Birthday week wrap-up and a wildlife sighting

This week's Friday, End-of-the-Week, Blogging-Wrap-up, Musical Interlude is dedicated to everyone else born in mid- to late June, like featured artist Paul McCartney who turned 70 on June 20th. Sir Paul McCartney is obviously best known as the influential mastermind behind the band Wings, which formed following the dissolution of some other little band that didn't work out.

At the risk of gaining a reputation as a really terrible photographer, I'm going to share this picture taken from the bathroom window yesterday afternoon. Like the deer family portrait yesterday, the quality of the photo is definitely sub-par. 

I happened to be standing in front of the toilet yesterday doing whatever it is that one does in front of the toilet when some movement out in the garden caught my eye. At first I thought it was a sparrow, because at any given moment during the day, there are 10-50 sparrows using my backyard as a giant restroom. Then, I noticed that this sparrow was unusually lithe and non-airborne. 

This personable little guy stopped underneath the lost tomato plant right in front of the bathroom window and posed for me. He stayed completely stationary while I ran to get the camera, cleared the tasteful but excessive decoritive items from the windowsill, and unlocked and opened the window. The conditions (weird angle of mid-day sunlight creating weird shadows, me leaning out of the bathroom window trying not to scare this thing away, etc.) adversely affected the quality of the photo, but you can still get the idea. 

It's a Texas Spiny Lizard, often confused with the Texas Horned Lizard (better known as the Horny Toad to those of you who aren't some ivory tower biologist too busy to look up from the Eppendorf tubes on your lab bench to use the name the rest of the world uses). He was pretty big, too. I would guess about a foot long from tip to tail. 

I am very pleased to see this sort of useful wildlife in my garden (as opposed to mooching squirrels and murderous opossums). I hope he ate many undesirable insects while he was here.