​​​​​​Because humor is funnier when you know it's true.

Scary suburbia (continued)  

​One day I was mowing some very tall grass.  As I mowed along the side of the house, I suddenly hit something.  I pulled back the mower to see that I had just decapitated a live coiled snake!  I backed away immediately, remembering a weird newspaper article I had read many years ago about a guy who had also mowed the head off a snake, and then had that separated snake head actually bite him!  That was not going to happen here. 

A while later I returned to examine the crime scene.  As scary as that incident was, it was made scarier when I realized I had accidently killed a younger, smaller snake, and not the parent!  I now lived in fear of retaliation.  Fortunately, snakes were never spotted again, though it took me a while to truly accept that.  Either my brutal murder had scared them off, or they had moved on to better hunting grounds. 

Then I ran into a different challenge.  We had found a small crack inside the foundation of our unfinished basement that occasionally caused some leakage after heavy rainfalls.  On one post-rain inspection, I was checking out a small puddle at the base of the crack.  There, at the side of the puddle, was a fairly large, brown, spindly, spiderly-looking thing that almost seemed to be drinking from the water.  It freaked me out a bit, and so I decided to stomp it out of existence.  As I approached, it suddenly sprung high in the air toward me.  Holy Crap!  What the hell is that?  A leaping spider?  I ran up the stairs like a frightened school girl. 

I did some research and found out that I had a very ugly-looking cave cricket living in my “cave.”  Make that plural, as I had no idea how many of those damn things were down there.  All I knew is that I needed to get rid of them before they decided to upgrade their lives from cave dwelling to first floor living. 

One day, I finally built up the courage to take them on.  I purchased a can of insecticide with a long range sprayer, loaded a flashlight with fresh batteries, and then suited up with a hat, gloves, over clothes and goggles.  If I had a hazmat suit, I definitely would have worn it.