And Yet Another Snake

I've been full-on working on getting my classroom ready for the start of school.  Next Thursday is our Back to School Night, so the pressure's on.  I'm still not at all sure how or what I'll be teaching this coming year -- but I did get my desk cleaned out!

Bruce and I are still chipping away at cleaning things up the area around the house -- I'm beginning to think that what we need is a crew of three strong workers to put in three hours a day.  For the rest of their/our lives.  No matter how much we rake, haul, prune, shovel, water, weed and wack there's always so much more.  Well, onward ho!

While cleaning out the kennel we used for last year's meat chickens, I lifted up a plywood board that had fallen.  Underneath was curled an annoyed little rattlesnake.  We glared at each other for a moment and then I gently laid down the board again.  This made for the fourth snake of the season, so dealing with it has become routine.  I went over to where Bruce was leaf blowing in front of the chicken coop and tapped him on the shoulder.  He turned off the blower, I said "Snake" and he had the little guy caught with the snake tongs and dropped in a lard bucket within 5 minutes.

Bruce and the snake left for the rock wall down the road where we released the other three snakes and was back home again ten minutes later with the empty bucket.

Then he went back to leaf blowing and I finished cleaning out that kennel.  

I'm hoping that this is the last of the clutch that I assume hatched out here.  I will say, though, that we have a lot fewer mice in the barn this summer...