Just take the refund offer on the house
Idaho Couple’s Home Infested With Snakes
Really. You cannot fight nature:
Turns out the property was a winter snake sanctuary, likely a snake den or hibernaculum where snakes gather in large numbers to hibernate for the winter, said Lauri Hanauska-Brown, a biologist with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.
In the spring and summer the snakes fan out across the wilds of eastern Idaho, but as the days get shorter and cooler, the snakes return to the resting place ─ in this case, the Hepworths’ new home ─ where they ball up for heat.
The snakes are likely a terrestrial garter snake, Hanauska-Brown said. Reptiles are a protected species meaning the Hepworths cannot bait them or kill them, she said.
The couple have not contacted Fish and Game to move the garters, Hanauska-Brown said. The department would attempt to move the snakes, but it could be difficult because if they move them too far they would die and if they move them close by the snakes would likely return to hibernate, she said.
“They are used to going there and kind of balling up,” Hanauska-Brown told The Associated Press. “That sounds kind of Indiana Jonesish. But this is a natural thing.”
In which I talk more trash about music from the 1980s
I love Radio Paradise. They play a wonderfully eclectic variety of usually excellent music.
Sometimes, however, they slip in CRAP LIKE THIS just to mess with me. Yes, I do believe it is personal.
If you looooooove the linked song, I DO NOT CARE. If you feel compelled to try to convince me of its wonderfulness, DO NOT BOTHER. It will only end in tears and name-calling.
The other thing about a cold
…is that you become obsessed with things like the pyramid-shaped teabags of your Lipton White Tea with Island Mango and Peach. How cool is that?
Come on. Work with me here. I’m sick.
The thing about a cold
…that’s so completely ridiculous is that while you tell people that you woke up this morning feeling like industrious little elves had spent the entire night packing your head with cotton, you also believe that is quite possibly EXACTLY what happened.
Sick and tired
So I just realized why I feel bad … not that I had precisely mentioned that to anyone (lest you think you missed something or that there was ANY context for this at all). I’m clearly coming down with some sort of cold-type thing. If it is anything like what my coworker has, it will be more flu-like. GREAT!
Meanwhile, I am also preparing for a board meeting tomorrow.
And I am dreading the coming of winter.
And did I mention that I am feeling unwell?
All this to a jumbled soundtrack of combined cds – ones I have sent to a friend; ones he has sent to me – which has recently provided the following randomness for my listening pleasure:
- Thank You (falettinme be mice elf agin)/Sly and the Family Stone
- I Don’t Know You People/Orbital
- Man in the Street/Joe Jackson
- Bedshaped/Keane
- Supernova/Liz Phair
- Appalachia Waltz/Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Mark O’Conner
- Yulquen/Autechre
- In God’s Country/U2
- Coulibaly/Amadou & Mariam
- Montreal/Autechre
The combination of styles is slightly surreal. Or maybe it only seems surreal because I might be running a fever.
Feeding the need
…for scientific data:
For the first time the [Royal Society] Archive provides online access to all journal content, from Volume One, Issue One in March 1665 until the latest modern research published today ahead of print. And until December the archive is freely available to anyone on the internet to explore.
Monster
I shake my two hairy fists at the sky and I let out a howl so unspeakable that the water at my feet turns sudden to ice and even I am left uneasy.
[via]
Knowledge of another
The following question was put to me today:
Why would knowing a detail about you that nobody else knows make me more knowledgeable about you than anybody else, or knowledgeable in the first place?
It reminded me of this little set of books I have. I stumbled on these books at a sort of trading post/store in Old Town Alexandria, VA and collected them over a couple of years. They fascinate me.
These books are what were known as “purse books” or, I gather, little self-help books women could carry around conveniently tucked in their purses. They all seem to date from the 1960s and 1970s.
The books themselves are somewhat pedestrian, informed more by the times and trends than by anything intellectual. The unusual thing about them, and the reason I collected them, is that they all have very striking homemade covers. The dichotomy between the books and the covers is stark. All of the covers are interesting and most of them are thematic.
And I wonder who this woman – owner of the books and maker of the covers – was. Why did she care enough about these riciculous little books to carefully slipcover them in a manner that entirely eclipses them, that is more than they deserve, that is significantly more interesting than the books themselves?
So I find that I have weird detailed knowledge of an aspect of this woman … but I don’t know anything about her.
