Duct tape really does fix everything! February 23, 2009
Warning: This story is not for the squeamish!
So today started off just like any ordinary day. Then the unthinkable happened! When I pulled into the driveway after having gone to the Y and Publix, there was a black snake slithering across the driveway! Oh, I almost puked. So my silly first reaction was to push the button to close the garage door. If I hadn’t done that, it probably would have kept slithering to the other side of the yard. But I guess the noise spooked it and it slithered right into the garage.
So I left the car running with the kids and groceries inside, grabbed the shovel and went over to our makeshift work bench. The snake was freaking out and just slithering wherever it could go, but was too fast for me to chop its head off! The way the makeshift workbench is set up, the snake was able to hide out under a board out of my reach. I probably tried to get it to come out for 10 minutes or more. Then I realized that the kids needed to get out of the car and so did the groceries.
So I unloaded all of that and went back outside to figure out what to do with the snake. After conferring with Daniel on the phone, I decided to trap the snake by stuffing the hole he was in with towels. I even put heavy cans of paint on top of the towels so the snake couldn’t get out. And like a dummy, I closed the garage door because I didn’t want someone breaking into our house.
Here’s what my trap looked like:
Then at naptime, Daniel called to ask me how things were going. So I confidently walked out into the garage, around the car and immediately started freaking out. I told Daniel that I had to call him back. Again, my first instinct was to open the garage door. This freaked him out again and he went back into the work bench area, but in a different section this time. So I took my car out of the garage and began my snake stakeout! I got a chair and the ax and waited! That stupid thing poked his head out of his hole at least 5 times and eventually ducked back under the board the same amount of times. So again after conferring with Daniel, I proceeded to cover his new hole with… wait for it… duct tape!!! And here’s the picture of my second trap!
Later in the day, again after talking to Daniel on the phone, we decided that I should try pouring gasoline into the crack that you can see just in front of the duct tape above. So I did, not realizing that the gas might interfere with the adhesive on the tape. And then the tape started moving! Oh man, did that gross me out something awful. But the snake couldn’t seem to peek its head out from under the tape, so I lifted it with the tip of my ax head. And I saw the snake stuck on the tape. Again, I was grossed out, so I put those paint cans on top of the tape and waited for Daniel to come home. Luckily, he made it home before 11 tonight!
So when he got home, he reluctantly pulled up the tape with ax in hand and this is what we found!
I think we were both prepared for the thing to suddenly jump off the tape and wriggle up our legs or something, but it was as dead as a doornail! After convincing Daniel not to throw the thing into the bushes again (now that’s a whole other blog post and it’s a whole lot grosser), the tape and snake are now in the garbage can waiting for pickup tomorrow! So like I said… duct tape really does fix any situation!
Nothing much February 17, 2009
Nothing much is going on around here. Well, there’s the whole issue with our HOA, but that’s a story for another time! Instead, I’ll just leave you with some more scrapbook pages I’ve done recently.
Counting February 6, 2009
Jack surprised me yesterday by counting all the way to 12! He’s known bits and pieces of number sequences, but has never counted all the way from 1. Then he started pulling blocks out of the bucket and counting them. He only got to about 4with actually counting them, but I thought that was pretty good. For some reason, it took Amelia a long time to realize that you can actually count items instead of just reciting numbers.
Do you know the muffin man? February 1, 2009
No, not the one who lives on Drury Lane, but the one who lives on Hampshire Bay! Jack LOVES muffins! Here is a picture of him from Thanksgiving day eating a muffin I had made for breakfast.
One day he saw me taking some muffins out of the oven and screamed his head off for them until they were cool enough to eat! All the while screaming, “Muppins, muppins” because that’s what he calls them.
Yesterday, he wandered away from me and later I found that the three muffins that had been on the counter on a paper towel were all laying on the kitchen floor with bites taken out of all 3 of them. It looked like a rat had come and nibbled bits out of each muffin. Pretty funny.
And as a bonus, here’s a picture of Jack doing his “angry eyes.”
