Week(ending)::Still Saturday...

Four and half inches of rain and the frogs are in heaven.

Sitting still under the cypress trees by the pond at dawn this morning, I couldn't help but notice that there will likely be a multitude of pollywogs swimming about soon.

The weather alarm went off four times during the night. We'll be catching up with lost sleep by napping this afternoon between watching the Gators and Yankees play baseball on television.

What are you doing on this still summer Saturday?

Linking with sweet Sandra's "Still Saturday"...

{Photos - the magnolia and cypress trees and happy little frogs this morning}

That was hard...

That was hard. Don't you just hate having to make decisions? I'd much rather have a flower than a frog in my house (which reminds me of an incident that I'll tell you about in a minute), but as several of you indicated, the frog IS Pollywog Creek. I'll just have to surprise the rest of you more often with colorful flower photos in my posts. Deal?
Tuesdays are often one of my busiest days - leaving little to no time for photography wanderings, but I happened to catch this male cardinal through a bedroom window this morning.
Can you tell how brown the grass is beyond the cardinal? Except for the winter grass that Louis planted close to the house, there is little that survived last week's hard frosts and freezes. On one of those cold mornings last week, I opened the front door and two little frogs like the one in my header photo fell into the house. They must have sought refuge from the cold in the tiny space between the top of the door and the frame. They just lay on their backs on the floor and didn't move, so I assumed that they were dead and that I could leave them there for a few minutes while I looked around outside. When I returned about fifteen minutes later, the frogs were no where to be found. Louis found one of them later that evening on the other side of the house. He said that they probably didn't move at first because they were too cold, but after they warmed up a little in the house, they hopped away. Don't tell Emily, but we never did find the other one.

Pollywogs

When we were looking for a home to buy in this rural south Florida community nearly twenty years ago, a real estate agent introduced us to this property by telling us how charming she thought the street and creek names were. I was not impressed. To be honest, I was still digging in my heels about moving here to begin with, and there was very little, if anything, about the house that I liked. Louis, however, was totally enamoured with the property. He was convinced that a little acreage, a pond and a creek were the perfect place to raise our little boys. I suspect that he also envisioned that moving here would require the purchase of bigger and better power tools. He was right on both accounts.

After six months of living out of boxes in a disgusting rental home and not being able to find a home to buy, I surrendered, and we bought our little patch of earth on Pollywog Creek. The boys were thrilled, wasting no time finding the perfect spot to build "forts" and discovering favorite places along the creek to explore. They even swam in the pond, with it's mushy bottom. Not one to appreciate slime and dirt with the same enthusiasm, I watched from a distance and tossed them a bar of soap and the water hose when their adventures for the day had ceased. I knew that there were pollywogs in the pond, naturally, but I am more of the chrysalis/butterfly/flowers type, so I never encouraged the boys to remove the pollywogs from their habitat, where I figured the boys could watch them grow up to be frogs without bringing stinking pond water and other slimy, gooey stuff into the house.

A little more than two years ago, I noticed that people were coming to my blog looking for information about pollywogs. Some were looking for what to feed a pollywog. Others were looking for pictures. Quite obviously they were disappointed in their search engine for sending them here. I decided I should oblige them, but despite the efforts of the males in the family who have been willing to venture close enough to the pond to capture one, there hasn't been a visible pollywog here in a very long time. Until yesterday. The drought earlier this year left our pond lower than it has been in the years we have been here, and the dry bed lured me (and my camera) in for a closer look. I noticed that something was really stirring up the water...

so I got closer...

 

and closer to the edge of the pond...

 

Pollywogs! A gazillion pollywogs! So to all those searching for pollywog pictures, I now have a page for Google to take you!

 


Frog photos will obviously come later. How long does it take a pollywog to morph into a frog anyway?