seem to break in the package. But regardless of that fact they taste very good. They are not outrageously sweet with plenty of chocolate chips or nuts depending on the recipe.  Today we went with the walnut chocolate chip and the macadamia nut cookies.  Good stuff, for sure and one should definitely try them if you come across them in a store.

We talked about whale watching as one of our colleagues had gone on a New England Aquarium Whale Watch over the past weekend resulting in her face looking about as red as her color enhanced hair. Apparently it was a successful trip with none of the drama say of the Whale Watch trip I took out of Provincetown once with 6-10 foot seas and 75%+ of the people on the trip vomiting.  Whale watches can sure be a lot of fun.

Our colleague's trip came across a few whales but the featured creature of the deep that they found was what they understood as a basket shark. We took that to mean basking shark and after a quick search with some images included it was confirmed that a basking shark is what they saw.  So we learned about basking sharks.  They are vegetarian, filter feeders existing mostly on plankton but are the second largest species of fish. On average, the adult basking shark reaches a length of 6–8 metres (20–26 ft) and weighs about 5.2 tonnes.  That takes a lot of plankton!  We speculated what would the sharks response be if it accidentally sucks in small fish and other things.  We presumed they have a method of spitting it out.  Given their size we are glad that they are harmless to men.

This is one big fish!

When trying to view pictures of a colleague's phone the phone reverted back to a previous screen and would not show the shark again. This prompted a comment "I thought they were called smart phones" and the wag response was "they are for smart people." Very funny!   Later the touché response was when the comment came about the basking shark having a big mouth the answer was "just like some people here." Ha, ha!  Is there a similarity? Hmmm!

Basking Shark

 Filter Feeder with unfiltered brewski!

Basking Land Shark?

Shappy Shark!

There was also some chocolate brought back from a co-worker who visited Peru. Unfortunately the gluttons here could not wait for cake time to spread the wealth and largely finished it off before it could be properly recorded. The wrapper was nice, though!

Nice wrapper!