Wildlife in my Backyard

In the last week I have seen the following things in my backyard:
Ants, lots and lots of ants.

A wasp

Lacewing Flies (These are one of my favorite bugs)

Scorpions, of course

A carpenter bee

A lizard

A ground snake (see previous post)

A kitten (which made its way into our house and attacked my sister-in-law and I when we tried to pick it up to take it outside)

And a Vulture

We see most of these on a regular basis, but I haven't seen a snake or a vulture around here before, so that was pretty cool. There are also a bazillion doves and pigeons and crows that like to sing 24 hours a day, which is kind of obnoxious at 1 in the morning but it's fun to wake up to. :)

Meet Mo:

Yesterday several members of my family were swimming in the pool in our backyard. At one point my nephew shouted, "Hey look Dad, I found a snake!" And in his hands was this little guy:

At first we thought he was dead and we told my nephew to put it down and my mom proceeded to pick it up with the pool net. Then it started wiggling around so we figured he was still alive. My brother went in to Google it to find out what kind of snake he was and my niece and I watched him, and she told me to touch it so I pet his back and named him Mo. Then my brother came out and informed us that he is a slightly toxic ground snake that eats scorpions.

So we put him in the alley behind our house where he has been assigned the task of eradicating our scorpion population.

Summer Reading List

In three days I will take my last final and then I will have finished my freshman year of college!! Woo hoo! So in preparation for a long, hot summer spent largely indoors with air-conditioning, I am compiling a summer reading list. So far, here's what I have:
1. John Adams by David Mccullough
2. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
3. The Kane Chronicles by Rick Riordan
4. The Iron Heel by Jack London
5. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (When it comes out)
6. Enna Burning by Shannon Hale
7. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
8. 1984 by George Orwell
9. Dune by Frank Herbert
10. Plato's Republic by Plato
11. Walden Pond by Henry David Thoreau
12. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
13. The Tempest by William Shakespeare
14. Horatio Hornblower by C.S. Forester
15. A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeline L'Engle
16. Beowulf as translated by Burton Raffel
17. El Leon, la Bruja, y el Ropero by C.S. Lewis
18. Common Sense and other writings by Thomas Paine
19. Rifles for Waite by Harold Keith
20. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
21. Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
22. Don Quijote De La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes
23. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
24. Standing for Something by Gordon B. Hinkley
25. Tally's Corner by Elliot Liebow

A lot of these are books that I tried to read when I was younger and had no idea what the heck they were talking about, so I guess I'll give them another shot and see what happens :) Any suggestions?