I just got back from a week in Puerto Rico with my whole family. We survived, and Jessica didn't have to kill anyone, so I consider it a success. After I'm more caught up I may make a longer post with more pictures.

I actually accomplished multiple things this weekend. On Friday (which I had off, since I get every other Friday off at work) Jessica and I went into town and did some shopping for our upcoming vacation. Then we came home and finished assembling the framework for the lid of the turtle pond.

Then, on Saturday, I used up a box of a thousand staples putting the mesh all over the lid, to keep mammals out and reptiles in. All in all, 3 months elapsed while I worked on the following transformation:




To:




I worked primarily on weekends, and I took a couple weeks off during April and May when we were considering moving out of this house. Here's a shot of the pond with the lid up, showing off the fancy turtle dock I made:





Then, today, I took Jessica to the doctor to get medicine for her ear infection.

Also, during the weekend, Jessica and I downloaded World of Warcraft and created trial accounts. Behold Yudderick, the Gentleman Zombie:



We most likely won't keep playing once our trial accounts expire, but we'll run around and have fun while it lasts. Paying for 2 retail copies, and then $30 a month indefinitely after that isn't the most appealing proposition.

We found this under the deck yesterday when we were cleaning:





It's a Northern Water Snake, and it was very aggressive.






I got it into that tub by prodding it with a stick until it crawled into a long-handled net. After taking the photos, I dumped it out in the big creek by the dam. That'll teach it for hiding under my deck. We usually only find garter snakes in the yard, though one time Bumble found an Eastern Hognose Snake, and I think Chert brought home a Brown Snake one time too. At my mother-in-law's house, Sissy-Kitana once came home with a baby milk snake.

Today I finished Turtle Project #1: the pen for our land turtles.




In this shot you can see the foundation of Turtle Project #2: the 840-gallon pond for our aquatic turtles.




Here's a shot of the inside, and you can also see the back side of our Russian tortoise:





My new schedule at work has me working 9-hour days most of the week, but then I get every other Friday off. Yesterday was my first such Friday, but instead of relaxing Jessica and I had to drive to West Virginia to pick her brother up from college (3 hours), then drive to northern-ish Virginia to drop him off at his mom's house (2 hours), and then drive back home (2 hours). Wheee.

I didn't get much sleep last Thursday night, because someone apparently started a large brush fire on the dam that's right next to our house. There's nothing like looking out your bedroom window at 11 o'clock at night and seeing towering flames shooting up from just over the hill. I called the fire department, and got their answering machine. That was pretty funny. But just after I called them, a couple fire trucks pulled up at the top of our driveway with their lights flashing, so one of the other neighbors must have called them first.

The fire just burned up a couple trees and some piles of leaves and sticks, fortunately, and it didn't spread.





The firefighters attacked the embers with some shovels and such, which is why most of it is now bare dirt instead of ashes.

Yesterday was our second wedding anniversary. We celebrated in the usual way: eating seafood and buying more animals. We got these two "female" "fancy dwarf hamsters" from Petco in Harrisonburg. And when we got home, we took a better look at them, and discovered that the tan-colored one is actually a boy. Which means we'll probably have some ugly little hairless baby mini-hams at some point in the future.


For our big anniversary present for each other, we were thinking of maybe getting a nice big LCD TV, or maybe central air conditioning, but then we decided to get something a little bigger. We have an appointment to look at a new house tomorrow afternoon.