{"id":194,"date":"2009-09-16T07:52:19","date_gmt":"2009-09-16T12:52:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.annakatedonovan.com\/?p=194"},"modified":"2009-10-01T17:06:52","modified_gmt":"2009-10-01T22:06:52","slug":"no-shoulders-no-thank-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/?p=194","title":{"rendered":"no shoulders? no thank you!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Snakes and I do not get along.\u00a0 I’m not ashamed to say it.\u00a0 Poisonous or not, it doesn’t matter.\u00a0 I don’t like them at all.<\/p>\n

For the most part, I am an animal lover.\u00a0 Dogs.\u00a0 Cats.\u00a0 Cows.\u00a0 Anything that would live in a barn.\u00a0 Birds.\u00a0 Rabbits, squirrels and chipmunks.\u00a0 Lizards.\u00a0 Frogs and turtles.\u00a0 Everything but snakes.\u00a0 I do love the snake in the Jungle Book but somehow I don’t think that counts.<\/p>\n

I’ve had a few good experiences with snakes but that still hasn’t changed my mind.<\/p>\n

When I was in junior high, I volunteered at a now-defunct children’s museum.\u00a0 It was hands on and we had a lot of animals.\u00a0 I went through the extra training so I could get the animals out for visitors to touch.\u00a0 We had an opossum named Sassafras, a hedgehog, a tarantula and an iguana.\u00a0 We also had Sneakers, the snake.\u00a0 I got that snake out all the time.\u00a0 I don’t know how but I held that snake at least twice a week without breaking a sweat.\u00a0 Then again, Sneakers had never bitten anyone that we knew of.\u00a0 Maybe that was enough to calm my fears.<\/p>\n

The next close encounter was just a few summers ago.\u00a0 I was pregnant with my 3rd child and I had planted a huge bed of impatiens and hosta in our back yard.\u00a0 Every morning around 7, I would go out to water the flowers and have a few moments of quiet before everyone else got up.\u00a0 Of course we had a snake that took up residence in that flower bed.\u00a0 I can’t say that I blamed it.\u00a0 It was cool and damp and stayed shady most of the day.\u00a0 Ideal snake grounds.\u00a0 The girls named it Sally (they named every living thing in our yard Sally that summer).\u00a0 Sally and I had an agreement.\u00a0 She knew that every morning I was going to water the flowers.\u00a0 If she didn’t want to get wet, she needed to move.\u00a0 I agreed not to shriek in terror or beat her with the hose as long as I knew where she was.\u00a0 Over the course of the summer, Sally tripled in length and girth and seemed to be content.\u00a0 I was almost happy with the snake.\u00a0 Maybe those pregnancy hormones were kicking in.\u00a0 I felt good that I had provided a happy home for another living thing.<\/p>\n

Despite these good experiences, I still freaked out a little yesterday at the sight of a 4 – 5 foot black snake near the sidewalk.\u00a0 It made my skin crawl.\u00a0 Yuck.\u00a0 I don’t have anything against snakes.\u00a0 I know they will leave me alone.\u00a0 But that doesn’t mean I have to like them….<\/p>\n

Robert doesn’t help either.\u00a0 I walked in the door from the bus stop this morning (after giving myself a headache watching for that stupid black snake all the way home) and Robert announces from our screened porch that he just saw a water moccasin swimming in the lake behind our apartment in the same spot where we feed the ducks.<\/p>\n

Oh, hiss….<\/p>\n

\"our<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Snakes and I do not get along.\u00a0 I’m not ashamed to say it.\u00a0 Poisonous or not, it doesn’t matter.\u00a0 I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[92],"class_list":["post-194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-thoughts","tag-snake"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":217,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions\/217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}