Life in a Dallas suburb

Indulge me a bit… I thought of this post ON Halloween, but I’m just now getting to post it!

The top 5 scary things about Halloween at my house:

5. The costumes available for eight year old boys.  Austin chose the old stand-by: The Grim Reaper.  He’s not smiling because “Grim Reapers don’t smile!”

4.   The amount of candy that is collected by an eight year old boy in less than an hour.  (No picture – trust me, it’s a huge pile.)

3.  The sugar rush the rats at the city dump had after trash pickup in our neighborhood.  (Our pile is SIGNIFICANTly smaller now).

2.  The number of non-neighbor infants trick or treating in our neighborhood.  I’m still floored at the ability of those moms to steer the stroller and manage their large bag of candy they were collecting for their infants.

and the number one scary thing about Halloween at our house… 

1.  The speed at which our carved pumpkins turned into a pile of moldy mush.  (Again – trust me – you DON”T want to see this picture!)

Over the weekend, our satellite receiver went kaput, so for a meer $25 we had the HD satellite put in. I can’t even begin to describe the chaos that was my house during the four hours that the installer was here, but it got done.  On  his way out the door, the installer tells me he put a signal amplifier in my bedroom and that I shouldn’t unplug it or all three tvs won’t work.  Fine.  It’s behind a largish piece of furniture, so the chances of someone messing with it is slim to none.  That was last Monday. 

Fast forward to Thursday night.  Doug finally gets a chance to sit down in the den and watch some tv.  Lo and behold, our satellite can’t pick up a signal.  Argh!  He calls the satellite company who tells him to call the installer to get him to come out and fix it.  So Doug trying to get in touch with the installer while I’m ranting about why can’t  the satellite company call the installer and get it fixed and customer service these days is so lame and something about their butt and a hole in the ground and on and on.  Doug is worn out trying to juggle all this and I can see it on his face.  I’m feeling really bad for him (but not bad enough to stop ranting) and suddenly I have an inspiration.  I run to the doorway to our bedroom (G-rated here, I promise) and in my best Ellen Griswold voice, whine “Clark!” and flip a light switch.  All of a sudden the satellite receiver starts working in the den!  No Hallelujah chorus, but Doug is dumbfounded.  It is a pure Griswold moment.

As it turns out, the satellite installer plugged the signal amplifier (that thing I wasn’t supposed to unplug)into one of the two plugs controlled by the light switch on the wall.  The light switch was off, so no juice, no satellite signal.  There are so many things about Christmas Vacation that we identify with, we’ll just add this one to the list.

Russ, we checked all the lights, didn’t we?

Maybe you like snakes.  I don’t.  I am alternately fascinated and freaked out about them, but I know I don’t want them around.  So yesterday as I was leaving to run a lunch-time errand, I flipped out when I saw a large one in the corner of the garage.  (My definition of large snake means that it would take more than 10 whacks of a garden hoe to kill it.)  This little one (killed almost two years ago on the patio) only took 8 whacks.  See the marks on the patio?

The ickiest part of the whole spotting it thing was that I only saw PART of the snake – I did not see the head of it. Not knowing where it was “headed”, I got in the car and got out of Dodge.  I eventually got Doug on the phone at work, but my pleas for snake removal were met with “when I get home this evening.”  Granted he works at least 60 minutes from the house, but geez!  Lucky for him there was no sign of the snake when I got home.

Snake – Take 2:  I spot the snake AGAIN as I start to leave to get Austin from school.    This time, I get brave – I can see his head.  I’m guessing that it is a rat snake, and with all the construction around us, I figure I need all the help I can get fighting the mouse/rat population.  So I decide to let it live.   So now I need a plan for snake evac.  Snakes are scared of noise, right?  If I make enough noise on one side, he’ll go the other direction, right?  Well, this theory worked pretty well until the snake realized he couldn’t get out the way he came in BECAUSE OF THE BULGES IN HIS STOMACH!  (Snake 2, Mice 0)  Apparently he had gotten in from in between the bricks and the trim around the garage door, and his lunch wouldn’t fit through the teeny gap.  Now given that the teeny gap is RIGHT NEXT TO the large 2-car widths wide opening, you think he’d head out that massive opening.  You’d be wrong.  He decides to stand (slither?) his ground and try to bite my garden hoe that I’m using to “encourage” him out.  After about a dozen lightening fast strike attempts by the snake, I decide that enough is enough and head off to pick up Austin.

4pm Arrive home with Austin – snake still there. 

5pm Doug gets home – snake still there.  The snake (Or “Embers” as Austin has named him) is now nicely coiled so we can see all parts of him.  Doug removed all items in the corner and uses the hoe to try to encourage him out.  He does manage to get the snake out of the garage, only to have the snake crawl right back in between the bricks and the garage trim from the outside.  (I guess his food had digested enough for him to fit in the crack this way.)  Okay – after trying to pull the snake out without killing it, Doug gives up on that aspect.  The snake is technically out of the garage.  Next mission: prevent the snake from getting BACK in the garage.  Here’s where it gets expensive.  Apparently putting a piece of wood in the way to keep El SnakeO from returning to the garage interior is equivalent to putting it in the way of the garage door.  And when the garage door hits the wood, it will cause the the door to become completely jacked up.  Yes.  All because we were trying to be good environmentalist and not kill a “good” snake.

Realizing our defeat, we all three headed out to football practice surrending the garage to the snake and the jacked up garage door.  When we returned later, the snake had disappeared, but he didn’t fix the garage door when left.  Dined and dashed.  Stupid Snake.

So today we had the garage door fixed to the tune of $130.  Say it with me: $130.  For a rat snake. 

Next time, I’m going at it with the hoe.