So today I'm going to post some old photos from the past few months, to catch you up on some things that have happened and that we've seen. First off, we watched this snake slither along the bank of the river, then up this oak tree until we couldn't see it, high up in the top branches. It took several minutes, and was amazing to watch:

Saw this praying mantis, about four and a half inches long, late one night in September. The next morning, it was up on our roof, where Mike also saw it.

Some of you may know that the river flooded pretty epically during early September. In the picture below, see the picnic table with the deck chairs on top of it? The bank of the river is about 15 feet beyond that table. The river flooded over a huge area, and we were parking our cars about a mile away, and wading in and out. I left the cabin in a bathing suit in the morning, and changed in the car before heading to work or dance rehearsal. We kayaked our 5 gallon jugs of water in. One day, Mike kayaked to the 'river' from the door of the cabin and all around the property and back. Everything was flooded. I think Mike has a few more photos of this, but this was the best one I have right now. Maybe in another post, I'll take some comparison shots, so you can see the huge difference in terrain:

This little guy was hangin out on our trashcan.

About a month and a half ago, we went to Point of Rocks, out on the south side of Siesta Beach. Mike took out his cast net, intending to cast for bait fish. You can see the birds waiting for him to throw them whatever he didn't want (we saw other people doing this in the same spot on another day)

Feet of a snowy egret - I just love how brightly colored they are! And this on the bottom of a pure white bird.

Here are a few of the mullet that Mike caught in his net. Like I said, he was going for bait fish, but then a school of mullet swam by. Mullet are good eating, but are hard to catch on a line because they are vegetarians, so they don't go for bait. Mike's net was small, and not meant for larger fish, but he tried anyway, and caught 18 mullet (a foot to a foot and a half long) in a single cast! That evening I learned to clean and scale fish, and we raced the sunset to get the job done. We borrowed a smoker from a buddy of Mike's from work, and made smoked mullet dip. Huge. Amounts. Of. Smoked. Mullet. Dip. We still have a lot in our freezer.

Mike took this photo of a fox squirrel. I've never seen one, and it's hard to tell the scale in this photo, but they're much larger than regular squirrels, and darker in color.

Lastly, the first flower out of our seminole pumpkin patch! I took this the morning it opened, a few days ago, and two more have showed up since. I'm optimistic about getting some pumpkins out of this patch yet!

That's all for today, thanks for stopping by!