Carol, That poor woman! A snake outside is at least somewhat expected, but a snake inside would be a shock. One of Chris' friends in high school lived on a horse ranch and found a rattlesnake in her bedroom one night when she was barely a teenager. I cannot imagine that happening to me when I was a teenager. I would have been hysterical. I don't care for the snakes, but the only ones that upset me are the venomous ones, and then also the rat snakes and chicken snakes that get into our chicken coops and eat eggs and half-grown or smaller poultry. I even kinda like the Rough Green Tree Snakes, but from a distance....not up too close and personal. As a side not, if a snake dies in your garden, you wouldn't believe how quickly it can stink up the place! Generally you'll find it by smell long before you see it. We do live in an area that has wildlife that is far too abundant and I don't think that will ever change. There's just too much wild river bottom land around us that hosts all sorts of wildlife, and drought drives them up here to higher ground....and so do floods....so we're gonna have them around either way. We need them, unfortunately, to control the rodents that live in the wild, but that doesn't mean I want to be stepping on them when I'm in the yard or garden. I am not surprised snakes seek refuge indoors, but to find a lot of them in a house would be terrifying. One of our neighbors told us a few years ago about someone he knew who finally cut down a really big old tree that had been dead quite a while and likely was hollow. When they cut the main trunk near the ground, dozens of rattlesnakes came slithering out. The way he described it, some of those people likely set a new land speed record in their haste to run as far away from the snakes as they could and as quickly as possible. Lisa, What an awful story (and a stinky one too)! Back in the awful wildfire year of 2008-09 (not be confused with the awful wildfire years of 2003, 2005-06 or 2011-12, lol), we were at a fire in the river bottom lands east of I-35 fighting a huge fast-moving fire when we abruptly were paged to a fire well west of I-35 because a fire there was very close to a house. Tim and I raced to that new fire as fast as we could, and when I opened the fire truck door to jump out, there was a very stinky big pit bull waiting there for me. Not being particularly fond of pit bulls that smell skunky, I froze where I was until the resident came and got the dog. She said the dog had cornered a skunk under their house and a pitched and prolonged battle between the two ensued. Apparently her house smelled as much of skunk as the dog did, and then they had the added complication of a fire making everything around smell smokey. Hurray for the leaves! Of course it is a fancy hugelkultur bed in your yard. lol I've never yet seen a fancy one, so maybe you and I are taking liberties with the English language. Every hugelkultur bed I've ever built basically looks like a brush pile with soil and compost and chopped leaves piled on top of it. Not fancy, but a great way to improve soil and recycle 'waste' material that otherwise would either be burnt or hauled to the dump. You never can have too many leaves. The very first hugelkultur bed I built in Fort Worth was beautiful. I spend far too much time digging little trenches and vetically lining up tree branches about 4 to 8" in diameter in rows in those trenches. Then I backfilled with soil to hold them upright. Once the bed was filled, the outer row of branches looked a gorgeous wood edging a flower bed, but really the whole bed was wood too with just some compost and soil added. The flowers I grew there forever after were gorgeous. I was so excited. When I built a hugelkultur bed here in our earliest years, the snakes moved in before I even could finish it. That was the last one I built for a few years. I have continued building them on top of eroded spots in order to fill in the gullies and get something to grow in a gully's bare ground, but have stayed away from them to start garden beds because well, you know, I don't like rodents and snakes! I don't regret moving here to this specific piece of land. It is gorgeous here and I love seeing most of the wildlife. However, we do have about 1000 times as much wildlife as I expected before we moved here, and I expected to see a lot. We also have had some wildlife I never expected to see here. Life is full of surprises. The last couple of weeks the wind here has been bringing down the autumn leaves from the native post oaks. Those leaves normally cling to the trees until at least February. Since we have a winter rye grass lawn that I have to mow anyway, when I mow I end up with a grass catcher full of grass clippings and chopped up oak leaves and the two of them together are wonderful to use as mulch or to add to the garden's compost pile. When I mowed on Friday, I dumped all those grass and leaf clippings into the hay bale beds I'm building north of the barn. I'm going to