Not many people enjoy snakes more than I do, but I have to say, even I would not be happy to have one fall on me out of nowhere before I knew what it was. My story along those lines involves a cat house we built on the back of our home years ago, with a kitty door going out to it. A little verandah for our indoor cats, so they could lay on the cat shelves out there and enjoy the fresh air. Unfortunately, it wasn't screened in, but rather, enclosed with a wide mesh wire fencing. This meant that lizards and snakes and many other creepy crawlies could take short cuts right through it. (Though why anything would WANT to cut through a small enclosed area with three large cats hanging out in it is beyond me.) Suffice it to say, many snakes were cat nabbed and carried proudly back through the cat doors over the years. My husband at the time had a phobia about them, and would end up standing on the chairs or the sofa hollering at me to come get the snake (which was almost NEVER injured in any visible way) and take it outside. It was a funny sight. But he got the last laugh. I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night once and stepped right on top of a black racer in my bedroom...in my bare feet...in the dark! There was MUCH screaming and hollering and hopping about coming from ME that time! This one was injured, but definitely still thrashing about. *shiver* THAT will wake you up right quick! Marcia

Its definitely a racer. Probably an Everglades racer as dayby day suggests.

Good evening, everyone! What a treat to come back and find 4 new posts. You made my day! I really enjoyed reading about your treasures. Thanks so much for sharing with everyone. I've purged so often over the years that I'm amazed I have anything left, but those special things have a way of hiding out from me so that I don't do anything foolish with them. LOL I had a good workout, then came home to do piddling stuff around here. I finished the last book in a series by Gary Chapman and Catherine Palmer. I hated reading the last chapter because I knew that would be it since it was only 4 books, Spring through the following Winter. If you're ever in the mood for a just-because-it-feels-cozy kind of book, I highly recommend these. My next book is "The Memory Keeper's Daughter" that a friend loaned me. I'm sure I'm probably the last one to read it. Dinner is cooking, so I have a little play time here. I had leftover chicken breasts and leftover whole wheat spaghetti and creamed spinach, so I threw together a kind of chicken florentine or chicken spaghetti kind of casserole, all basically WW/Core and using up all our leftovers! Hubby gets the 1/2 cup of leftover mashed potatoes on the side, and we'll both have garden salads. Marci, happy first day of school tomorrow! I hope your assistant works out great. Jan, I drink green tea drinks all the time, especially before working out because I read in a Woman's World magazine recently that it maximizes your workout. Hey, I'll do anything to get double the workout! Raeanne, love your sense of humor! Suzanne, I've been keeping Sweet Pea's photo on my end table and keeping healing thoughts for him going everytime I look at it. Dee, I have my mom's last wedding band that my dad gave her for their 25th anniversary. I wear it whenever I go somewhere nice and think about how I'm taking Mom with me in spirit! She used to be a great Canasta player, so maybe she'll send me some good strategy if I wear it to the next game. :-) Well, hubby's home, so I'd better scoot. Wishing you all a peaceful evening and a happy Thursday!

