She No Work No More!!

And that means our night guard has extra duty these days.

The heavy metal doors for the garage have been getting progressively difficult to open and shut.  A year ago we pointed this out, and the solution was to "shave" the metal at the top of both doors.

Well, it took a year, but here is how we had to leave the door last evening ... And in order to even open it this far on Sunday morning Tom and I were both shoving, trying to lift, pulling and forcing it to drag open just enough to drive the Trol out!

Supposedly a crew is scheduled to come out today to fix it.  Based on past performance, that may or (more likely) not happen.

And ending with a very pretty lily in the front yard.  Everything isn't bad here, just a bit of a struggle.

New Animals

The last three days has brought a few new animals to photograph.

First one is a beautiful butterfly near the backyard (actually called the front yard here ??) patio resting on some frilled coreopsis:

Early on Sunday morning, while we were loading up the Trol for a shopping excursion to Kitwe Tom nearly stepped on this little guy.  It was quite patiently watching small ants.  Since we have plenty to share, it was welcome to any and all it would eat.

The final new creature greeted us when we returned from Kitwe.  He (she?) was waiting near the front door on the entryway.  Fortunately it simply skittered in and stayed put outside.  Beautiful lizard, though I am grateful we found it outside, and not inside.  We are fine with the inside lizards as they only range from 1" to no more than 4" long.

Since he was so pretty, here is one more shot:

Proof!

Our efforts with the pool have paid off.  And we've been in the water a few times the past week and weekends.  However the rainy season is gearing up, so it is a fight between having enough solar radiation to warm the water, enough chlorine to temper the algae growth, time for the pool robot to clean the bottom and rainfall!

But, here we are enjoying the water and sunshine on Saturday.