A Cautionary tail revisted

So I got bit by a snake a week or two ago.  After that, the raggedy scab where it bit me kept on snagging on stuff and hurting like a real MF.    I decided to examine the area more closely and found a few tiny splinter-like  dealies sticking out every so slightly from my skin.  They were so small that regular tweezers were not enough.  I petitioned the wife for better ones and she delivered.   What I extracted looked like this:

Can you believe it?  An entire penny lodged in my finger?  Ok – the penny is just there for scale to illustrate how incredibly freaking small a SNAKE TOOTH can be.  I had a couple of these buggers stuck in me and they really hurt.  Case closed.   Let’s talk about what we’ve learned here today:

1. Pennies look big when the camera gets close.
2. Snakes teeth still look pretty small when the camera gets close.
3. It takes about 40 shots to get a good snake tooth photo.

A cautionary tail

I went for a walk in the woods today with the wife and kids.  We found a snake.

We picked him up. (He was just a common black snake, not some venomous killer (of people))… (offspring pictured)

I held the snake

The snake bit me.

Lessons to be learned:

1. Snakes bite
2. It hurts (a little)
3. I would do it again
4. Snakes are rad

Easter oil change trip results in corpse extraction!

So I went to the Wal-Mart Easter morning to get my oil changed.  They used to be the cheapest – $19.99 or so.  Now they charge $30.00 for the cheapest one, which isn’t the best price around, but I’d rather have the opportunity to peruse their latest deeply discounted Chinese injection-molded offerings and enjoy the smug satisfaction that accompanies people watching at Wal-Mart.  Go ahead – cast the first stone.  Besides, anything beats a jiffy-lube waiting room, with its hospital-style wall mounted CRT TV playing “Everybody Loves Raymond” and stale stack of Motor Trend magazines, right?  Right.

After browsing awhile, they mispronounced my name over the P.A. system, asking me to return to the service center.  When I got there, all three automotive department employees were standing there at the counter.  The one guy pipes up and says “We can’t change your oil”.  I immediately imagined some massive repair bill in my near future.   Instead he tells me there’s a dead cat stuck under my engine, and he can’t change my oil on account of cause it might have some kind of disease or something and he doesn’t know where I’m going to find somebody to take it out, but maybe I could start with the dealership but he doesn’t really know, but he did take a picture with his phone and did I want to see it? No thanks, I said.  “We’ve heard of this kind of this thing, but never saw it first hand”,  he said.   They all nodded.  I agreed.  I then purchased my laundry detergent, wished them a happy Easter, walked out to the parking lot, opened my hood and peeked in to see this:

Awesome!  So my whole drive home consisted of me grimacing and wincing over the prospect of prying these grisly remains from the undercarriage of my vehicle.  I toyed with the idea of posting something on Craigslist offering $100 to anyone willing to take the job, but quickly dismissed the idea.  $100 is a lot of money.  I could just pay myself to do it!  Besides, the posting seemed more suitable for Khraigslist that Craigslist…

So I got home, rounded up some rubber gloves (Thanks, Jann), some plastic bags, and grabbed my tools.   I removed the front passenger tire and was greeted with this posthumous posterior view:

I donned my gloves and tried to give it a gentle yank.  No go.  It did feel kind of rigor-mortisey, though.  This allayed some of my wince-worthy fears of juicy, rancid gut spillage upon extraction.  The primary obstruction seemed to be a plastic shield secured by a couple screws.  I removed the screws, shifted the plastic thing and the critter kind of schlumphed out of his hidey-hole a bit.  A visual:

I can’t express how pleased I was to see that the little guy was still in one piece! One seriously jacked up and combustion-roasted piece, but one piece nonetheless.   I was really concerned that I was going to have to bust out the pruning shears or hacksaw to finish the job.  What a relief.  I slid a plastic bag underneath the car to catch him and rolled him out of the wheel well.  It look like this:

This cat is dead, BTW, in case you are unfathomably stupid.  I flipped it over and saw:

Jacked indeed.  I am guessing that the thing was one of the cats living under my parent’s back porch, and crawled up inside my car sometime over the Easter weekend when we visited them.  An ill fated napping choice, indeed.

Last image -  a final resting place:   (Until 5:30am this morning when the trash man came)…

So I hope we can all learn something from this gruesome incident.  What have we learned, you ask?

1. Cats who are despondent and depressed can and do really crawl up inside of cars to commit suicide.
2. It’s pretty gross when they do.
3. If this happens to you, email me and I will remove it for $100.