I am very honored to announce that the newest addition to our family, Sasha, received "The Happy Cat" award from Sammy and his mom Duni. 

Along with this award we are supposed to list five things that make Sasha happy.  She is a virtual purring machine.  I hope that means she's happy a lot :)

1.  Sasha likes learning to play fetch.  She  still just plays around with the mouse - doesn't bring it back too often, but she seems to be learning!

2.  She loves wrestling with Peanut which scares the heck out of me.  Peanut is our 13 pound male cat.  Sasha is not quite 3 and a half pounds!  I used to break them up, but believe it or not, Sasha holds her own!

3.  Sasha loves  watching the squirrels play through the screen on the patio.

4.   Sasha loves to climb on anything - especially our living room furniture!

5.  Sasha loves being my alarm in the morning.  She curls up right next to me or most of the time on me purring VERY loudly every morning.  I like to believe she's just happy to see me when she wakes up, but I know she's probably angling for breakfast :)

Thanks Sammy and Duni!

Last but not least, I received "The Sweet Blogger" award from Bing .  I was really touched that this wonderful blogger thinks I'm as nice as I think she is. 

Any blogger knows that one of the best things about awards is who you get them from. I am so glad that I met both Bing and Duni and truly love their blogs.  They are both great people and writers as well!

I would like to pass theses awards on to any of the fabulous bloggers I know who would like to accept it.

Thanks so much for stopping by.  I hope everyone has a terrific weekend!

I am definitely no master gardener, I'm really just a beginner.  Please remember this is what we started with after a very brutal winter - so sad looking I know:

Some loser(s) very immature person(s) cut two square holes in my screened in pool that my cats love to roam around in while I was gone for 4 hours to dinner and a movie on Saturday night. My male cat Peanut was missing when I got home and I never would have noticed the holes in the dark - except my Jasmine jumped out the hole as I was looking around the pool for Peanut. SO glad I live in a gated community.

So, SO happy to have my Peanut back.  He's the peace maker around this joint:

( I know my soda can on the piano makes the picture)

It took two hours to find him, but I was scared to death that someone had taken him or worse yet hurt him.  I am SO thankful that none of my other cats have any desire to go outside.  Peanut always runs to the door when it opens, but never has gotten far and doesn't seem to want to run that far away.  I was also a little concerned about some of the wild life we have in the area like ALLIGATORS! 

I'm also a little bummed out that I now A) can't let the cats out in the patio/pool area as much B) I have to set my security system around the clock now.  I tend to forget to shut it off thus alerting the police department mistakenly and C) now we feel the need to install security cameras which will cost thousands :(  

I filed a police report and the officer thought it was a kid playing a joke.  I never played these kind of jokes and I was certainly no angel - sorry to disappoint anyone ;)  Of course I am very upset about potentially losing my cats especially after losing one to cancer less than three months ago.   However, it just seems to me that whoever did this is capable of other despicable acts.

Did I mention we live in a gated community?

One last photo showing a very sad Peanut sitting near the patio doors wishing they would open:

Thanks so much for stopping by and have a wonderful day! 

This past weekend we visited the Homosassa State Park hoping to swim with the manatees.  Unfortunately there are only certain times and conditions under which you can swim with them.  However, I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience anyway.  Despite the 90 plus degree heat and 110% humidity, we were really comfortable because of the tree cover throughout the park:

I saw a lot of animals up close and got a lot of photos.  I will post a few here and the rest on my sidebar soon.

I can't wait to visit this park again.  It was so easy to see the animals who seemed very well cared for, was very clean, well maintained, and had an above average gift shop.  The shop had lots of BIG and small sun catchers which I can't have too many of:

Thanks so much for stopping by and have a wonderful day :)