Emma, We always have had snakes here in plentiful amounts, but then our back property line sits only about a quarter-mile from the Red River, so it would be shocking if we didn't have oodles of snakes. I can link the rise and fall of our snake population more to the river itself than to the weather. After a big rainfall year like 2007 when there was widespread flooding, we hardly saw any snakes at all whatsoever for the next year.(it was terrific!) Then,after almost 13" of rain in one day and widespread flash flooding in April 2009, we didn't see many snakes at all until thef following spring. I suspect the flooding had made a big dent in their population in both 2007 and 2009. 2010 seemed normal. In 2011, we saw relatively few. Perhaps the heat had a negative impact on the survival of their young. In every summer, as it gets hotter and drier and the ponds and creeks dry up, the snakes we do have will move to any available body of water, including a bird bath or small water lily pond, but I don't think we have more....I just think they venture closer to us humans out of necessity. I always think that we have too many snakes, but then the one neighbor to our W/NW whose home sits between us and the Red River has vastly more snakes than we do. I am glad his property is there as a buffer between our place and the river. He can sit on his front porch and shoot snakes night after night after night and still more and more keep coming. Bre, With repeated efforts, the kids will learn. Country kids learn at an early age that there are some things they need to be really careful about. Sometimes, though I think we forget to look at things from their perspective. When our son was dating a young woman who had a little girl who was then just a toddler, she and I built a Peter Rabbit potager garden. We spend oodles of time playing in the dirt, reading the simplest versions of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and planting similar crops in our Peter Rabbit Garden. She was so excited, and so was I, but for different reasons. We had a darling little picket fence, but we had completely different attitudes towards the fence and the Peter Rabbit Garden. I wanted to close the gate to keep the real cottontail rabbits out of the Peter Rabbit Garden, but she wanted to leave the gate open at night so that Peter Rabbit and his friends could come into the garden and eat! Clearly, we had different ideas about the purpose of the garden, and this experience taught me to remember to look at things from a 2 or 3 year-old child's perspective and not just my own. Be sure your hoe is sharpened so that it will chop a snake in half. A dull hoe won't do the job and you do not want to have an angry snake that feels threatened coming at you. We see brown snakes all the time here. They just turn and run. I believe they are as startled by seeing us as we are by seeing them. Oops, I forgot to link the website earlier that has photos of snakes of Oklahoma....I'll link it now. Occasionally we have lost a cat to snakebite but not a dog, and my little cat, Spots, who is sitting here on the couch beside me as I type this has been bitten twice. She rarely goes outside any more....though it is hard to guess if her love of sleeping on the sofa in the air-conditioned house is related to past bad experiences with snakes or not. One cat almost died, but then survived. He was almost comatose for almost two weeks from a copperhead biite to his groin area, and still bears the scar. He is the only cat we've had that had the copper rash in the area where he was bitten. One of our neighbors who was bitten by a copperhead had a similar rash near the site of her bite. One of our neighbors had an old little dog named Rascal when we moved here. He might not have been a full-blooded rat terrier, but his appearance was somewhat like a rat terrier. That was the bravest little dog I've ever seen. He completely hated snakes. When he saw one, he'd catch it, shake it a certain way to break its neck, and then would skin it and eat it. He was a completely amazing little dog. He lived to a pretty old age and then just disappeared. We always assumed a coyote or something got him. The cougar encounters were quite unsettling at the time. I always thought it would be cool to see one "in the wild" until I actually sow one. When we were in our pickup truck going someplace and saw two walk across the road in front of us, that was cool. Having one roar at me? Not cool. Having one in the yard twice in one year, and right by my garden. Not cool. I have to be honest and say that for a couple of months after those two incidents, I only went to my garden to harvest and then immediately came back inside. Being out there made my skin crawl. For a couple of years after that, every time I walked down to the spot where I saw the second one, which was about 12' from me when I first noticed it, my body had an involuntary reaction.....heart pounding, fear, that fight-or-flight feeling. I was worried that my brain would never "get over" that experience and always would feel creeped out, but eventually I got to where I could be in that area without having the feeling of fear. Your location sort of guarantees you'll see lots of wildlife and most of it will be a wonderful experience. I love seeing all the wildlife as long as I am in a location where I don't feel like they can get to me. Just today we had a turtle laying eggs under the plum tree (she lays her eggs there every year) and a wild turkey walking up and down the driveway and all around my garden. The turkey has been here for weeks. It is a male looking for a female and apparently can't find one, so it does the mating dance for my chickens who stand in their fenced chicken room and stare at it like it is an idiot, why their roosters just all puffed up and upset and stomp around trying to scare off the turkey. Usually one of our more bold cats will start walking towards the turkey and it then will vanish into the woods. I enjoy having that sort of wildlife around, but don't like seeing the predators too much. Nothing flusters my son, who is a professional firefighter or my husband, who is a cop, but the cougar incidents came close. Of course, they were inside the house either watching TV or on their computers each time and missed the really exciting part. Both of them have shot their share of snakes and skunks. The gators are rare, but not unheard of. Sometimes they are found in or very near the Red River. Sometimes they have made themselves at home in a stock tank. It always makes the news specifically because it is so rare. The year before we bought our land, which was 1997, a gator was found in a stock tank on property about a half mile from ours. On the day I drove up from Fort Worth so I could be here on the day that the electric co-op guys were installing our poles and electric lines and our water co-op was putting in our water line, the guys working here warned