Sunday Soup

Hey!

We have birthdays to celebrate!

The baby turtles are now one year old. If you have been reading Pure Florida for a while, you know the story of the misplaced turtle nest and the egg moving. If not, and you're curious, do a blog search for "baby turtles" and you'll find a couple of posts about their progress.

"Breaking Out"

The photos above are snippets from those older baby turtle posts.

I have farmed out two babies to a fellow science teacher who loves turtles, a little boy who now loves turtles, and my mom.

Mom's turtle lived in her goldfish pond for quite a while and then suddenly vanished. She and I are going to fix a little turtle barrier around her goldfish pond and then I'll send a replacement.

On the down side, I lost one to a stupid mistake which I'll share because if you read PF, you know that what you see is what you get ... including my screw-ups.

The turtles live in a big Rubbermaid container that I carry out and place on a table in the yard for the sunning that is essential to good shell and bone growth. About a month ago, I set them out for sunning, but failed to refresh their water with cool (72F) well water and I then failed to check on them in a timely manner.

When I did think of them, the water had heated up under a powerful Florida sun and two turtles were upside down and the rest were in distress. I quickly flushed them with cool well water, but one of the upside down turtles was unresponsive.

Ever do CPR on a turtle?

I have.

It didn't work, sadly. Eventually I pronounced him dead ... and me careless.

"Party On , Little Dudes"

Still, the entire nest would have been doomed had I not chanced upon the female a year ago. Her nest site was in a terrible location that was too close to the driveway and garbage area.

So, life goes on ... for most of these turtles. We have gotten pretty attached to them, but I still plan to release them (okay, I'm keeping two of them) back into the wild. I thought I would have done this by now, but my pond is still a damp grassy hole, instead of a water filled turtle oasis.

As soon as it fills, in they go.

I promise.

"Wish For A Full Pond"

Being turtles, they needed some help blowing out the birthday cake candle, but we managed.

In other news, at some point this week, Pure Florida will go quiet for a few days. I will be out in the Gulf of Florida, not on some fluffy cruise by the way.

This will be a bit more rustic. It should provide a good source of pics and posts which I will share when they drag me kicking and screaming back to dry land.

Just kidding. Actually, dry land and freshwater feels pretty good after extended stays in the briny.

At least I won't be stuck on some deserted island.

Speaking of that ...

The Blogger poll thingie is turning out to be kind'a fun. It looks like Katherine Hepburn wins, and I guess she probably would be the best conversationalist of the possible choices.

Me?

I voted for Rita Hayworth.

Call me crazy ...