Thank God for neighbors with illegal fireworks

Well, thank you for all your votes. My husband's vote won out, though -- even more than my vote.

We went to Lion Country Safari. We arrived just in time for it to start raining. They say that's the best time to see the animals, though. But because you can't roll down your window while you're driving through, you can't photograph the animals with raindrops on the glass. For example, here are the lions.



So.

I did manage to get a good snapshot later, though.



Tonight we were going to see our city fireworks. But it got rained out.

Fortunately for us, we had at least four neighbors who were setting off fireworks. From our front yard, we had quite a show.



So all's well that ends well.

Never wear sequined thongs in an aviary

My son has had The Very Hungry Caterpillar book for more than a year now but seems especially interested in it lately. Like probably most kids around his age, he likes to touch the holes where the caterpillar has eaten through all the food in the book.

Wait, stop the story for a moment. Did you know the author, Eric Carle, lives in the Florida Keys? That's all I wanted to say....

So when you get to the last page of the book, the caterpillar has turned into a beautiful butterfly. By then, we've passed all the pages with the holes in them, so my son has lost interest in the book by the end. But I decided to turn the book into a butterfly, moving the sides of the book up and down and make it "flutter" around his head.

Now he loves the end of the book. In fact, the boy will even skip the pages with the holes just to get to the butterfly at the end and make it fly.

With his new interest in lepidoptera, I thought he'd enjoy going to Butterfly World. We went today. The first part of the butterfly garden you enter is amazing! There are butterflies everywhere you look.

To dress for the occasion, I put on a pair of blue flip-flops that are topped by butterflies made out of sequins. Cute, huh? Well, when we got to the lorikeet aviary of Butterfly World, a bird there also thought my shoes were cute. In fact, the bird decided to stand on top of the sequined butterfly. My son was amazed, the lorikeet keeper (say that five times fast) was curious, and I was amused.

Until that little bird finally moved on, and I noticed he left behind green poo on my toes. Niiiice!

Overall, my boy enjoyed Butterfly World. We'll definitely go back -- but next time, I'm wearing work boots.

The crazy lizard stick lady

There are two tiny wood piles in my backyard. Little piles of sticks I've picked up from the ground. I made them myself! For the lizards, of course.

Yeah, I'm a little crazy.

When my husband and I moved into our house, we wanted it to be a natural place full of native Florida plants and homey enough for wildlife to move in if they wanted to. Surrounded by neighbors whose yards are "done" (come to think of it, the way some of my friends get their nails or hair done) and look like a slice of tropical heaven, our yard kind of stands out like a tamed bit of the wilderness. Drive down my street, and you might ooh and aah over the trimmed orderliness that is our development ... until you come to our house. Purposeful asymmetry. Oaks left to flourish and stretch out their branches they way they were meant and not pruned to point to the sky in surrender like our neighbors'. Dead palm fronds left hanging down on purpose in order to provide a home for eastern screech owls or various bats. (What? A bat can eat 600 insects in one hour. How can you not appreciate that?.) Our yard is landscaped, but it's natural, and what we lack in tidiness and tropical perfection, we make up for in colorful flowers, birds, butterflies and other animals.

And NO pesticides. (Umm ... do you see why I need those bats?)

So it is that I created lizard shelters by piling up sticks -- a tip I'm sure I picked up somewhere. Sometimes my son likes to pick up sticks from one pile and carry them to the other. If he sees me picking up new sticks from the ground, he might help. I think this is not only good exercise for him, but it gives him something to do when playing during his Green Hour. (It was great to see the Green Hour mentioned at MomsMiami.com today.) That's when I take my son outside and just let him play however he wants. Sometimes it's our backyard, and sometimes it's a neighborhood park.

I haven't seen a lizard in the little stick piles. I assume they go there at night. Who knows... Maybe someone was playing a trick on me, and there really is no such thing as a lizard shelter.

But those sticks came in extremely handy today when I saw a dead rat under the bird feeder! I took the fattest, longest two sticks I could find from one of the piles to pick up the rat and throw it in my neighbor's yard dispose of it properly before my son found it.

Those crazy lizard piles are staying.

The great possum rescue of 2008

I am having the worst luck lately. Yesterday, my Internet service was down again. And my Mother's Day.... Well, this is what I planned to post yesterday.

- - - - -

Ah, Mother's Day. A time to celebrate mothers and take time to reflect on ... wait ... reflecting? Something reflecting in the pool. No, there's actually something in the pool. Let's take a closer look....

It's a baby possum, clinging to the pool-vacuum hose floating on the surface!

My husband takes the pool net to scoop the rat lookalike into a bucket. Poor thing could have been there all night.