grow winter squash and pumpkins there so they can run wild and cover every square foot of ground. You know what monsters some of those squash vines can be, so I am relieved to be getting them out of the big garden and into their own spot. I cannot imagine gardening without chopped or shredded leaves. They make the best soil amendment and mulch. I heard rain early this morning. We had about 2 hours of strong thunder and lightning and about 15 or 20 minutes of nice, steady rain. It only left 3/10s of an inch in the rain gauge and I was hoping for more, but we never seem to get that "more" nowadays. We just get a couple of tenths here and a couple there. Larry, I agree with you. I wish we could do that, but it just doesn't work out that way. I've noticed your rainfall comes in inches and mine comes in tenths of inches. No use in me pouting about it, but I'll just say how unfair it is! : ) A lot of us have snow in our forecast for Tuesday, and what I expect will happen is that a lot of y'all will get more snow than we will get down here, if we get any at all. Dawn

Patty, I really don't think I am brave at all. I am a huge chicken and venomous snakes simply terrify me. I just do what I can to survive. I knew, realistically speaking, that we'd have venomous snakes when we moved to a rural area. Knowing it would happen, though, is not the same thing as having it happen! I just don't think I realized how many we'd see some years nor did I understand how much the close encounters would affect me. I am, truly, a big fraidy-cat. I will say that living in the country is not for sissies. Venomous snake encounters are not nearly as frightening as running into a cougar, panther, feral pig, rutting deer or rabid skunk....all of which we've encountered here. And, when you buy formerly "raw" land where local residents have hunted for decades, you WILL encounter poachers on your land and they WILL tell you that they've always hunted on this land and they aren't going to stop now just because you bought the land and put a house on it. And you'd better be armed and ready to defend yourself, and you'd better call the sherriff and report each incident and make it clear you will prosecute, which is only possible if your land is properly posted, by the way. So, not all snakes are animals..... We cleared out all the human snakes found on our property in just a couple of years, but the actual reptiles will be with us forever because we're so close to the Red River. I love, love, love living in the country and there are MANY enjoyable wildlife experiences.....bunnies, birds, fish, turtles, lizards, frogs, toads, squirrels, foxes, bats, dragonflies and damselflies, etc. I've had the great fortune to observe both bald eagles and golden eagles flying overhead or sitting on the tops of haybarns or trees. How wonderful is that? And, 99.9% of the people you encounter are wonderful, but there are a few that are scarey. So, you take the good with the bad and just try to go with the flow. Carol, I am as careful as I can be.....and, truly, I feel like God is watching over me and pray he continues to do so. Once, DS and I stepped into a "bunch" of coppperheads--a mother and 15 or 20 babies.....in the middle of the pasture. We fled from them....they fled from us, and somehow, we weren't bitten. (We were scared almost to death.) Those snakes are why we now mow 8' wide paths through all our pastures, and walk only on those paths!) Another time I was walking through my garden on a chilly fall morning and stepped right over a western diamondback rattlesnake that was coiled up in a path. I DIDN'T EVEN SEE IT! Luckily, DS was with me and said something like "Um, Mom, don't move because there's a rattlesnake right behind you." Of course, I moved.....immediately jumped forward a few feet and turned and stared at that snake, wondering all the while why it didn't strike me. DS went to the house, got a gun....and you know the rest. On yet another occasion, I was raking leaves and picking them up and putting them into a bag to carry them to my compost pile, and I suddenly realized a small pygmy rattlesnake was about 3" from my hand and was poised to strike......and, since I was crouched down low, I simultanouesly droppped the handful of leaves and the bag, and somersaulted backwards to get away. I didn't enter the woods for months after that. Those are a few examples....but there have been many snake encounters, and I honestly believe that it is only through God's grace that I haven't been bitten. For what it is worth, I don't hate all snakes, and I know that without them being here to eat all the field mice and meadow voles, we'd be overrun with rodents. We don't kill non-venomous snakes unless they are in our henhouse eating eggs, keats or chicks. I've even rescued non-venomous snakes which were being attacked by our cats, chickens, dogs or guineas. We have 14.5 acres and we pretty much leave the 10 or 11 wooded acres to the snakes during snake season. Then, in the winter months, we