Little steps...

A long time ago, not too long after I met Daniel, he went out and got his ear pierced. I sent him a few earrings that I found at the Phoenix & the Dragon, mostly celtic knots. I even picked up a few for myself. By the time he moved out here, most of them had gotten lost. Of course, mine started to vanish not to long after that.

A couple of months before he died, he was looking for one of his in particular, and we couldn't find it anywhere, so I gave him the match to it that I still had in my possession.

He was wearing it the day he died.

Two days later, when we were cleaning up for the wake, we found his. I've been wearing it ever since.

It has brought me great comfort over the last two and a half years. I've noticed a habit of twisting it around, especially in moments that I am thinking of him, or am feeling lonely, or afraid.

I stopped wearing a beautiful antique claddagh ring he gave to me some time ago. The earring was the last thing I had left.

Today, I took it off.

For good.

Snakey Fun

So, last week, I went out to the mailbox to get the mail and a snake approached me from the gladiolas at a high rate of speed.

Mind you, I like snakes, but when they charge me, it tends to make me nervous.

Yes. There was running, and screaming, involved. I even vowed never to get the mail outside a car again.

So today, David went outside to mow the lawn. A half hour goes by, lawnmower sounds humming happily in the background. Then it suddenly stopped.

Blake then comes upstairs and announces: "Mom! Dad found a snake! And it's in a jar, on your desk!"

Of course, I developed a momentary deer in headlights look. Obviously, I was hallucinating because I thought I heard "snake", "jar" and "MY desk" all in the same sentence.

This was soon followed by me rushing downstairs and finding out that, yes, there was a snake in a jar on my desk.

A right cute snake at that, being that he was safely inside a jar.

David was trying to find out if he was poisonous and had to go to animal control, or if he could go to a safe, lawnmower free zone of the yard.

He was having difficulty finding it, so I went and looked up "common snakes of Atlanta" and found a very cute picture of the "deadly" snake that had terrorized me.

Here it is:

Midland Brown Snake

They are vicious earthworm eaters!

So, Wormtongue, as he's been affectionately named now, was released back into the wild beside our compost heap where there are many many earthworms for him to munch on.