Snakes

Yesterday Nate and I spent the afternoon at my parents' house.  While we were there, my little sister and her friends came in.

"You will never guess what disgusting thing happened to me!" she exclaimed as she walked into the room, her cohorts trailing.

"What?" we asked, thinking what she could consider disgusting.  Having been a teenage girl, I know a lot of things can be disgusting.  We weren't disappointed.

"I was in the yard and I looked down and there was a snake next to my foot."

"Was it dead?"  we asked.  No.

"Did you kill it?"  we asked.  No.

"Well, what was disgusting about it?"

She gave us a rather irritated look that we couldn't see how gross the situation was.  "It was a SNAKE!  That is what is disgusting!"

So then we all started sharing stories about our run-ins with snakes.  Who all had run over snakes with their bikes, who'd killed snakes, who'd eaten snakes.  My sister left the room more disgusted than when she came in.

A few hours later Mom, Rachel, Baby N, and I all went for a walk.  Lo and behold,  about a mile away we saw a snake.

This poor snake was lying in the road.  It had been run over by a car and it looked dead... until we saw it's little heart beating - outside of its body.  It was pitiful and sad.  So what did we do?

Mom and I took pictures and video.  Good old iPhone.  We debated putting it out of its misery, but we didn't have anything to do it with, so we left the poor creature to suffer a little longer.

In retrospect, it seems slightly cruel.  My sister Rachel did not approve of our callous treatment, taking pictures and video of a dying snake.

When we got home, I showed Nate and my dad the footage.  After all, it was pretty cool.  Dad's first question: "Did you put it out of its misery?"

I looked at him blankly.  "No.  We didn't have anything to do that with.  We were on a walk."

Nate shook his head, "Why didn't you stomp on its heart?"  I blinked and shuddered.  That would have been disgusting.

Reality Check

This morning the headline news story was, of course, about the death of Osama bin Laden.  After talking for a few minutes about his death, the news reports turned to reactions here in the States.

Apparently in D.C. hundreds of students gathered to celebrate in front of the White House.  The news reporter said, "Now, most of these students were 8, 9, 10 years old when 9/11 happened."

I was rather offended that he would say the college students were only eight to ten years old on 9/11/2001.  I was definitely older than that.

Then I remembered that I'm not a college student anymore.  And I haven't been for several years.  Oops.