[UPDATE 5-12-08: 8am] I’ve been reading more detailed reports and it looks like the fires are definitely north of our house. And it looks like 95 and US1 are both open .. or parts of them are open, so we shouldn’t have a problem getting home when we get on the road. I found this article on Florida Today that has updates that seems to have the best info on status of the fire. [click here]

Please keep our house in your thoughts .. apparently there’s a huge brush fire in our area that has burned 1900 acres already. At this moment I95 is shut down from exit 173 to 156 (we live in between those 2 exits, about 4 miles east of 95). US-1 is closed south of malabar. So if we were to drive home right now we wouldn’t even be able to get to our house. There are 3 major north south roads that get down to us, the 3rd is Babcock, which actually crosses 95, so we’re sure that one is closed too.

We’re still in Orlando for the night, the winds are supposed to stay high until noon tomorrow, which is terrible to fight fires. And they aren’t predicting any improvement on wind or dry weather for days. They’re expecting this fire to spread all the way from 95 to US1 overnight. I believe that this fire is north of our house (close to malabar rd), but I really dont know for sure as Orlando news reporters really dont know our little area. 

Some local news stations, most are calling our fire the ‘malabar’ fire.
http://www.wesh.com
http://cfnews13.com
http://floridatoday.com

When I let the dogs out this morning, they quickly sounded the alert over this lump.

I figured it was a turtle, but it also kinda looked like an old avocado, or maybe a giant dung beetle. But really.. how would either of those things find their way up next to our house Here’s my flip flop so you can see how small he was. Probably the size of my palm.

Then I went back inside to investigate what he could possibly be … and Sean let the dogs out again For fear of the puppies torturing the poor thing with their barking (and torturing us as well) I had Sean move the turtle out to a shady spot near the edge of our wetland. I took that opportunity to take a shot of his turtle bottom. 

Using my super duper investigation tools (aka google images) .. I think I’ve figured out this is a Florida Striped Mud Turtle. [another link], scroll down to find the info