When an old dog who has chronic kidney disease insists he must go outdoors now, you must drop everything and take him out. If you don't, you'll find yourself mopping up the floor. There's none of that "wait a minute and I'll take you out". Nope, he is a little dictator (unwittingly, perhaps) now---one sharp bark and I drop everything and take him out because I know the consequences if I do not react quickly enough. Kim, No lady bugs around? Sometimes you can attract them to your garden (if they are in the general area) by making wheast. Or, even just by spraying a sugar-water mix on your plants. Here's some recipes for these: Recipes To Help Attract Beneficial Insects This morning I did a quick walk-thru of my garden to see how it has been doing without me and I did see some ladybugs (real American ladybugs, lol, not the Asian ones) hard at work on some of the watermelon plants. Sometimes in extreme July/August heat, the ladybugs seem to lie low---and who can blame them? I always wonder if they are up in some shadier spots just trying to survive the heat without subjecting themselves to full sun and full heat. Jennifer, It is great that Stella knows how to have a good time, but unfortunate that she chooses to have that good time in the garden. I've been leaving my garden gate open every day so the chickens can go in there now if they wish. Now that they can go into it, they no longer want to. I guess they've been excluded for so long that they've forgotten that good times can be found in the garden. Or, now that's there's no low-hanging tomatoes or melons for them to enjoy, maybe they just aren't motivated to go in there and eat grasshoppers and such. I'm glad you don't have a stress fracture because I know the time you'd need to stay off of it would drive you crazy. Still, take care and let it heal. The older I get, the more prone I am to catch the flu. I hardly ever got it in my 30s and 40s and, when I did, recovered quickly. These last 5-7 years, I seem like I get it every year and the recovery is harder every year. All my life I've heard that peoples' immune systems weaken as they age, and I see that now in my own life---at the age of only 59. By the time I'm 70, I'll have to hibernate at home during cold and flu season because I won't have any immune system left at all. On the other hand, an immune system is a funny thing. Last year, nationwide, a lot of young people in their 20s, 30s and early 40s died after they went sepsis during a case of the flu. When you go into sepsis like that, it normally is caused by your immune system over-reacting to an infection, which in these cases was the flu. What is it about the flu last year that caused young peoples' immune systems to overreact and throw them into sepsis shock? This sort of thing puzzles me. Obviously we want to have healthy immune systems but maybe not such robust immune systems that they overreact and kill you. It is such a conundrum. My garden is dry and pitiful looking, as the drought continues and no more rain has fallen here. It is what it is. August in a drought year is a tough month as it is, and the rain we got a while back was nice, but not drought-busting type rainfall. The rain made plenty of weeds sprout though. I see lots of morning glory, bindweed and foxtail grass to deal with---that will be next week as long as I don't encounter any snakes in there between now and then. Eileen, I bet it was the flu. I'm just basing that on the fact that there's low levels of flu cases being reporting across the country in August. My BIL in PA had it two weeks before I did. I did an uncommonly high amount of flu research while sick---trying to figure out if there was anything more I could learn about it that I didn't already know. One thing I learned is that it is not uncommon for the cough to persist for up to 4 weeks after you've otherwise recovered from the flu. I didn't know that, but I do remember that last year, the cough did persist for an uncommonly long time. Just take care of yourself and get your energy back. Last week I tried to do too much too soon and promptly relapsed, so this week I've been trying to take it easier on purpose so I don't do that again. Larry, I'm glad you're finally going to be able to go and get that PET scan. I hope all the news is good after it all is done. I love the deer but they sure can be destructive. What I've noticed is that when I plant stuff on purpose for them---like one of those fall and winter deer plot mixes, they ignore it. If I plant stuff for us, well, that's what they want to eat. It drives me crazy. Have y'all been watching the weather? Are some of you still getting rain? I've been out to lunch, weather-wise, not watching very carefully, while sick. Now I'm starting to pay attention again, and am not happy to realize we're back to being hot and dry, hot and dry, hot and dry. We had a couple of cool mornings earlier in the week and they sure were nice but I didn't even feel like sitting outdoors and enjoying them because of all that smoke in the air. It doesn't seem as smokey today, but then tomorrow is supposed to be really windy. I hope the wind blows away any lingering smoke, and not that it blows more smoke down to us, which I guess always is possible. Hurricane Lane has been a surprise. The last time I paid any attention to it was probably early last week and it was way out there in the Pacific as a topical depression, not expected to come within hundreds of miles of Hawaii, and not expected to do much of anything. So, fast forward a week or more, and I click on Dr. Masters Wunderground Blog maybe on Tuesday night and discover it is a Cat 4 headed towards Hawaii. By the next morning it was a Cat 5, but it now is weakening as it encounters wind shear and is back to a Cat 4 again. Still, they are going to get tons of rain if nothing else. I suppose that rain is usually good, but not when it comes in feet instead of inches. I hope everyone there stays safe and above the flood waters and out of any potential mudslides. I would joke and say why can't we ever get a hurricane here to bust our droughts, but you know, we got the remains of Hurricane Erin once, and also of Hermine, and the flooding was awful, so I won't even go there.... Have a good day everyone. Dawn