Snake: It's Not What's For Dinner

Dead snake No. 8 for the year.

There's a 39-inch rattlesnake in my freezer. 

Yes, you read that correctly.

I'm saving it for my neighbor. 

Yup, you read that right, too. But it's not for her dinner. She skins 'em and decorates walking sticks.

Seriously, folks, how far from my sterling silver upbringing on the Palos Verdes Peninsula can I get?

So today, I'm gardening (of course, because what else do I do on my days off?) and Mason's down the driveway a good ways, weed-whacking the overgrown greenery encroaching on the road. I'm tossing tree roots into the firepit when I notice a good-size snake winding its way across the driveway and into the north lawn. (Yes, we have a north lawn, as well as a west lawn, a south lawn and a back lawn, which is really the east lawn, but we don't want to sound snooty, so we just call it the back lawn.)

I quickly haul my ass down the driveway and flag down Mason, who conveniently has the snake pistol on his hip, because when you're weed-wacking the driveway, odds are good that a snake may be in  there.

Now, a few weeks ago, we were talking to a weekends-only neighbor about how many snakes we'd killed this year (6 copperheads and a rattler that I almost stepped on). Explaining her walking stick art project, she asked us to save our future kills. Sure, no problem.

That's right; we measure our kills.

But we failed to ask what the best way is to save the snake. Today is Tuesday, and she won't be back up on the mountain until Thursday evening. So we froze the snake. It's in a Ziploc, behind the Boston Market frozen meal that Mason will eat for lunch when I go back to work.

The gross part is that snakes still do a fair amount of moving despite decapitation; once we got half the rattler into the Ziploc, the back half  just curled itself right on into the bag. Then we double-bagged it, for good measure.

SO, that's our snake story of the day. In other news:

My Little Lime hydrangea is an absolute winner. Buy one, people. Buy five of them!

A frog has taken up residence in my watering can. I dump him out; he moves back in.

My hardy begonias are blooming. Love those veiny undersides.

Heucheras do really well here; this is Silver Scrolls.

I harvested my first eggplant; the babaganoush was delicious.