Red and yellow...

Yes, we live in a pretty wooded area. No, I don't like when wildlife tries to mess with me :)

Tonight the dog was barking in the garage and Mike went out to find this:


I didn't take this picture, I stole it off the Internet. Mostly because although I will photograph half-dead opossum babies, I don't enter the garage when there's a snake in it!

Thankfully, as the rhyme says "Red and Yellow, Kill a fellow, Red and Black a friend of Jack". And this is a KING snake, not a CORAL snake. Our first Christmas here there was a coral snake on our playground area though, so you can never be too careful.

In fact, several years ago when my parents lived here they found their cat under the dining room table playing with a snake. My dad caught it and put it in a trashcan and called Animal Control. That one was a Coral Snake. IN. THE. HOUSE. The cat was fine, smart kitty she is, but the animal control lady wasn't quite as bright. She looked at my parents said "this isn't a coral snake, it's a king snake." Having lived in this area for a long time, my parents protested and said they were sure it was a coral snake. Smart animal control lady reached into the trash can bare handed and picked it up and put it in her bag and was on her way.

If I remember correctly, it wasn't much later that my parents left the neighborhood and found that the animal control truck was parked just a few houses down. The 'finding out' part I'm not quite so sure of the timeline, but essentially the lady got a few houses down and realized that she was wrong-- that was, indeed, a coral snake, and she'd been bitten. She stopped at a neighbor's house and called 911. She was taken by ambulance to the hospital...

My parents were contacted by our local news crew and I felt pretty bad for the rather unintelligent animal control worker that made a mistake that would certainly cost more than a bite... but be a lick at her pride as well.

Anyway, Mike looked up the snake on the Internet before he decided to go out there to get rid of it. What, he doesn't trust his wife? Ah, well, can't be too safe I suppose...

Except that instead of catching it and tossing it away or killing it, he checked the Internet and the snake got into a crack in the concrete and as I type this is still in my garage. Poor guy is going to be up all night keeping the dog happy because she KNOWS it's in there and will likely bark incessantly several times overnight.

And it kind of freaks me out to know I went out there barefoot in the dark to feed the dog just about 30 minutes before the snake incident... even though the snake IS safe... I don't do snakes!

Ha, that makes for a lot of blogging in one night!!