Dorothy,

I am so jealous that I am just green with envy. : )

Birds are all over the place in great profusion, but so far we've had not a peep from the frogs! Well, I think they made a little noise one day in January when we went to 77 degrees, but I knew that was a fluke, and haven't heard from them since.

When we first moved here, we loved to fall asleep with the bedroom windows open so we could listen to the frogs that were down at the big pond, which is several hundred feet from the house. Then, we built the lily pond in the back yard, and we had to close the windows in order to sleep because the chorus of singing frogs would keep us awake at night. I love listening to them, but just not when there's a million of them outside the bedroom window singing all night long.

My favorites are the little tree frogs. They often attach themselves to the windows of the house, and also hang out in flower pots and plants on the patio. The only tree frog I'm not crazy about is the one that sounds like a woman screaming off in the distance. That one disturbs me. The first time I heard it, I was just positive there really was a woman screaming off in the distance. It took me a long time to accept that the screaming woman was only a frog.

I did unearth a toad in the garden the other day, and spent the next 20 minutes trying to avoid stepping on it. Every step I took, it was right there under my feet.

Dawn