So my husband decides to put the possum in a cat carrier with a little food and water so it can dry out and regain its strength before releasing it.



Then he begins a long afternoon of -- what? doing things to celebrate the mother of his child? -- no! Fixing the busted lawn sprinklers, of course.

Later that night, we let the possum/opossum/Pogo go into the wilds of our yard. It hung around at first, then took off like a shot into my wildflower garden. Since we went through all of this trouble to help the possum, I sincerely hope it doesn't just become roadkill.

As my husband would say, "It was a dark and possumous night."

I guess if I'm a quote-unquote mom blogger, then I'm going to have to step up the mom posts and stop blogging about wildlife so much!

Wherein an electrocuted iguana ruins my lunch

The scene: yesterday, in the kitchen. I have just returned home with my son from a fun outing. It's lunch time. No sooner do I set down the diaper bag than the power goes out.

No power means no cooking.

No cooking means a cold lunch.

And you don't want to open the refrigerator too much, because you don't want the warm air to move in. You don't know how long the power will be out.

So I scrounge around and come up with slices of deli turkey and ... um ... I think that was it.

By the time my son declared he was done eating by threatening to fling the remains of his turkey (at least he only threatened this time), the power came back on.

I didn't think anything more about it until I saw this headline today:

Iguana causes power outage for 20,000

So 19,998 other people had a cold lunch too? I'm thinking.

Seems an iguana wandered into a substation and got jolted to death, causing the power outage.

This is one of those times when you shake your head and say, "Only in South Florida."

Fun with peacocks

All work and no play makes families dull, not to mention they want to strangle one another or at least pull one another's hair out.

Not that I'm speaking from personal experience, of course.... Ahem.

This weekend, our family went to Flamingo Gardens for a little play. We hadn't been there in a while, and we wanted to get our fix of peacocks. That's right. Because a place called Flamingo Gardens should totally be known for its pea fowl.

We came at the right time of year, apparently, to see the peacocks putting on an impressive show for the peahens (aka lady peacocks):



Even tail down, the peacocks were fun to watch.



And I thought I'd treat any possible readers to the seldom-photographed backside of the peacock:



After watching the peacock show off his feathers, was it wrong of me to tell him I was so impressed that I would go out with him?

In which I overcome my pettiness (sort of)

So my husband says to me, "Did you see the article I left out for you?"

"No, where?"

"There on the kitchen table."

"What, this city magazine?!" I asked in disgust.

"Yes."

"You know I don't read that!" I said.

And the poor man ducked into another room.

Our city mails us a glossy magazine every quarter, which I promptly put in the recycle bin. I refrain from even opening it because I once applied to be the city's communications person who would have worked on said magazine, and the city didn't hire me. Spurned by the city, I decided to never look upon their verbiage again.

Yes, apparently I am that petty. (I'll show them! I'll never read their magazine again! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!)

My pettiness came to an end, though, when I glanced at what my husband left out for me.

Residents urged to be cautious of urban coyotes



"...most residents would be surprised to learn that the City is also home to some urban coyotes.... To date, no incidents have been reported."

Which led me to wonder: if no incidents have been reported, how does anyone know there are coyotes roaming around? Did they show up for story time at the library? Were they seen at the drive-through window at Wendy's? Were the coyotes standing in line trying to get tickets for a Panthers game?

I take my son to parks all over the city (all over the county, for that matter), at almost all times of the day, and we have never seen a coyote.

We live next to a park that's along a major canal, and we have never seen a coyote.

The cats that wander the neighborhood haven't seen any coyotes, either. If they did, they probably wouldn't be here to vouch for that ....

So have you seen a coyote in South Florida?

And isn't my husband great for pointing out such news to me?

As for the magazine, it included information about a South Florida punk band, so I guess the person who stole my job the person who runs the magazine can't be all bad ....

You gotta love a place where sharks cause traffic jams

How cool is it that the week I start Tropic of Mom (which has a spiffy new look, no?), the Miami Herald sends me an e-mail saying it has a brand-new online forum for South Florida parents called MomsMiami? Oh, those reporters are good. Too good -- it's like they're going around inside my head! Sorry, reporters -- my boy takes up enough of my mindshare. You'll have to get a scoop somewhere else!

Speaking of the Herald (or the Hrelad if you can't spell), I loved its article about how a shark caused a traffic jam on Lower Matecumbe Key. A fisherman was doing a catch-and-release deal with a lemon shark, and apparently hordes of people driving by just stopped their car on the road to go over and see what he was doing with the nine-footer! Sadly, though, the people trampled some native plants that was a poor Eagle Scout's now-ruined project. If that was my son, I would be so mad!