You know how when you see/smell/taste/touch something really gross and disgusting, the first thing you are compelled to do is share it with someone? Yeah, this is one of those posts. Consider yourself warned.
Feeling unusually energetic and motivated this morning, I decided to go down to the local garden center after dropping Grover and Ollie off at school. I picked some lovely horticultural selections to spruce up my planters outside. This decision was not without ulterior motive - most of my decorative plants got fried from the excessive heat and lack of rain AND my in-laws are coming in a few weeks and I'd like them to think I can keep simple things like plants alive (bodes well for the grandchildren, after all). Anyway, I started removing the dead plants from one of the planters on my front porch and in the dirt was this white ovoid object about 1 - 1.5 cm long. I'm not sure what I thought it was (spider egg sac, potting soil additive, who knows?) but the 6-year-old in me immediately wanted to squish it and see what happened. So I transferred it to the porch railing and lowered my planting shovel in a swift smashing motion. To my great surprise and disgust, something slimy shot out of it across the porch. Having not seen "Alien" in a while, I abandoned good sense and went to have a look. Lying prostrate on my front porch in a pool of clear goo was a lizard embryo. You know, those little green anoles that proliferate in the South in the summertime? I guess on some level I knew that lizards were reptiles and therefore hatched from eggs, but I never expected to see one of the little unborn suckers, especially one flying across my front porch. Its little eyes were closed and its arms (?) were still attached to the torso and it was all curled up like it was asleep. Having just committed lizard abortion, what was I to do next? Naturally, I picked the critter up with the shovel and chucked it into the flower bed trying desperately all the while to keep my stomach contents where they belonged.
Only after I had planted everything and stopped my skin from crawling did I think like Fishmonger and go "Hey, I should have taken a picture of that!" Fortunately, my flower bed has no ground cover (nor does it have actual flowers, but that's neither here nor there) so it was pretty easy to find the tiny lizard embryo. Actually, I was lucky The Fuzzbucket didn't find it and eat it first (and yes, she would). It had dried out a bit before I had the photo-op revelation, so it's not quite as disgusting as when it first landed on my porch, but here it is:
Still pretty gross, though, isn't it?
