Excellent day and awesome friends

I have not been on much the last two days because my friend came down and visited me. She's from North Carolina and I visited her up there one summer in 2013.  So I have bunches of comments and art I need to catch up on.  She's a bird fan like me and loves budgies so much.  She works at a raptor center.  She came over yesterday evening and we took her and her mom out to dinner at IHOP.  Then she came to our house and I showed her the gourds, chickens, budgies and took her on a tour of my house. We had so much fun. She looked at all my figures and brought her own microbes. We played with my toys. Here's some of what happened with that.



The first pic is how my bed exploded after she left. Birds, microbes and Fear toys all over the place. Plus my art work. Haha.  The second one is from this morning when we had a microbe party. My microbes are in the back. Hers are in the front. These aren't all my microbes. I need to take a group pic of all the ones I own. you'll like my Euglena figure on the right. The green one. She's one of my faves.  So I showed my friend my morning routine with my birds. I let the chickens out, harvest eggs, and feed all the other birds. She got to meet Bullet and play with the two new babies.  Then this afternoon we dropped her and her mother off at the airport.  Since we were close to the water Chris had the awesome idea to go to Weedon Island Preserve in St. Pete.  We've only been there once kayaking. But we went on the boardwalk and up the tower.  HEre are some pics.



Ok so going across the Courtney Campbell Causeway.  Notice the two towers.  We'd come back to the one on the left.  I saw this gopher tortoise at Weedon.  I found two and I thought this pic came out nice.  I hold Fear in front of the observation tower.  He didn't want to go up. Too bad. We're going.



From the tower you could see the Tampa Skyline.  Scream for me Fear! I dangled him from the top of the tower. Cry you little wuss.  Haha.  Don't worry. Notice I actually had a very strong grip on him and was not going to drop him. I just really like scaring him and taking his pic.  When leaving Weedon I noticed a flock of white pelicans. I was thrilled because they weren't here last month. I love winter in Florida for the awesome migrations we get.  So the white pelicans are back in the state.  They are cool because they are prettier than the resident year round brown pelicans. They are also way bigger and they are high flyers. They also fly in large flocks.  Nice to see them again.



We then went to eat at a restaurant called the Crab Shack. It was ok.  Inside had lots of funny sailing art.  But what I loved was in the back there were these berry bushes and they were FULL of Robins. The robins are finally down in Florida. We only get them in winter.  I LOVE robins.  So many.  This is a great time of year for birding.  The second pic is funny. That little robin ran out and pose. I had no idea a friend was landing next to him. So that was great I inadvertently caught that.  Then we went to the beach on the causeway with the tower.  There were two pods of manatees swimming by and followed by this research vessel. None of my photos came out so great though but more on that later.



There were to many birds on the water today. This flock of shorebirds flew by. I think they are sanderlines but they were too far away to tell. Can anyone confirm this or ID if not?  Never been keen on memorizing shorebirds.  Chris stands on a sea wall. The water was calm. Gosh I wish I had had my kayak.  And a brown pelican flew towards me. Lovely breeding plumage with the yellow feathers on the head.



I walked up to the tower. As always Fear was afraid as I held him up. He thought he would be electrocuted.  Had this been Scary Fear he'd have wanted the electricity all to himself.  I finally got a pic of a manatee. A third pod swam by and I ran from the tower all the way to where we had parked.  I got this one decent pic where you can see the head.  I was so tired.  But it was great. Then this boat was coming and there was a long line of ring neck ducks flying in front of it.



I got this nice pic of the ducks flying over the sea.  This is how crazy the winter migration is. This photo does not do justice to how many ducks there were, nor pelicans nor robins.  I loved this little shallow area with one mangrove tree.  And lastly Fear with the mangrove tree. Nothing like my drawing with his wings next to those mangroves. This one is afraid.  Perhaps I should build a second Scary Fear to have as a travel buddy.

So over all excellent day.  I had a wonderful time with my friend.  Oh a few more pics actually. Remember the gourds? We harvested most of them after the frost killed the plants.



These are African Wine Kettles.  I'm so happy to have had at least 20 of these monsters growing in the yard this past year.  

I got the Power Theory CD in the mail the other day too. So  now I finally have the lyrics for the line I was missing from the song Driven By Fear. So that's a good thing and was very important for me to have.  I need it for something I'm working on.