My backyard is flooding!

[pelagia]

I would drive through the rain for flowers!

W&W - Two things I can never seem to get adjusted to about living in the country - snakes and the big spiders we seem to get every fall.  I grew up on Long Island, truly suburbia, and they were hardly any spiders and definitely no snakes around my house!  When we renovated our old farmhouse in the 1980s we found loads of snake skin sheds in the attic. Very creepy.  But, I love this place and it's mostly "out of sight, out of mind for me."

[kitkatz]

If I find a snake in my bathtub, I am moving out!

[G-Ma]

and I wouldn't even pack first....my family all knows that.....eeeeekkkk....

[monrein]

I like snakes but we don't have poisonous ones so that makes a difference I think. The introduction of the mongoose in Jamaica killed them all off there and here in Ontario we only have one type that is venomous.  It's the Massassauga rattlesnake but it is very shy and quite rare.
I like lizards too.

[willieandwinnie]

monrein, we'll send you all we find. Do you care if they are dead or alive. 

[monrein]

Are you giving me a hint about what my secret santa might be thinking?

I don't like dead snakes BTW. 

[harley08]

This has been a terrible year for everyone weather wise, I am in Pittsburgh and last week in the area that I work the wind and rains were so bad we had a power outage at work for the entire following week.

[pelagia]

I like snakes but we don't have poisonous ones so that makes a difference I think. The introduction of the mongoose in Jamaica killed them all off there and here in Ontario we only have one type that is venomous.  It's the Massassauga rattlesnake but it is very shy and quite rare.
I like lizards too.

Actually I like snakes just fine, just not in my house/bedroom/closet/kitchen/etc.  I also like lizards. 

The only sentence I can say in Thai is "Linda keeps her house lizard in the bananas!"  or "Linda keeps her house lizard in the kitchen." depending on my pronunciation!
 
 

[annabanana]

 

[monrein]

Where else would one keep a house lizard besides in the bananas or the kitchen?  As kids we always had at least two lizards on the wall of our room every night eating the mosquitoes.  They were croaking lizards so they'd arch up and stick out a fan-like thingy under their necks and croak.  Charming (said in a sarcastic British way).
We also used to make tiny lassos out of the spine of a palm leaf and try to lasso their tails to see them detach as the lizard wriggled away.  I once suggested that we lasso one as a pet and walk it but my Mum sent me to my room (or some other punishment can't remember exactly) for being an "uncivilized barbarian".  I had to go look up what a barbarian was  but I got off lizards and switched to pet wasps.  That's a story for another time.  All my wasps had names ending in -ert.

[petey]

pelagia, they have us under a flood watch until 10 pm tonight and then said with Kyle passing to the east we will again see higher tides. It has poured here this morning, cloudy and windy right now but calling for thunderstorms. My daughter called a little while ago in tears, there was a snake in her bathtub. They managed to kill it and the neighbor told her it was a corn snake (yeah, a snake is a snake), so she has already said she probably won't sleep tonight. We don't have much standing water but the mosquitos are horrible. I won't let Len go outside because of them.

flip, Maggie and Jeff, have you guys managed any rain out of this?

petey, how did you guys make out? You know, weather wise.

We made out just fine... nothing that shook the house, but a little howling at the windows, .......the weather wasn't too bad, either.                


A snake?  In your daughter's bathtub?  I would have literally passed out.  I don't like live snakes.  I don't like dead snakes.  I don't like pictures of snakes.  I don't like thoughts of pictures of snakes.

Here's a snake legend that my grandmother taught me...If you kill a snake, you MUST chop its head off.  Then, Grandma would throw the body in the woods across the road in front of her house and the head in the woods behind her garden (way back behind the house).  When, as a little girl, I watched her perform this ritual and asked her why, she said if you didn't totally separate the head from the body by a great distance, it would reattach itself and come back to life before the sun set.

I, personally, have never killed a snake, but I've stood back 100 yards and screamed and paced while Marvin has killed some with a hoe, a rake, a shovel, and even one time, a baseball bat.  Marvin doesn't like snakes, either.

[pelagia]

I, personally, have never killed a snake, but I've stood back 100 yards and screamed and paced while Marvin has killed some with a hoe, a rake, a shovel, and even one time, a baseball bat.  Marvin doesn't like snakes, either.

Stephen had a big snake in his closet one time.  Thought the tail was his belt and then it moved.  He killed it by chopping it's head off!  My son was there (I wasn't) and then he didn't want to go upstairs to his bedroom unescorted for a couple of years.

A herpetologist once told me that the best way to catch a snake is to offer it a box to crawl into through a small dark hole.  They will head for something like that when confronted.