Today is the last day of summer and my personal zoo is still hopping!

Over to the right there is a Knight Anole (invasive species from Cuba), much larger than my baby local anoles! I can't get over his eyes -- totally looks like someone painted on his eyelids while he was sleeping.

We chased him from one side of the tree to the other to get this shot. I'd go to snap the photo and he'd shuffle to the opposite side...So I'd go to the other side and he'd shuffle back where he was... needed to get Mike to limit his options and get this shot.

It's summer and I live adjacent to a preserve in Florida, so it's a lot like living in a zoo. Every day we wake up and scoop the fiddler crabs out of the salt water pool...Watch the video of the critters walking past our security cameras...

I was supposed to get a new puppy, which I was beyond excited about (I'd already written him into my new book!) but it fell through.

I'm SO BUMMED.

But, it's been quite the critter-filled summer, so I thought I'd share some of my local friends with you. I had a really good armadillo movie, too, but once again when I thought I was filming I wasn't so... big sorry to the armadillo fans out there.

This isn't a paid advertisement --- I just thought I'd let you know about some things I discovered that I love and that might help you, too! My new years resolution was to SOLVE PROBLEMS - if something bothers me, now I take the time to find a solution and move on, instead of putting up with whatever it is and putting off looking for a way to make it better. Saves time in the long run.

Mike and I finally got around to adding a back yard camera to our Nest system and the very first night we heard the most ear-shattering wailing coming from just outside our bedroom. We both shot up and then remembered we had a camera there now! Turns out it was a whiny bobcat strolling through our back yard. Who  knew they wailed like that??

Now that I've moved to Florida and actually have some counter space and a place for all my paraphernalia, I've been cooking a lot more. For Christmas it was just Mike and me, so instead of doing the whole turkey-hoo-ha, I made perogi (pasta stuffed with mashed potatoes/cheese) with a recipe I made up as I went along, and it turned out so well I thought I'd share it! They're time consuming but now I have three dozen frozen (after eating at least two dozen), so they last forever...

We've been having a ton a fun with our security cameras... but it was hard to tell WHAT was scurrying across the driveway. This guy finally stopped and posed long enough that I could see the trademark bandit mask!

Whoo! I didn't talk about it because I thought I'd jinx it, but finally the sale of our old house is official. It's not like winning the lottery because the money just gets funneled right back into the new house, but it is a LOAD off our minds. Anyone who's ever bought and sold a house knows what I'm talking about. I think right before we started this nightmare I saw a poll about how "moving" was the second most stressful thing in life above things I thought were clear winners.

I basically live in a zoo now. The other day Mike and I were in the pool watching (at the same time) two gopher tortoises chase each other back and forth, an osprey fly overhead, a million lizards jump around the fence, a land crab skitter around:

After days of waiting to see what happened, for South Florida, hurricane Dorian ended up being milder than a lot of our regular old summer storms. We tend to deal with stress with humor, so did some drills the day before for practice:

This week I found out Florida is NOT kidding around when it comes to lightning. We took these shots from our living room (they were videos and then we pulled the frame). Actually, this first photo looks like a blip on video...but when you go frame by frame, BAM!

In case my tortoises and turtles weren't doing it for you, I'd like to share with you the furry curve-ball nature threw us the other day...

I was sitting at my kitchen table working on the laptop, and my husband was standing between me and the glass slider door, which is about three feet away from me, when I heard him say, "Aim..."

At that same time I felt a presence...something moving near Mike's feet that wasn't Mike's feet.  

It was a cat.