Snow Day!

Ok, not really, considering I work from home and therefore have to work everyday no matter what the weather. BUT! Snow in Raleigh is still pretty exciting, since it doesn't happen very often.

A Visit to the Duke Lemur Center

A few days before Christmas I had the opportunity to visit the Duke Lemur Center, which is an 80+ acre sanctuary with the largest population of endangered lemurs in the world. Dedicated to the conservation of the primates, as well as one of the top lemur research facilities around, I'd been wanting to take a tour of the Lemur Center ever since we moved to North Carolina, and I'm so glad I finally got to go!

We took the Lemurs Live basic tour, which started with an introductory presentation and video at the visitors center. It was both cute and educational, and we learned a lot of neat lemur facts.

After the intro, we got to visit the lemur enclosures. Our tour started in the nocturnal building, where they have the lemurs on a swapped schedule to think it's night during the day, which not only makes for better viewing for visitors, but makes it a lot easier for the caretakers.

Sadly, photos were tough in the low lighting, and I didn't get a single one that wasn't blurry. This is an aye-aye though, the ones with the crazy long middle fingers that they use to pull bugs out of holes in trees.

After the nocturnal building, we headed outside to the indoor/outdoor enclosures. There were two layers of fencing separating us from the lemurs, for apparently good reason....

End of Summer Trip to Lake Lure

Another vacation post! We've been traveling a lot this summer, and have several more trips planned over the next few months. But before fall officially begins this weekend, I wanted to share a quick recap of our trip to beautiful Lake Lure.

Lake Lure is in the NC mountains, about a four hour drive away from Raleigh, and where a lot of the scenes in Dirty Dancing were filmed. We spent four fun days in a house we rented right on the lake, hiking, swimming, canoeing and relaxing.

The lake view from the living room.

Spotted

Taken out our front window:

This little guy was eating my hostas, but I'll forgive him because he is just so adorable!

 

Jamaican Anniversary Trip {Recap 1 of 2}

Before summer completely slips away, I wanted to post about our 10 day Jamaica trip that we took to celebrate our third wedding anniversary!

We stayed at Couples Swept Away in Negril, and it was an absolutely wonderful place to experience the Caribbean for the first time. It was our first real stay at an All Inclusive (although we did 2 nights at an AI in Puerto Vallarta in 2009, but weren't there long enough to really take advantage), and it was a nice change of pace to be able to just leave your wallet in the room safe. Couples resorts don't even allow tipping, since they have an employee bonus system built into their room prices, so it was really a cash free resort.

Happy Friday!

I can't believe this week is over already! Between starting tennis lessons, working around the house and several trips to Lowes, finalizing the decor proposal for an upcoming charity event (basically feels like the pressure of planning a wedding!), and, you know, actual work, this week has gone by in a flash. And we've got a busy weekend planned too, I'm running jogging a 5k tomorrow, my husband has got a soccer game, and we'll be making some really good progress with our bathroom renovation.

With everything going on, I still haven't gotten around to narrowing down all of the photos from our whirlwind Florida trip last week, but I couldn't resist sharing what I think is going to be my favorite of the trip!

I got to hold the softest little baby alligator at the park where they film Animal Planet's Gator Boys! Definitely one of the highlights of the trip, although I kind of wish we hadn't done a 15 mile bike ride through the Everglades in 90 degree weather right before, so my hair and makeup would have been cuter for the photo opp. Oh well, I'm sure the baby gator didn't mind my disheveled look. :)

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend planned. Is anyone doing any Halloween activities?

{Nature Photos} 3 Bucks!

Man, I love our yard!

While sitting at my desk yesterday, I spotted a beautiful juvenile buck out my office window. As he walked around the side of the house, I grabbed my camera and had the perfect vantage point out our bonus room windows, above our garage.

Look at the cute little horns!

 But he wasn't alone, and a moment later two other young bucks appeared next to him.

I've never seen this many male deer together before. The family that has been coming by a couple of times a week usually only has two bucks. I wonder if these are the same ones, or a whole different group. Either way, I appreciate them trimming our weeds, at least until we get around to landscaping our backyard!

Baby Deer Wishes You a Happy Friday!

Happy Friday!

We have a family of 7 deer that have been visiting us the past two weeks, ever since they discovered the new salt lick I mounted on a tree down by the old access road that runs behind our property. There are 3 babies, 2 juvenile males with little nubby horns, and 2 adult female deer in the family. But this morning is the first time I've been able to get a picture of one of the babies, because usually they're running around like crazy, chasing each other, jumping over the creek and being silly, while the older ones take turns at the salt lick. This morning though I finally caught a shot of a baby!

Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend. We're in for another tiring and dirty weekend, working on the bathroom, removing the rest of the damaged sub floor, scrubbing/sanding any surface mold on the joists, pulling a thousand nails out of all of the studs to prep them for fresh drywall, and a whole bunch more tedious prep work. But I hope we'll have a bit of time to watch some of the Olympics this weekend too. What are you guys up to this weekend? Any home projects planned? Who is excited for the Olympics?

