It's a baby with a rattle

This is the small one.

This is the big one.


Most people relax and BBQ for the Labor Day holiday, but Joe took the morning and touched up the exterior paint on the house. So helpful. After 30 minutes of being outside he comes inside and said,"Guess what? I found a baby with a rattle." Which, in our house, means he found a rattlesnake. Last week Joe accidentally grabbed a rattlesnake that was wrapped up in a bush when he was cleaning the yard. That one was only 2 1/2 feet long and very thin. I go outside and this 2nd snake (in 2 weeks) was HUGE. Like .... huge. It was probably 4 feet long and very thick. (*That tube-like thing hanging out from the back of the snake is actually it's penis. I know .... gross. It's called a hemipenis. I didn't know this, but apparently rattlesnakes have 2 "arms" on their penis .... who knew?) We are not see-it-kill-it people .... unless we happen to see a scorpion and then we apologize in advance to it for what we are about to do, explain that we have a crawling baby then smash it with a shoe. I called around and since we don't have a "subscription" to the fire department it would cost us $350 for them to remove it or $75 for a private company to come and take the snake away.

Joe decides that he "can take him" and gets pumped up to do-it-yourself poisonous rattlesnake removal.

Joe got a long paint roller, a garbage can and his wife to video his rattlesnake catching event. (This video available on my Facebook).It probably only took about 10 minutes, but he got the snake into a tall garbage can, lid taped on top and he released it away from the house near the neighbors ;) GO JOE!

In other, less exciting news we have doves. I know it is not earth shattering, but we have lived in our house for nearly 4 years and every single year these dodo-bird doves try to build a nest in the tower above the front door. The ledge is too narrow and the nest inevitably falls and the eggs are lost. I asked Joe to make something so the foundation of the nest would be more secure. If you look closely you can see that he wrapped twine around some sticks and actually drilled the sticks into the pillar so they would never fall out. Yesterday we looked and there was a happy family of 3 sitting up there. I was SO thrilled after all these years to have a baby bird in the nest. Yeah for Doves!