He was scratching at the door. My daughter thought there was a puppy outside, so she went to the window to see. It was a lizard! Yellow head, blue body, green tail. Definitely a male, and definitely a collared lizard.
[1]

We also caught a [2] black widow spider recently! We’ve been doing some remodeling in our home, and when my husband picked up a piece of scrap wood he felt the spider (and dropped the wood!). We’ve had this fine specimen in a small container for four days now. I believe it’s a female, because of its size. My daughter (9) went straight to the wildlife resource books and looked up black widows. Did you know black widows spin 3-D webs? Most spider webs are flat, two-dimensional weavings. Black widows create ‘balls’ for their web. We have a lot of those around the yard, but the spiders are small and brown. That will have to be my next research project… spiders!