me that two different people----one in town in Marietta and one right here on our road---had been bitten by snakes that day. With one of them, the snake wouldn't let go of the person, so the medics had to cut the body off the snake and take the person to the ER with the snake still attached to the person's body. That was a creepy image. Those utility workers wanted to be sure I understood just how many snakes we have around here, so that I would be careful. I appreciated so much that they were so concerned. (I also was horrified when I thought about how we had walked all over that property with the real estate guy when we were considering buying it....we walked through Johnson grass in the bar ditch that was head high, we walked all over the woods, the fields, up and down the creeks, etc. We went places I never go now because there's always so many snakes there! Live and learn..... We have bats every summer. I love seeing them. They are one thing you do need to teach your kids not to touch, for obvious reasons. They usually come out around twilight and, at least at our place, they always flock to the outdoor security light looking for bugs. I love to sit out in the lawn chairs and watch them. Discovering the bat activity here was a really neat surprise. Feral hogs are very dangerous and can kill a person. A couple of ranchers west of Marietta had some very close calls with them and narrow escapes from them a couple of years ago. I usually hear them before I see them, and I always go inside when I see them. Well, once I did go into the woods looking for them (what was I thinking?) and found them in the creek....they often travel the creeks, which often have only very shallow water in them....and then I hightailed it right back to the house. The first time a feral hog ran out into the road in front of me, it was so big that I was sure I was seeing a hippo. I see them more often when we are out at wildfires in remote locations than when we are at home on our own property. I don't like seeing them. They tend to be really aggressive. I see coyotes a lot, and have had our dogs get in fights with them, which scares me. My dogs are pet mutts, not livestock guardian dogs and pet dogs often get the worst end of the deal when they tangle with coyotes. There is nothing worse than hearing a fight to the death between a coyote and dog and thinking that it might be your dog. It wasn't....but the sound of it all was so terrifying that a neighbor came running from about 100 yards away to check on me because he thought the coyote fight was on our property....it might have been, but it was west of the house in a dense woodland....and he and I both knew all our dogs were home and accounted for. You cannot be a gardener and avoid wildlife because it will be out there with you and your children. Most of the time, you'll love seeing it. Even the animals I personally find frightening are still something that it is thrilling to see....after you get over the fear. Most coyotes turn and run. I've had more trouble with deer that want to pick a fight with me than with coyotes. About 90% of the time, the coyotes turn and run. We had trouble with a couple of coyotes for a few months that looked like cross-breeds between coyotes and domestic canines. A neighbor called them coyote hybrids and warned me that they had enough domestic dog in them that they didn't fear humans like normal coyotes do, and I sure did learn that for myself. I love living here but I've told Tim many times that if I every encounter a bear near my garden, I'm packing up and moving back to Texas. I wouldn't actually do it, but at that point it would seem like a great idea. We rarely have wildlife in our garden any more because we kept raising the fence higher and higher to keep the wildlife out. Now both the front garden and the back garden have fences 8' tall, and both have two gates....because you need a way out if a wild thing comes in one gate. The worst sound I've ever heard is the rattle of a rattlesnake. I always freeze in my tracks and try to determine which direction the rattle is coming from so I can go in the opposite direction. The closest I've ever had a venomous snake to me was a pygmy rattler about two inches from my hand. When I saw it, I instantly and instinctively did a backwards somersault (I was crouching low to the ground before I saw it) to get away from it....and I was glad no one was around to see that odd movement. It was in late February or early March when the snakes usually are not out and about. I have seen snakes out in every month except January, though we usually see them only from about March or April through November. Some breeds of snakes are very aggressive, but others are a lot more passive and would rather flee than stay there and fight you. I try to give them a chance to flee and get away. All my neighbors will come over and shoot a snake for me, and sometimes more than one will come and I will think to myself "they are having too much fun with this.....:". I appreciate them though, and think we have the absolute best neighbors in the world. It is one of the reasons I love living here. On the page linked below, click on the photo gallery to see the various snakes featured there. There are 46 kinds of snakes in OK, but only 7 of them are venomous. At our house, brush piles and compost piles are prone to have snakes lying around them in the summer months, so I pile on the compostable materials, but I never turn the pile and I only remove compost from it in winter. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Snakes of Oklahoma

In my state, 25% of bats carry the rabies virus. That's not good odds, when you wake up with a bat in your bedroom. There have been enough cases of rabies from bats where they could not figure out if the victim was bitten or just touched the saliva or something else. If rabies wasn't fatal once the symptoms start showing, it would be a different story. But the only way to prevent dying from rabies if you have been infected is to get the shots soon enough. Last week, we found a bat in the kitchen sink one morning. Because we sleep with the bedroom doors open, the bat could have been flying in our rooms as we slept. Therefore, it needed to be tested for rabies. A call to the state department of Public Health brought a Fish and Game official to our door less than two hours later. We had the results of the rabies test four hours after that. (It was negative. However the bat was infected with white nose disease, which is killing off a lot of bats in our area.) At no point did anyone from the state suggest that we were fear-mongering or making a mountain out of a molehill. Everyone was polite, concerned and determined to act fast. They took the bat seriously. So did I. There's no need to panic if you find a bat in your house. But there is a need to take it seriously and get it checked for rabies if anyone was asleep in any of the rooms it was in.

