my father the hero

I've previously mentioned the snake problem at my grandma's house. It's gotten to the point where I won't go into the basement unless it's absolutely necessary. Our most recent encounter with the snakes occurred last weekend when my family went down to visit Grandma for Easter. When we arrived, my dad went to the basement to turn on the water. Mom followed him shortly, and they remained downstairs for a suspiciously long amount of time. When they finally reemerged, Dad was carrying this:

You can't see what's inside the bucket, but trust me--it's a snake! I could see it slithering around ... ewww! Dad carried it outside--all the while, I was yelling, "Kill it! Kill it!"--put a heavy flowerpot on top, and left it until morning. Then he took care of it--and called me out to take a picture:

The animal rights people wouldn't call him a hero, but I sure do!

who cares about spiders when you can have snakes?

Remember last summer when I spent a week visiting my grandma and being terrorized by horrible spiders? Well, her house doesn't seem to have a spider problem anymore, and I think I know the reason:
Meet our "friend" the snake. I wish I had a clearer picture of him. But here's his skin . . . at least we assumed it was his skin. Now I'm not so sure. Those pictures were taken at Thanksgiving. No one saw the snake at Christmas, so when we were there for Easter, Mom and I decided to go snake hunting. (Why? Because we're clearly mentally impaired!) We didn't find "Blackie" . . . but we did find snake #1: snake #2 and snake #3 Obviously, none of these snakes is the one we saw at Thanksgiving, but snake #2 looks suspiciously like a mini version of that snake. This leads me to four questions:

1. How many offspring can a snake have?
2. Just how many snakes are in that basement?
3. Are any of them poisonous?
4. Why on earth would my dad just look at the snakes and not try to kill them???
   

it's been a while

I haven't posted in two weeks. First, nothing "blog worthy" was happening, then I went to Kansas for Easter, then I was really busy with work, then I got sick. Now I'm healthy and less busy, so hopefully I'll get some things posted soon . . . especially the snake pictures. I read another book review blogger book, too, but I still need to write the review, so look for that in the next few days. And I've started tutoring--I definitely need to talk about that. Just wanted you to know that I'm still alive, and I haven't forgotten about my blog!