clear pathways and remove brush and enjoy walking through the woods (with dogs and cats tagging along behind us), but we don't kill snakes in the woods....we just avoid them during the 6 months of "snake season". In the couple of acres closest to the house, though, venomous snakes aren't tolerated. And, really, one of my biggest fears ISN'T that a venomous snakes will bite me, but rather that it will get away before we can kill it. If the venomous snakes are near the house, barn or garden, I want them dead. I'm really enjoying the cool weather too. During the cool spell a couple of weeks ago, we got down to 44 or 45 a couple of nights and I was deliriously happy in those early morning temps. I knew, though, it wasn't quite sweater weather, yet, and of course we haven't been that cool again, but it is in the 50s here this morning and that is nice. I know what you're saying about the nuts on the roof of the bunhouse! Our chicken coop and guinea coop are under a pecan tree and their roofs get showered with nuts too. Then the poultry begins squawking and carrying on because they think a predator is trying to come in through the roof. (A previous chicken coop had a fiberglass skylight to let in some light, and a large owl once crashed through that skylight in an effort to get himself some chicken, so their fear is not exactly unwarranted.) Fall is my favorite time of year except for the part about the snakes being up and about....and the knowledge that colder weather is coming. Once we've had several hard freezes and the snakes are denned up for the winter, I enjoy fall even more! I made it through a whole day Friday without running into a snake, so my nerves have calmed down a little. Well, actually, I saw the same snake Friday morning that I saw Thursday night, because we had to lift the bucket, retrieve it and get rid of it. It wasn't as scarey, though, because I KNEW it was there. To me, the most upsetting snake is the big, black, often 6-foot-long rat snakes that get in the chicken coop. I HATE even seeing them at all....even if we are a mile from the house and I see one crossing the road, it just makes me feel ill. I hope I've seen my last venomous snake of the year, but at the same time, I am sure I haven't. Dawn

The state makes some of us wear ankle bracelets for electronic tethered tracking. Well the state doesn’t make you wear it, the state gives you a choice to wear it or go to prison. The free enterprise system gives me a choice too. If I want to stay in the 25% tax bracket, I will continue to keep my Apple 8+ phone on me at all waking hours and charging on my nightstand, right next to my Wilson Combat .45, when I’m asleep. So far, the Apple has created much more mayhem than the .45. It used to be that the biggest got all the work, now in the internet age the work goes to the fastest, hence my conjoined phone. I swear I’m not making this up, but I got out of the shower to take a call yesterday. Apparently the strippers at the club and I are the only ones making money dripping wet and naked. Good thing I bought the waterproof case. If you can’t stand always being a little bit at work, self-employment isn’t for you. I recently enabled my Verizon account to allow me to take calls in Mexico when my wife, Lynn Anne, and I stayed at a fancy 5-star resort as guests of friends. I so wanted a break, but I had a print ad publishing several days before we would return. I considered an answering service, voice mail was out of the question, but soon realized that the peace of mind of answering the leads from my ad immediately would far outweigh the several minutes of vacation interruption. It was, me, my wife, my friends, and my phone, drinking margaritas poolside at 11:00 a.m. I haven’t forgotten that this, like giving every 4th dollar I earn to the government, is a first-world problem. Forty years ago, Lynn Anne and I were living on government food stamps in a cockroach-infested apartment her father owned. Our neighbor, Artie Johnson, was bitching about how much he had to pay in taxes as a railroader. I remember thinking “I wish I had your problem.” We outgrew our poverty and the government got a very nice return on its investment in keeping these future taxpayers fed. I not only pay my and my wife’s cell phone bill, but subsidize 4 other family members. I’m grateful I can, however, judging by how many voice mails I have to leave and how few returned and unsolicited calls I get, they don’t feel the same tethering obligation I do. To prevent inconsiderate ringing, I put my phone on Airplane mode when I’m at the movies or other performances or in an actual airplane. It was disabled while I was being rejected for jury duty for a full day last month, per the judge’s stern orders. I can only think of one circumstance under which I would deliberately let a call go to voicemail, but I’m going to let you guess what that may be. Here’s a hint: My phone will probably be on my nightstand. Sometimes tethering is just too high a price to pay.