"Decades of visious and unprovoked attacks cry out for the removal of this threat from society. How many mutilated faces, mangled limbs, butchered pets, and even human deaths does it take to convince even the slowest dullard?" By that arguement, we should ban automobiles, or at least large trucks, because those have caused millions of those kinds of sitiuations. And airplanes. And other things. I am a proponent of Ban the Deed, not the Breed. Have been for a long time. However, there has never been a population of dogs like the present pit bull population. There have never been so many people intend on breeding a dog capable of such vicious instinct on such a large scale. Pedigreed pits have no such instinct. Americam Staffordshire terriers are not evil dogs. Cane corsos are bred to be evil dogs, for specific reasons. I used a lab/chow mix and currently have a GSD/chow mix as a guard dog. They were/are evil in the situations for which they are trained. I had a lab/pit mix. Not by choice. I got the lab/border collie mix(as I was told by the dam's owner) as an 8 week old pup. He was trained quite well. He was totally predictive when under control. In the house or yard or on leash. My granddaughter could piut him on his back with a grunt and a poiunted finger when she was 15 months old. I could play tug of war(No one but me, since he was storng enough to hurt even me) and say quietly No in the middle of a tussle and he stopped NOW. Immediately. Totally. Dopped the rope. People could not believe how well he was trained. But, when he got loose----and I spent over a thousand dollars in trying to contain him----he was a totally different dog. I talked to pit rescue folks and others. They all agreed, usually regretfully, he was dangerous. He attaked almost anything that moved if he was on his own and I was not chasing him. So, I had him put down. If we comdemn the bad pits, we need to condemn the bad breeders/trainers/owners.

Some things to do: 1. Shut off the alarm clock. 2. Make a list of all the places you'd like to see in the US, and then prioritize those. Selec the top few plan to go there. Prime sightseeing place are National Parks. Take a camera. 3. Long forgotten relatives: You can visit relatives and friends you have not seen in years and get re-aquainted. Combine a trip to their house with sightseeing along the way. 4. Take up a hobby: This may require several tries until you find someting you like. Consider genealogy. Genealogy and visiting relatives are good fits. During my working life, I had regarded genealogy as something dull and and something my old unmarried aunt might pursue. Not so! You'll find that you will have to develop your best dectective skills to be good at it. When you visit relatives, they can be very helpful and it gives you a reason to search out family reunions. Tracing my family tree has become a lesson in early US history and the development of this country. I hated history when I was in grade school, but it becomes a facinating subject when you begin to connect you family tree with historical events. For example, I discovered that I had an ancestor who owned a 420 acre plantation in Virginia when it was a colony in the 1700s; Five of his grandsons were in the Revolutionalry War; In the next generation, one of them fought under Andrew Jackson in the Florida War, and then later was a Captain in the Black Hawk War in Illinois. Another served in the Mexican War (1846-1848). This was a lot of military action for a family who waw not militarily inclined, but were mostly farmers and settlers. 5. Volunteering is good. You do have to be careful, though, because you no longer will have a corporation and their lawyers to stand between you and law suits. I found a number of organizations in my area who were looking for people to provide transporation, but were not insuring your activity. The repurcussions can be large, for example, suppose you are transporting a juvenille and another vehicle crashes into your car injuring or killing your passenger. In this suit-happy environment, you will need good insurance to cover the situation. 6. Inquire at your local hospital. These often have need of volunteer help. 7. If you are qualified, consider substitue teaching. 8. If you belong to a religious orgaization, now is your chance to pay back by fulfilling a needed service. 9. Handy with tools? Consider working with "Habitat for Humanity". 10. Have single relative with a child nearby? Consider baby sitting the young one a few days a week. 11. Have an elderly or disabled neighbor? Offer to clear their sidewalk of snow in the winter. 12. Become a Boy Scout Leader. 13. Join your local Lion's Club. 14. And then, there are self improvement courses at your local vocational/Trade School. You might find that you are qualified as instructor for some of these. If you have completed college level courses in Calculus on the way to your degree, very likely, you can teach a variety of math classes at a vocational school. *********** You do have the choice to take it easy for 6 months while you explore and think about what you would like to do. Yeah, you can take 6 months off. Your main problem will be to maintain your physical well being. Do not lay around during a slack period; Do enough physical activity to stay in shape. Somewhere along the way, you may come to the realization that this is God given opportunity, and now you have a chance to do someting with your life other than put food on the table. Now is the chance to view your existence from a different perspective and act accodingly. Get bored - Nah!