In Front

The two bougainvilleas up front are resprouting, but we need instant gratification and bought a new one plus a pink hibiscus.The white African iris at the garage corner are doing well. Unfortunately, their pale color does not hold its own against the house.
One courageous little bougainvillea and another one further down. The stick (photo below) is the bougainvillea's former trunk.The fire engine red kalanchoe will be relocated to the red/green themed courtyard when they are done blooming. The bougainvilleas are pinkish purple which should make for a nice psychadelic color scheme in perfect harmony with the orange kumquats and calamondin oranges.

Grass Pellets

That forklift goes everywhere: through the bird sanctuary, across sandberms, our lawn ... all for the sake of St. Augustine grass, the big water hog.
Speaking of water hog: our wonderful water district has been preaching water conservation and has now restricted homeowner's water use for irrigation. We understand that. Florida has water issues. We know and we conserve.

But here lies the irony: We may now buy additional water from our precious aquifer bottled by the private Niagara water company. Thank you St. Johns Water Management District for selling us out to big business.

If you buy Zephyrhills water in small bottles, you buy what comes out of your Central Florida faucet. Save your pennies for more important things such as my piggy bank, send them to me. :-)

Garbage Truck

I figured that you must have strained your eyes enough finding pinhead sized creatures in my photos. Therefore I provide you with the special treat of a large creature: the fancy Leesburg garbage truck. The driver doesn't get out unless you leave stuff next to your huge garbage can. No second man necessary. Metal arms reach out, grab, lift and voilà, our trash disappears.
The yellow box is for recycling and this is a whole different story for some other time.

Red-winged Blackbird

The prairie near the alligator pond houses plenty of birds, but only one was smart enough to see that my camera was not a gun.One of the hundreds of birds too dumb to pose for me. One of them was cheeky enough to almost fly into my hair: a Florida scrub jay on his way from a favored tree to an even more favored birdfeeder.

Alligator

Why is there a sign: No Swimming?
If you had eyesight like an eagle, you would see the tiny speck in the water.Here it is: two eyes, one nose.
I was too chicken to go closer because my neighbor had told me about the swiftest 12 footer she had ever seen in one of our ponds.
This guy, however, is on the small side and never batted an eyelash. (Do alligators have eyelashes? No, but they have a semitransparent membrane or third eyelid called the nictitating membrane.)

Sandhill Crane Nest

It's a puzzle: find the nest. :-)If you haven't found it yet: it's in the lower right hand corner.
I took these photos on the walking path along Legacy's largest wetlands.

Bald Eagles

Now, folks, don't expect any close-ups. We were down on the ground, or to be more precise, on Number Two (yeah, really, this is the name of the rural road) and the birds were high up. I saw one of them swooping down with a squirrel in its talons. Otherwise, we would have driven by, just staring at the nursery to the right. At least, I would have checked out the nursery.
The white sign on the right is the nursery's.

Cool names in Central Florida: Numer Two Road leads directly to Howey-in-the-hills. (Did you think it would be Howey-on-the-pot?)