OT photo of a snake

On Wednesday a few friends came over to help me make a big push forward on installing a masonry landscape wall I've been working on for years.

We had pizza and beer and acted like brick layers and got most of the blocks leveled, cut, and installed.


Early in the day we were standing as a circle in a freshly dug sand hole, that will become a flower bed, when this snake crawls out of a burrow we hadn't noticed and ends up right in the middle of the circle as we stare at it:



This is a photo I took right after we released it a few miles further out in the forest last night.

I felt bad displacing it from its home base and habits but it is poisonous and I thought our dog Go-Go would eventually find it again and tangle with it.


It was quite a surprise to have it crawl into the middle of our conversation because, although it is a snake that we know is common in the sand hills here we rarely actually get to see one.




To tell the truth, we all did our own little special dance when it happened.

:-)



best regards,
mike

It was seamless... we forgot what we had been talking about.

Actually the first thing I realized after the surprise was that there were 4 guys shouting "get the dog in the house" because we all saw that Go-Go was delighted to have discovered a new animated play toy.

:-)

Go-Go would have had a bad surprise!

Here's an interesting factoid from wiki:



"The bite of a coral snake may soon become increasingly more dangerous, ironically because of the relatively few bites each year. Production of coral snake antivenom in the United States has ceased because it is not profitable. According to Pfizer, the owner of the company that used to make Coralmyn, it would take over $5–$10 million to put toward researching a new synthetic antivenom. The cost was just too large for the small number of cases presented each year. The current antivenom stock expired in 2010, after two consecutive expiration date extensions approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Foreign pharmaceutical manufacturers have produced other coral snake antivenoms, but the costs associated with licensing them in the United States have stalled availability (see above).[7] Instituto Bioclon is developing a coral snake antivenom.[8]"

I thought all good studios had a snake or two, no?

So there is no antivenom, and Pfizer has made it prohibitively expensive for anyone else to produce it. They have essentially decreed that a small number of fatalities is acceptable. 

Unfortunately, it's not a unique situation. Treatments for many parasites are similarly unavailable, because "only" a few hundred thousand (mostly poor) people are blinded, crippled or killed by them annually. 

This why so many people in the world have such a dim view of capitalism.

mike_mccue

What musical instrument does he play (keeping it music-related)? The shaker?

I use it in the side chain.

mike_mccue


On Wednesday a few friends came over to help me make a big push forward on installing a masonry landscape wall I've been working on for years.

We had pizza and beer and acted like brick layers and got most of the blocks leveled, cut, and installed.


Early in the day we were standing as a circle in a freshly dug sand hole, that will become a flower bed, when this snake crawls out of a burrow we hadn't noticed and ends up right in the middle of the circle as we stare at it:



This is a photo I took right after we released it a few miles further out in the forest last night.

I felt bad displacing it from its home base and habits but it is poisonous and I thought our dog Go-Go would eventually find it again and tangle with it.


It was quite a surprise to have it crawl into the middle of our conversation because, although it is a snake that we know is common in the sand hills here we rarely actually get to see one.




To tell the truth, we all did our own little special dance when it happened.

:-)



best regards,
mike

Call me paranoid but this whole post seems strangely metaphorical.

mike_mccue


I hope so... there's no real need to kill it.

I live in a small out parcel in the forest which is why our land still has a lot of critters happily living on it or crossing over it.

There's probably a rule against it, but we just scoot the snakes in buckets with a stick and take them further down the road, several miles from any home to a habitat that we think will suit them ok.

It's a 1/2 million acre forest so there's lots of space.

best,
mike

This grasshopper still interprets a metaphor (or five) going on here.

mike_mccue


Timing is everything.

I'm a free form riffing kind of guy. And tempo means little to me too.

Much.