I saw this on facebook this morning. :)

Every Texas home is incomplete without this one thing.

GARDEN SNAKES CAN BE DANGEROUS..

by Trey Preston.

Snakes also known as Garter Snakes (Thamnophissirtalis) can be dangerous Yes, grass snakes, not rattlesnakes. Here’s why.

A couple
in Sweetwater, Texas, had a lot of potted plants. During a recent cold
spell, the wife was bringing a lot of them indoors to protect them from a
possible freeze.

It
turned out that a little green garden grass snake was hidden in one of
the plants. When it had warmed up, it slithered out and the wife saw it
go under the sofa.

She let out a very loud scream.

The
husband (who was taking a shower) ran out into the living room naked to
see what the problem was. She told him there was a snake under the
sofa.

He
got down on the floor on his hands and knees to look for it. About that
time the family dog came and cold-nosed him on the behind. He thought
the snake had bitten him, so he screamed and fell over on the floor.

His wife thought he had had a heart attack, so she covered him up, told him to lie still and called an ambulance.

The attendants rushed in, would not listen to his protests, loaded him on the stretcher, and started carrying him out.

About
that time, the snake came out from under the sofa and the Emergency
Medical Technician saw it and dropped his end of the stretcher. That’s
when the man broke his leg and why he is still in the hospital.

The
wife still had the problem of the snake in the house, so she called on a
neighbor who volunteered to capture the snake. He armed himself with a
rolled-up newspaper and began poking under the couch.. Soon he decided
it was gone and told the woman, who sat down on the sofa in relief.

But
while relaxing, her hand dangled in between the cushions, where she
felt the snake wriggling around. She screamed and fainted, the snake
rushed back under the sofa.

The neighbor man, seeing her lying there passed out, tried to use CPR to revive her.

The
neighbor’s wife, who had just returned from shopping at the grocery
store, saw her husband’s mouth on the woman’s mouth and slammed her
husband in the back of the head with a bag of canned goods, knocking him
out and cutting his scalp to a point where it needed stitches.

The
noise woke the woman from her dead faint and she saw her neighbor lying
on the floor with his wife bending over him, so she assumed that the
snake had bitten him. She went to the kitchen and got a small bottle of
whiskey, and began pouring it down the man’s throat.

By now, the police had arrived.
Breathe here…

They
saw the unconscious man, smelled the whiskey, and assumed that a
drunken fight had occurred. They were about to arrest them all, when the
women tried to explain how it all happened over a little garden snake!

The police called an ambulance, which took away the neighbor and his sobbing wife.

Now,
the little snake again crawled out from under the sofa and one of the
policemen drew his gun and fired at it. He missed the snake and hit the
leg of the end table. The table fell over, the lamp on it shattered and,
as the bulb broke, it started a fire in the drapes.

The
other policeman tried to beat out the flames, and fell through the
window into the yard on top of the family dog who, startled, jumped out
and raced into the street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid it and
smashed into the parked police car.

Meanwhile,
neighbors saw the burning drapes and called in the fire department. The
firemen had started raising the fire ladder when they were halfway down
the street. The rising ladder tore out the overhead wires, put out the
power, and disconnected the telephones in a ten-square city block area
(but they did get the house fire out).

Time
passed! Both men were discharged from the hospital, the house was
repaired, the dog came home, the police acquired a new car and all was
right with their world.

A
while later they were watching TV and the weatherman announced a cold
snap for that night. The wife asked her husband if he thought they
should bring in their plants for the night.And that’s when he shot her.