Snake Update

So, the last snake never reappeared. Ergo, we picked up a new snake.

It proceeded to go three weeks without eating, until the night before last.

The video is running at about 400% speed (they're not quick eaters) but is very cool.

Enjoy.

(Spoiler Alert: It doesn't go well for the mouse)

What Does & Doesn't Work

In case anybody ever finds themselves in a similar predicament with a lost snake here are a few tips for what does and does not work in locating one:

Does Not Work - Calling the snake, much like one would a puppy... utter failure. Perhaps because we did not yet have time to make the snake feel comfortable about his/her name? (TJ, by the way.)

Does Not Work - Dead rat on the front seat floor. Didn't work so far, and I'm not sure it's worth continuing to try.

Does Not Work - Looking higher. The books / websites / etc. mention that snakes like to go high (an uncomfortable feeling when you are driving). Nothing above the visors, sunroof slider, etc.

Does Not Work - Laying on the floor acting like a snake of the opposite gender. (Perhaps not knowing the gender of the lost snake is a disadvantage in this one... but I don't feel like it would've changed much.)

Does Work - Nothing. Absolutely Nothing.

End Day One - Snakewatch

Quote from The Corn Snake Manual, by Bill & Kathy Love:

Corn snakes' climbing agility and expertise at squeezing out of tiny cracks and openings is nearly legendary.

True.

Yeah, ummm...

Nope.

I was hoping this would be an ongoing, breaking story. Sadly, nothing is breaking.

Not Yet

2:37 - Checks every 1/2 hour to see if the snake wants to eat the rat. So far, no good. The helpful fellow at Petco explained that they feed these babies once per week. Here's hoping it wasn't yesterday or today.

Breaking News - Stay Tuned

I fear I will not be able to do this one justice. But, since the story is ongoing, I have no idea what the themes, story arcs, or learning experiences are going to end up being. I'll opt instead to just tell the story as it happens.

10:00 - I picked up Joel and Erika from Mom's house. The car was full at the time, as Kelly, Tatum, Tally (dog), and Cooper (cat) were loaded up to come to my house.

10:30 - 5 bipedal primates (4 kids and me) cart off to Petco to fulfill Erika's Christmas wish/present... she wanted a snake.

11:30 - We (4 children, 1 adult, 1 baby corn snake in a small, fold-apart Petco box) begin the journey 4 miles from Petco to my house.

11:38 - Erika screams. The snake is half-way out of the bottom of the fold-apart Petco box.

11:39 - I pull over to the side of the road and try to wrangle the snake (still unnamed) back into the box. I fail. The snake escapes, drops into the doorwell, and out onto the street when I try to open the door to grab him/her (how do you tell?) I grab the snake from the street, try to get him back into the box, and he falls to the floor of the vehicle.

11:44 - We arrive home, and each begins searching our floor space for the escapee. No luck.

12:26 - The search continues, but more passively. We are all inside, and occasionally I go out to see if I can see the young animal.

12:33 - Joel begins a guided tour of YouTube videos detailing snakes eating various animals. This started because Tatum was curious about why I was thawing a frozen rat, and how the tiny snake was going to ingest it.

12:39 - Ummm... here's the part I'm not convinced is a good idea. There is a thawed rat on  a plate in the front floor of the car, waiting for a snake to want to eat it. When the snake is full of fresh-frozen rat, I will capture it, bring it into the house, and call it a pet.

That's the plan, at least. I can see one or two ways this plan might fail, but we're not going to allow our mind to ponder those yet.

Guitar Drop

So this one is more of a concept-piece blog.

New Year's Eve, downtown. Cold for us... not like snow or sleet cold, but shivery and a bit windy.

In the middle of the picture to the left, you can see it. In New York, they drop a massive, expensive, mirror/glass/precious metal ball. Slowly, so all the world can ring out the last few precious seconds of the old year.

Here? We hung a guitar from a crane over the Hardrock Cafe, and somewhere near the time of the transition, the crane operator hit the lever to lower the guitar toward the street. Ok... find the guitar in the picture. Start with the beam furthest to the left... the guitar is hanging between the 2nd and 3rd beam, slightly above and to the left of the green sign. You can make out the crane going down and to the right from the shimmering guitar. (If it is hard to see, it might be because this was not a replica of a guitar we dropped - huge and glowing. It was a guitar-sized guitar.)

Interesting differences between their Ball and our Guitar:

1) 15 minutes before Midnight, we were able to walk up and stand directly under the guitar (or a few feet away because of the police tape strung between pylon cones).

2) The crane operator's "precisely honed" sense of calibration made it somewhat less likely that it fell in any sort of exact manner.

3) People on the street (tourists, no doubt) who wanted to go into bars and get out of the cold were having their own spontaneous countdowns in the hour leading up to New Years. You would suddenly hear a crowed of 5-7 people count down from 10, yell "Happy New Year" and then go inside. Perhaps they were just practicing counting backward... our school system here is not as strong as one might hope.

and my favorite difference between their Ball and our Guitar?

4) Look carefully at that guitar. See how small it looks? You might think we were standing miles away. Not so. The green sign in the foreground is for Silkys. The guitar was hanging at Hard Rock, which is one block down from Silky's. I would estimate our distance from the guitar at about 100-200 yards.

Wonder if we received any national news coverage. At least there were no reported incidents of people randomly firing their guns into the air. (We had warnings and requests not to do this for Forth of July this year. The explanation that "what goes up must come down" fell on deaf ears... again.)

New Year

Worth noting: The last official iTunes purchase of 2008.

These were bought by Joel, who has discovered Pandora, a service on the web that allows you to enter a song and build a radio station based on what people who like this song also like. That way, bad taste can spread virally.

We saw Bedtime Stories the other evening, they played Don't Stop Believing, and now, a few days later, I am finding myself wanting to locate my old, brown, flared corduroy pants for Joel and see if we can't jumpstart this 70's revival.