It’s been a while…

Hello there! 🙂 Hopefully I’m actually back this time. 😅

It’s been too long since I last posted. Thought I’d start us off with some photos I took on the 27th of the sunset and silhouettes of some type of grass. 🙂

And pine tree branches. 😀 Haha.  I had a lot of fun that night.

Anyway…

A lot has been happening. I planned to have a short Thanksgiving break and it turned into three months.

My uncle came in from Texas and he stayed for almost two months. We got a lot of stuff accomplished while he was here, such as a new driveway put in. (I was very tempted to title this post “It’s the end of the road” because we live at the end of a dead-end road and a lot of these photos are about the new driveway. And I like puns. But I didn’t want people to see the title and think I stopped blogging. O.o)

Yeah, it was so needed. Mom and I almost got stuck in her car a week or so before we had this done.

We had the gravel hauled in and well…

I had fun in it. 😅

Mom snapped this one of me. XD

And this one too. Mom found a baby turtle!

He was cute but shy!

After I released him in a safe place, the gravel mountain was smoothed out.

And no more giant hole! But this also means I lost my tadpole pond. 😅 😅 😅

I helped get all the water out of the hole. I wanted to help with the driveway, but I also volunteered because I grabbed an old strainer and had every intention of saving the tadpoles in the mudhole. 😅 Why a frog decided to lay eggs in late November is beyond me. Anyway, I didn’t count them all individually but I estimated how many I had in my strainer each time and I estimated I saved about 300 tadpoles in all… O.o I moved them into a cooler no one was using. I accidentally let it fill with water over the summer; I wanted to drill holes in the bottom and use it as a planter, but it became a tadpole habitat instead.

But now we have a new driveway! 😀 Mom got this photo of me dancing on it. 😅

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Another thing that happened is this lovely new (to us – it’s a 2008 model) Impala. Which means I get to study for my driver’s license and practice driving with the new car! 😀

So I didn’t have a lot of time for blogging. Most of the time was great. There were a few days where it wasn’t so great though. I lost two of my cats. One was from the feral cat population (but wasn’t a wild cat anymore!) and the other was our 15 1/2 year old Angel. (You may remember her from her 14th birthday post. I was going to do a 15th birthday post this year but she had some medical problems and she looked like a shaved rat. So I was waiting for her fur to grow back out.) I’m going to do more detailed posts for these two gifts from God later. 🙂

Be on the lookout in an hour for a new poem – I scheduled it for 9AM CST – and hope to see you around! ❤

Animals – CFFC

Cee’s Fun Photo challenge last week is Animals. This is a subject I have plenty of photos for. 😀 I went through my archives for this. Most of these, I haven’t shared on my blog before.

This was my rooster, Kellogg. And this happened by accident. I was aiming for a more distant shot but he was fascinated with the camera lens. One of my first ever successful close-ups.

Another of my first successful close-ups.

One of my grandma’s neighbors sometimes lets his horses in her pasture. And I took the opportunity to get some horse photos.

Armadillo! It’s hard to get a headshot because they always bury their faces in the dirt looking for food.

I met this goat at a family reunion. The people who live next door to the building the reunion was held in had goats.

Here is the other one.

I was getting photos of mushrooms growing out of a dead stump and found this cute little guy blending in. Almost missed him.

Opposum! I called this one Philip.

Just hangin’ out. XD

Turtle taking a bath in the mudhole! I hope he wasn’t eating my tadpoles…

Last animal – Jackie taking a snooze on my bed! And my old plush animals in the background. 🙂

Hope you all are having a great Monday! ❤

Amphibians, Reptiles, And Opossums… Oh Dear!

I love wildlife. 😀 Here is a sampling of what I’ve seen:

Box turtle bathing in the mud hole.

Ribbon snake in the leaves.

Salamander in a dustpan – I found this little guy under my cat’s water dish, hiding from my cats. So naturally, I rescued him and took photos.

Lizard lounging on logs.

Frog just hanging out.

Phillip the opossum. He visited enough that I gave him a name. 😂

Oh dear…

Literally. When my mom went outside to get the newspaper, she was greeted by a herd of deer. There were four, but I only got close-ups of three before they ran into the woods.

I wonder if they were saying, “Oh, humans!” 😂

The Turtles And The Rabbit

Sounds a lot like The Tortoise And The Hare, doesn’t it? But this isn’t a fable, this is a post of photos from nature that I paired together; killing two weeks worth of photo challenges in one massive post. 😁 First are the turtles!

My mom found this one while raking leaves during the fall. He was hiding underneath the blanket of leaves.

He wasn’t scared of me at all and let me get this macro shot of his face. 🙂

And here is another one my mom found while raking leaves. (Apparently, turtles enjoy hiding under leaves. 😄) This was taken in transit to his new location, which was not too far away, just far enough away that he could escape to the woods without encountering my mom’s rake again.

He also let me get a close-up!

And they are even cuter as babies! Here is one that I found in 2015 that let me hold him in my hand.

And here is one I met in July of last year. So tiny!! This one wasn’t as friendly; he tried to eat my finger.  Don’t let his cuteness fool you; I thought he was a box turtle, but he snapped like a snapping turtle! 😂 But then, if some giant started wagging their finger in front of my face, I might get snappy too…

And this brings us to the Sienna or maybe sandy colored rabbit I met a few months ago. He has a mouthful of grass in this one.

He was trying to eat dinner while I crept closer.

He let me get very close; these were taken with my old camera with the 3X zoom zoomed in as close as I could get it.

But it wasn’t enough; he still got scared and tried to run away.

But he was too hungry to go far. I felt bad scaring the poor guy while he was trying to eat, but I really wanted to get photos, haha.

This is as close as I could get with my old camera; with my new one, I’ll be able to get really close without scaring him. I look forward to our next meeting! 🙂

Seven Days, Seven Black and White Photos Challenge – Wrap Up!

Here are the B&W photos next to their color originals. 🙂 A few were taken in B&W originally, so for those, I included a photo that I took in color. This has been so fun! 😀

Seven Days, Seven Black and White Photos Challenge, Day Six

Thank you to Miriam from The Shower of Blessings for nominating me for the Seven Days Seven B&W Photos Challenge! The challenge: Post seven black and white photos, no people, no explanation, of everyday life.

Today I nominate Danielle, who recently shared some really cool black and white photos! Click that link to check them out! 🙂

Seven Days, Seven Black and White Photos Challenge, Day One

Thank you to Miriam from The Shower of Blessings for nominating me for the Seven Days Seven B&W Photos Challenge! The challenge: Post seven black and white photos, no people, no explanation, of everyday life.

Today I nominate Incomplete Thinker!