Kim, I am sorry it has been such a hard summer and hope things will continue to get better. Making a living in agriculture is so hard---many of the market farmers here in OK have had a horrible year mostly due to uncooperative weather and have been importing organic produce, especially fruit, from other farms in other areas/states so they will have something to sell at their farms or to put into their weekly CSA baskets. Importing produce like that from other organic farms means their profit margin is small to non-existent---I see so many of them appear to be in a struggle to survive and I wonder if every year is this hard for the small farmers here. They have chosen farming because they love it, it is their mission and it is exactly what they want to do----but it seems almost impossible to make a living doing it. Nancy, I do think it is possible Tiny got himself all worked up. I'm glad he is feeling better and I do believe our animals have feelings. I also think there is a mind-body connection between health and illness---not that we can avoid every illness, but rather that we, and our animals, can make ourselves ill at times just by being stressed out. Jennifer, I'm glad Kane continues to heal. I wouldn't surprise me that your melons were carried off by coyotes. Here they will eat them in the field, but also will drag them off (and I have wondered if they drag them off because a car comes by or more coyotes show up or whatever). Back when Fred was younger, like in his early 80s, he'd raise an acre or more of melons, and some years the coyotes got most all of them. Of course, he was growing them on the old home place closer to the river and more remote than where his house is near us, and always had more wildlife issues out there because of it. I used to wonder why he'd plant an acre or two of corn or blackeyed peas or beans, but finally realized he had to plant that many to have enough for him/his family and for the wildlife. If he didn't plant a whole lot, the wildlife got it all. He hasn't had that much trouble with his garden in our neighborhood, but it is near a highly traveled road and likely that helps scare off the wild things. Jen, That will be a houseful of pups. You're on the verge of running a puppy resort? Who doesn't love dogs, though? We had 8 dogs for a long time---some slept in the house and some slept in the garage. We're down to 4 dogs now, all of whom sleep indoors, and 2 of them are very, very old. I don't regret the days when we had 8 dogs, but 4 is a much more manageable number. And, when they all are wound up and barking, it doesn't feel that manageable either, but I love them anyway. Farmgardener, It is the same here. All the beautiful green that the rain brought us is rapidly drying out, turning brown and curling up from stress. It is like the dry wind/heat are dehydrating the plants right in the ground. New brown plants appear daily as they continue to lose the battle to the heat and drought, and I blame this week's hot wind for a lot of that. New cracks are appearing in the ground. We desperately need for good rain to fall to keep the drought from worsening, which it already appears to be doing. We're about back to the point we were before the rain fell a couple of weeks ago. I think if we could get an inch or two of rain next week, that would help a lot, but our local TV mets keep emphasizing that the rain down here will be spotty and not everyone will see the moisture. Oh well, the rain has to return sooner or later. It always does. We have no control over the weather we get. I have no gardening news---it remains hot and dry, hot and dry, hot and dry and is the peak of our venomous snake season here, so I am mostly avoiding the garden for safety reasons. I have noticed the last couple of nights have cooled off a bit more than those that preceded them, but then the temperature and heat index zoom back up high very early in the day still. I'm looking forward to fall weather, whenever it finally arrives, and to cool mornings and cooler days. September can go either way here. I'm voting for cooler and wetter, but that doesn't always happen. I thought about mowing this morning, but there's not really any grass tall enough to mow, and the heat index here already was 95 at 10 a.m. so I'm sort of glad there's no grass tall enough to mow because I'd probably be the fool out there mowing it despite the heat. There's still tons of hummingbirds here so at least there's that, and lots of bees (and wasps, hornets, etc.) and butterflies. At least they are out there enjoying the remaining flowers in the garden. Last week we took the granddaughters to IKEA to look at all the kids' furniture so they could pick out their beds for the spare bedroom (formerly Chris' bedroom when he was a teenager, and in recent years a weight room with a weight machine and treadmill). They looked at everything and told us what they liked the best, so tomorrow Tim and I are going back in the pickup to buy what they chose, haul it home and assemble it. (This also requires moving the weight machine, which is attached to the wall, and the treadmill to the other spare bedroom, so it will be a busy weekend.) I'm excited about having a room set up just for them when they visit and sleep over, which is about every other weekend. They've been referring to our house as "home" for ages and ages, but I think it will feel even more like home to them once they have a space that is just for them. I want them to feel at home versus feeling like a guest. Today I'm going to work on cleaning out the closet in that room so they'll have some closet space too. By the time they come to visit next weekend, they'll have their own room decorated and furnished just for them. It isn't gardening work, and y'all know I'd rather be out in the garden, but at this time of year with the heat and the snakes, I have to sort of give up on gardening and just wait for conditions to improve. Dawn