2022-05-23 — Step Forward

Didn’t expect the rain today. It was actually kind of nice, as I didn’t really want to work today, gave me another rain out.

This time, however, I got up and got going. It wasn’t easy, but I did. Got my room cleaner and more organized than it’s been in a *long* time.

Got all my laundry washed and ready to put away tomorrow. Got the bathroom cleaned a bit. Got business documents filed away.

And though it kept me from getting a lot of the things done that I wanted to get done, the Internet being out all day today I’m sure helped me focus a little bit.

Played rescuer a bit today and found a good strategy in the effort I hadn’t used before. Our pest control guy, contrary to our requests (I’m sure he simply forgot) put down more sticky bug traps, and I noticed about a foot long snake stuck in a really big trap. 😕

I don’t know how long it was stuck there, but it was definitely still alive. When I touched it, it tried to move quite a bit.

So I got to work.

At first, I grabbed some scissors and started cutting away big chunks of the sticky trap away from the snake’s body. Unfortunately, though, I realized that wasn’t going to help as much as it needed to. I kept trying to move the snakes body off the awful sticky stuff, but realized that if I moved it even a little bit, it would just get stuck in the sticky stuff right next to it. That was when I had the idea to take the trap outside, find dirt, and rub dirt into the entire sticky trap, so that if I was able to get the snake unstuck from one spot, I could keep it from getting stuck in another spot. So I grabbed a razor blade, and I would gently try to lift the snakes body and cut the sticky stuff away. Then I would get some dirt and rub it into the sticky stuff that I just cut away, both on the snake, and on the trap, so it couldn’t get itself re-stuck in the same place.

In order to not damage the snake’s body, I had to leave a decent bit of sticky goo on it as I cut it away from the trap. It probably took about 45 minutes before I had all of the snake free but the head. That was definitely the hardest part. The snake’s lower jaw was so flimsy and completely stuck in the goo. I was afraid that both the lower jaw and upper jaw were glued together.

Anyway, I remembered seeing someone heat up a knife to cut through something in a YouTube video, and so I used my lighter to heat up the razor blade which made it a lot easier to cut through the goo in the tiny tolerances I was dealing with trying to get to head out without killing the snake.

At some point in time during the process, I either injured the snake, or it realized that I was trying to help it and it stopped fidgeting. I’m hoping it was the latter, as when I finally got it free from the trap, it was able to slither away. It was very slow, and still covered in lots of sticky stuff, but hopefully it’ll go through enough dirt to make it so the sticky stuff is more of an annoyance than a problem, and then when it sheds its skin the next time, hopefully it’ll be able to shut off all the sticky stuff. Hopefully it survives. I tried to give it a little bit of water as well, and it certainly stuck its tongue out at the water, but I don’t know if it actually drink anything. I never did see it open its mouth after I released it, but I think, I hope, that I got enough goo off that it can open its mouth.

Hate those traps. Awful, inhumane, horrible things. That’s got to be one of the cruelest ways of killing something that we’ve come up with.

Supposed to rain again tomorrow. Hoping the internet comes back, as my programmers are getting really close, supposedly, to finishing the transliteration tool. I guess that means I need to get my butt going on the characters, getting those done.

Anyway, I’m writing all this on my cell phone via voice to text as we still don’t have internet in the house. Hope you all had a beautiful day. Time for bed.

Lift the World

~ stephen