Happy Sunday, everyone! I’m back with another weekly recap. I should first say that while this post is post-dated for the week of Monday 4th-Sunday 10th of April, it’s about two weeks late… my apologies. It’s been very hectic, if in an on-and-off way. The subsequent week is also being posted momentarily.

As you will see in both posts (and a few additional side posts) my days have been packed with activities –though nothing much happened during this particular week that wasn’t me working on art, taking walks, playing video games (which I’m sharing on separate posts), shopping for dinner ingredients, or cooking (at least until the weekend).

🌈 Monday 🌈

First off, now that the house is fully painted, let me show you better photos of what it looks like. I feel like it’s the prettiest colored house anywhere near us. But maybe I’m just biased.

The entrance looks so bright and colorful. I love it so much!

On the topic of colorful things, here is a friend I picked up at the craft store’s spring section. This time of the year is always great to find new snail-themed decor, and of course I added it to the collection on display around the snail tank.

On Monday night we made mojo chicken bowls. We all worked together on different parts of the meal, and marinated the chicken for about a day. It was pretty great!

🌈 Tuesday 🌈

On Tuesday I went for a walk, just for fun and to pick up dinner ingredients. At Dollar General I found the Harold Mega Bloks set, I was really happy to add him to my collection that already has Thomas and Percy:

I also found this super cool Crayola dinosaur kit. I love the box so much that for now it’s on display on a shelf. Someday I’m sure I’ll open it though.

I made my guys quiche for dinner:

🌈 Thursday 🌈

During my Tuesday walk I passed one of the buildings that they are tearing down. They were an eyesore for a very long time; years. It is weird to see them disappear so quickly.

Here’s a little GIF I made of Kotoko greeting me with a silent meow:

Of course today we had date night again. My husband and our partner played the new Kirby game while I enjoyed watching. I got some screenshots to share this time:

It’s an adorable game, we’ve already had a few enjoyable evenings with it.

🌈 Friday 🌈

I’ve started having bagels with smoked salmon for lunch sometimes; I like them a lot.

Some cute photos of Kotoko, including a tiny blep and an old-lady yawn:

Today we made a sort of (fake) grass carpet on the porch. Our partner was using this stuff to decorate his old apartment, and now that he’s living with us, he didn’t know what to do with it. He suggested this as opposed to trashing it and I think it looks interesting.

🌈 Saturday 🌈

Here’s a photo I took on Saturday of Rosie enjoying the new “grass”:

This day I got up early and prepped the slow cooker to cook beef for tacos all day. After cooking for like eight hours, it was amazing for dinner:

🌈 Sunday 🌈

Sunday was our adventure day. Our partner and I went to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden (being outdoors, we could not convince our favorite vampire to come along). This is a very beautiful place that our partner had never been to, so I was really excited for him to enjoy it since he loves flowers and nature.

I took lots of photos that I will caption here and there, and had a little risky adventure.

First, a pretty brook…

Just general photos of the garden’s beauty:

A friend!

Speedy getaway 😁

Ok now for a little story. You wouldn’t think so by the manicured look of this place, but there are multiple gators living here (in spite of the sign saying crocs, this is an alligator area):

Now I’ve been living in Florida for twenty years, and whenever I see these signs I get so excited to see a real, live alligator. Not to get close. Just to see one. They are basically dinosaurs. But I never had seen one in the wild. Today though, would be the day!

Prior to this encounter, we were walking down a nature trail –here’s some pictures of it:

Anyway there we were, when I pointed down to our partner a strange gathering of bluish flies at our feet. They were flying in a curious pattern. Cue him going “oh shit” and grabbing me and quickly pulling me back. What I had assumed to be flies, perhaps close to an animal carcass or waste, was a nest of blue-winged wasps!

We didn’t know at the time that these wasps are not super aggressive, and it is possible to gently walk through a swarm unmolested (we would come across a second nest later after the gator encounter, and again felt lucky to not be stung, since we didn’t see it until we almost stepped on it, just like this time).

A bit rattled by the wasp nest sighting, we doubled back and took another trail. Barely five steps into the trail I wanted to take a photo of the lake before going right.

…well, I didn’t when taking the photo above. But then I looked again, and my gasp of “Is that real?” was greeted by another “oh shit” from our partner (we were about twenty feet away from this quite massive guy –you can best gauge the distance in the photo above, as the one below is significantly zoomed in):

The scary thing is that he blended in so well. I could have gotten a lot closer before noticing him.

Now I want to point out a few things. The weird tag-like thing on his tail. His almost comical grin. His way-too-white teeth. His goofily beady eye. And of course he (she?) was perfectly still. All of these things together would have me bet money that this was not a live animal. I wasn’t stupid enough to approach him, just trust me that we were far away enough, but I did feel very sure that this must have been some decoy thing placed there by the garden keepers to keep people from approaching the water and actually risking a real encounter.

Since we were at a distance to make an easy getaway if needed, our partner began throwing very tiny pebbles at the water, and kinda near the gator’s head. I’m talking the size of my thumbnail, nothing that would have hurt the guy, but perhaps I dunno, made him blink? I will say again I was quite sure this gator could not possibly be real. So many years of never seeing one… My companion, wisely, told me one must always assume they are, but we both found the gator’s complete lack of reaction surprising.

We tossed maybe three very tiny pebbles. The last, rather than hitting the water, fell upon the gator’s butt with “toc!”. And here I can tell you this was a very real creature that immediately and quickly looked at his ass in a totally unamused way before resuming his sunbath, and then we left very fast and very respectfully and I felt very very bad for having done anything close to harassing him while he enjoyed his siesta.

But, boy. Was I over the moon! Going forward I will assume all are real (and so should you)! It’s uncanny how fake they can look. I just did not expect a gator to have such a goofy smile. It was rather cute. Definitely made my day. But I will say, please don’t do what we did. I know our partner humored me because we were at a safe distance. But had I been more sure that he was a real animal I would just have looked and walked away.

On our way back around we took another photo from the other side, and warned people we saw heading in that direction, so that he would be unbothered.

We continued to go around the garden, smelling flowers and studying leaves:

I made a GIF of our walk through the path above, because it was so pretty:

This tree had a face:

Here’s a photoset of many pretty flowers that we saw:

For a light lunch, we had crepes!

We had a wonderful (and adventurous!) time. Once home, I made korean beef bowls for dinner for the three of us. It came out pretty good:

Next week we are visiting family for Easter. And the week after that, Mwako is visiting us! I’m so excited. Are you excited for Easter too?