 

Lightning Bug Flash

While cleaning up my desktop files earlier this week, I came across this little 8 second video I took last year, but never shared.

Before moving to North Carolina, I'd never seen a firefly before (or lightning bug, as they're called in the south). I was fascinated by them, and just like a little kid, I just had to catch one in a jar to see it up close.

If you've never seen one either, here's what they look like when they flash.


(don't worry, I released this little guy outside right after filming him)

The lighting bugs are just starting to come out for the season, and it's so neat to sit on our deck after sunset to watch for the little flashes between the trees. I'm sure we'll be doing some of that this weekend, while we rest in the evenings after long days of hauling paver stones around to build our fire pit area!

Hope you all have a great Memorial Day weekend. Hopefully I'll be back next week with the good news that our fire pit is finished, and we got to enjoy it Monday evening, but we'll see!

Why Can't My Cats Do This?

Make friends with a deer!

I'm so in love with these sweet photos I saw on Reddit of a deer and a cat being friendly, that I had to share. Now my kitties need to step up their game, and make nice with our own backyard deer so I can see them more!

Photos from Imgur via Reddit

So stinking cute! Maybe I need to start rubbing salt licks on my cat's heads, to entice the deer to lick them, LOL.

Happy hump day! 

Funny Cat Photo For Your Friday

I sent this photo to Melinda at Palindrome at Home a couple of months ago, because she inspired me to see if I could "bread" one of my cats. Yes, I know, totally old and stale internet meme at this point!

But I just came across the photo again and it made me laugh, so I thought I'd share it here. Hope it makes you smile too!

(I'm pretty sure he was licking his lips in anticipation of eating the bread off his face!)

Hope you all have a great weekend! Anyone got any fun plans?

Surprise, surprise, we will be working on the house. On the agenda for this weekend is organizing my home office/closet bedroom while my husband works on his own office, looking at bathroom tile ideas, attacking the still completely full of boxes dining room, and maybe removing wallpaper from the downstairs bathroom. Depends on how ambitious and motivated we feel like being. Our to do list is so long at this point that we are just kind of picking what to do next by what we feel like at the moment. But we also need to make time to enjoy our deck though, since we only have about a month left before it gets humid and icky out! Gotta enjoy "first summer" while it lasts!

Happy Friday! And happy Mother's Day to any of you mothers reading (hi Mom!).

A New Kind of Backyard Friend!

Y'all know by now how much I've LOVED spotting wildlife in our yard ever since we moved to NC. Well I found a new type of animal to watch in our new backyard!

Do you see it? Between the slats of the deck?

How about now?

It's a gorgeous hawk! We've seen this guy a couple of times a day, flying through our yard down to the little runoff creek and up along it, searching for food. I've even seen him flying with a little snake in his mouth!

I Don't Know What It Is About Our Back Patio...

....but for some reason animals really seem to love it!

Remember back in November when the friendly fox visited us?

And we've had deer, bunnies and turtles come by too.

And I'm constantly being distracted by more common animals, like squirrels, birds, and our cats running around. But today we had a new kind of friendly backyard visitor, an opossum!

(Sorry for the cell phone quality pics!)

I know not everyone thinks they're cute, but being the animal lover that I am, I'm always happy to see another backyard friend! And they remind me of growing up in Washington State, where we would see them all the time. I don't think I ever saw an opossum the whole time we lived in California.

The best part of all? I totally thought it was just my blue point Siamese cat when I first spotted it out of the corner of my eye! It cracks me up just thinking about how insulted Hailey would be, that I thought she was a scruffy opossum.

Here's hoping we have just as many, if not more animals in our new backyard after we move!

 

OMG, MORE Animals!

This is getting out of control, guys!

Literally, like 3 minutes after I just hit publish on my last post about the deer I saw in our yard yesterday, I just saw a fox in our yard!!

Yes, I'm working in the basement room again today, in hopes to see more deer. :)

And last night, I thought I might have seen what I thought was a fox, but it was nearly dark out, so it might have been a cat, with a really poofy tail, carrying something dead in it's mouth. And I didn't get a photo of it, so without proof, I didn't even think it was worth mentioning in my last post.

But guys, it was the cutest little fox!! I don't think I've ever seen one in the wild before, only at zoos. And he totally walked across our patio under the deck right in front of me, and laid down in the sun on our lawn for a bit, all the while I could see the shadows of 2 of my cats watching him from the deck above.

But enough excited blabber, here are some pics of the little cutie.

Here is where I first spotted him.

Walking right across the patio, super close to the sliding doors I was looking through.

Taking a quick nap in the sunny yard.

Such a beautiful animal!

