Nature and how I don't like it.

I got to meet Becca last night at Memory Grove which you four will remember from a few posts ago, because it is haunted. A ghost lives there, an actual ghost that ghost hunters have caught on tape, (please google "memory grove ghost" and get the youtube link if you are interested as I am still too terrified to watch it or look it up) yet that isn't the scariest thing that exists at Memory Grove, at least not for me. But I will get to that in a sec, first let me tell you about Becca, because she deserves a shout out and I absolutely loved her. She is a girl after my own heart, she loves history, she loves to read, she is totally grounded in reality and she can rock a pair of green rainboots. She doesn't mind going barefoot, she doesn't mind when I make her change her outfit in the middle of a public park and she is really into photography, which I think is awesome, even if she is going to buy a Nikon instead of a Canon:) Also, she babysits. Which is a big deal because good sitters are hard to come by in this day and age. She is a great girl and we had a wonderful time doing her senior pictures. That being said, let me get back to the story and the title of this blog post.
So there we are, Becca, her mom and I, walking on a PAVED sidewalk (an important element to the story because I am so skittish whenever I am in the grassy or off -the- beaten -path areas) and I am making some small chit chat when all of a sudden I hear "MOM, there's a snake under your foot!!" And in less then a millisecond I was gone. I mean, across the street screaming and hopping from one foot to the other and probably swearing, all while trying to erase from my mind the image of the thing squiggling around on the ground underfoot. Becca of course is cracking up (obviously not afflicted by the same phobia as I am) and her poor mom is just trying to get a sense of why her photographer has just taken off screaming down the road in hysterics. For the rest of the shoot, and this is not an exaggeration, folks, I made Becca's mom keep watch for the snake while I tried to get my body to calm down enough to take a steady photograph. Which brings me to the title of my blog. I need to reiterate that we were walking on the SIDEWALK when all of this occurred, not the forest, not the grass, the sidewalk. Where we human beings belong. I try to do that as often as possible lately because of the Bee Incident of 08 (please click here for more details) and guess what? As it turns out, it doesn't help me avoid nature any better then if I had been traipsing through the woods with a basket and a snake charmers horn. To be fair to the wretched snake, it really didn't do anything to us, but as I may have mentioned, I am a little on the crazy side so it really doesn't matter. Mike still had to check under the covers when I got into bed last night and as I type this I am sitting with my feet tucked safe and sound under my butt lest there be a critter coiled up under my office desk just waiting for its chance to pounce.

PS, I told Paige about the incident and she laughed, and then she said "wait, mom, was it a poisonous snake? Did you see a rattle? Did it have red stripes down its back? Well, good, it wasn't poisonous, you don't need to be scared of the little guy.." I gotta stop taking her to the zoo.