I think since the fox seemed to be ignoring my cats up on the deck (and that he's probably been around the whole time we've lived here), and he's not much bigger than my fattest cat, I hope I don't have anything to worry about with them getting in fights. It probably would have already happened if it was going to anyway.

But I'm pretty sure that this means I do have to officially move my office to the other room. Only two days with this many animal sightings means I've been missing out big time!

Salt Lick Success!

....Or maybe I just need to look out the window more often.

So, yesterday was pretty freakin' awesome for this animal lover! If you've followed this blog for a while, you know that I love seeing animals, and have been waiting to see deer here in North Carolina even since we moved here almost 7 months ago and our neighbors told us there are lots of deer around.

Well, I saw deer in our backyard for the 2nd time, and this time I got pictures! I was washing my dishes after eating lunch, when I happened to glance out the kitchen window that looks out on our backyard, when I spotted her. I loudly whispered "DEER!" to my husband in the other room, and started jumping up and down and racing around to find my camera, just like I did two weeks ago.

But this time I was smarter, instead of going out on the deck and scaring her away, I ran downstairs to the sliding doors under the deck, so I could snap some photos without having to go outside. (And it was actually kind of funny, on my new Fitbit fitness tracker, I could see an activity spike when I was dashing around, freaking out about the deer!)

Come on, you know you want some salt lick, it's good for you!

Mmmm, salt flavored dirt!

After about 10 minutes though, I decided to try to sneak out on the deck again, for a closer look, and sure enough, she ran off into the small patch of woods behind our house.

But then I started wondering, if she came out in the middle of the day, maybe she would be back, since in my experience seeing deer growing up, they mainly came out around dusk, so I decided to bring my laptop into the basement room where I took the above photos, so I could work in there for the afternoon, and watch for the deer to come back at the same time.

(A side note, since I mentioned my "experience" seeing deer growing up. In case any of you were curious about what's up with my obsession with deer (other than the fact that they're adorable, magical creatures that I've loved since seeing Bambi as a child). Well, as a kid we used to go to North Eastern Washington State quite often, to visit my great great aunt and uncle at their home in a tiny little town with a population of about 100. In the evenings we used to go on what we called "deer rides," where we would all pile in the car and drive up in the hills on old forest service roads. Bumping around the dirt roads, we would spot a ton of adorable deer, and also other fun things like rattlesnakes, and we even saw black bears and a moose once. "Deer rides" are one of my fondest memories of visiting my great great aunt and uncle, along with spring, when so many baby frogs would come out of their holes that you had to watch where you stepped to avoid them. Yep, baby frogs were another animal obsession of mine, and in 2nd grade I even got to take two home with me, and they became the classroom pets!)

But anyway, back to the present day deer.

I camped out in the other room for a couple of hours, working away yesterday afternoon, and to my excitement, the deer came back! Of course, I was ready with my camera, even though I hadn't had high hopes she would be back.

So pretty! And noticing me on the other side of the sliding doors.

Yum, more salt!

But after only a minute or two, something scared her away, and she dashed back into the trees.

Although now that it was later in the day without as much sun shining through the trees, I could see further into the woods, and spotted her hanging out not to far into the trees.

It didn't take me long to figure out what had made the noise that had caused her to run away again. Another, smaller deer appeared to the left of the yard!

And then I noticed a second new deer creeping out of the trees, in the bottom right of the below picture!

Three deer in total, counting the original one that you can just see the rump of, furthest to the right in the photo below.

I think it's the same three deer I saw two weeks ago, because it's still a bigger female, and two smaller juveniles. The mama is the one who had been eating the salt earlier in the day.

The deer family started munching away at our grass and weeds, and stayed in our yard for at least 45 minutes. Which leads me to believe that maybe they've been there all along, we just haven't looked out our windows often enough. After all, we spend all day in our home offices, both of which face the front of our house. How many afternoons have I missed this while in the other room, staring at my monitors?!

Yes, I may have taken over 400 photos throughout the deer visit!

They were so fun to watch though, although they were very quick to startle at any noise. They constantly looked up from eating, and would sometimes do this funny stomping thing with their front legs. I'm not sure if it was a sign of aggression directed to whatever noise they heard, or a way of warning each other to watch out for something.

Apparently they also liked to stick their tongues out at whatever they heard.

LOL, just kidding, I think this was just a lucky shot!

A few more photos of them being our gardeners and eating our weeds.

After the deer went back into the woods after about 45 minutes on our lawn, one of my cats came out after a while, and just sat down and kept an eye on the woods. After peering in the same direction as he was for a bit, I finally spotted what he was looking at.

The deer were still hanging out nearby.

My cat's nonchalant attitude, and the fact that the deer stayed around for so long eating grass is just another reason I think these deer have been frequent visitors to our yard. I just need to look out the windows more often.

Or better yet, maybe I should move my home office into the other room that faces the woods....looking at deer while working would be a whole lot more interesting than seeing the mailman go by like I get to see now!