animals, disasters, healthcare, Texas

When snakes and hawks attack out of nowhere…

Happy Friday, everybody. We have beautiful weather this morning. The sun is shining, and the weather report says the temperatures will top out at about 84 degrees, which is a bit warmer than it’s been, but still not super hot. I’ll take that over some of the weather I’ve been reading about in other locations in the world. I am, for damned sure, glad I don’t live in Texas anymore, even though I still vote there. The extreme weather is just one reason why I am grateful we’re not living there anymore. Another is because of the extreme wildlife in Texas.

This morning, as Bill and I were eating breakfast, I was reading The New York Times, and I came across the bizarre story of what happened to Texas resident, Peggy Jones, late last month. I’ve run out of free articles to share, so here’s the CNN link.

The reporter wrongly states that this happened on August 1st. According to other news sources and Wendell Jones’s Facebook page, it actually happened on July 25th.

Peggy Jones, age 64, and her husband, Wendell, have been married for 45 years, and they have four grandchildren. The couple own an investment property in Silsbee, Texas, which is about one hundred miles north of Beaumont. The property has been in their family since 1850. It takes about three hours to mow the grass– and that’s with tractors. But the mowing work has to be done, and Peggy and Wendell Jones have been doing it together without issue for many years.

July 25th seemed like an ordinary Texas day, with temperatures climbing into the triple digits. Peggy was out on her tractor, far from the treeline, mowing the grass. All of a sudden, out of the clear blue sky, a dark colored, four-and-a-half foot long snake landed on her arm. It immediately tightly coiled itself around her forearm. Naturally, Peggy started screaming bloody murder, while trying to remove the serpent, which responded by coiling even tighter and striking at her face. Fortunately, Peggy was wearing her glasses, so the snake’s bites weren’t making contact with her face.

As Peggy struggled to knock the snake off of her arm, her tractor continued to creep forward. She screamed for help but Wendell was in the front yard, and he couldn’t hear his wife’s cries. The noise from Wendell’s own tractor, and the sound of nearby traffic, were drowning out Peggy’s hysterical shrieks.

Then, just when Peggy thought things couldn’t get worse, along came a pissed off hawk, who had come to reclaim the unlucky reptile. Apparently, the mighty hawk had planned to have the snake over for dinner and wasn’t about to accept the snake’s regrets. 😉 The hawk swooped down and grabbed the snake, but it was wrapped so tightly around Peggy’s forearm that her arm was forced upward as the hawk tried to fly away with its uncooperative prey. Again and again the hawk unsuccessfully tried to take the serpent, beating its wings in Peggy’s face and obscuring her vision, as she tried not to fall off the tractor or get bitten by the snake.

Finally, after about four swoops, the hawk was able to recapture the snake. It flew off with its prize, leaving a stunned, shocked, and traumatized Peggy in its wake. She looked down at her arm and saw that the hawk had mangled it pretty well. Peggy’s forearm was covered in scratches, puncture wounds, bruises, and cuts, and it was bleeding profusely. She said the pain was incredibly intense, and she was still screaming and hollering when her husband finally became aware of what had happened.

Wendell hadn’t seen the joint snake and hawk attack, but he soon found his wife in complete hysterics. The two went to a hospital, where medical professionals cleaned and bandaged the wounds and gave Peggy a course of antibiotics. The story was so strange that, according to Wendell’s Facebook account of the attack, even the doctor wanted to know if Peggy was on some kind of hallucinogenic drug and had just imagined the whole thing. Fair warning. If you click the link, you will see a photo of Peggy’s torn up arm. It’s pretty gruesome looking.

According to the multiple accounts I’ve now read about this extraordinary incident, Peggy was sure this was how she was going to die… in what I think is an utterly absurd way. She screamed out to Jesus as she tried to survive the attack, not just by a potentially venomous snake, but also by a hungry and tenacious bird of prey with very sharp talons.

Peggy’s glasses were chipped from the snake’s repeated strikes, and they found a substance on them that might have been snake venom, although the stuff was never tested. Fortunately, the couple reported that Peggy never experienced any symptoms of a venomous snakebite that time, although according to the article in the New York Times, Peggy was also bitten by a different snake two years ago. I sure hope Peggy has good health insurance. This incident is probably going to cost a bundle in medical bills.

Naturally, Peggy’s trauma and suffering isn’t confined to just the physical pain of the injuries she received from the attack. She’s now having nightmares, and has said that they range from a re-enactment of the attack to seeing snakes all over the place in her dreams. Honestly, as someone who is a bit prone to having phobias, I can hardly blame her for being completely freaked out about this. How does a person even process such a strange situation, let alone recover from it? It’s like something out of the Bible. Or, maybe, a Desperate Housewives plot? It’s just insane! I think it would make me agoraphobic.

It just goes to show you that life can be incredibly weird. You never know when you’ll be faced by a completely crazy threat of some sort. Peggy was just trying to mow the grass when she got attacked by wild animals… and not even from the ground. Since when do snakes fly? We certainly wouldn’t expect to have one fall out of the sky, right? But apparently, Peggy says she’s seen hawks catching snakes all the time and dropping them on fences, only to come down and pick them up again. I guess it never occurred to her that she might serve as a “fence” to a snake with a strong will to live and a hungry and very determined hawk, who also wanted to live, and needed to eat…

Peggy and Wendell Jones have seen the hawk flying around their property and they think it lives nearby. Hopefully, it will keep a tighter grip on its prey, the next time it hankers for a hunk of snake meat. Or, at least we can hope that next time, there isn’t a human being there to break the snake’s fall.

I am very impressed by Peggy’s pluck, as instead of immediately finding a good guy with a gun to dispatch the hawk, she says “I consider myself to be the luckiest person alive… I was attacked by a snake and a hawk and I lived to tell about it.” She wasn’t just attacked by a snake and a hawk… but a snake and a hawk at the same time! That’s a story for her grandchildren to pass down… not to mention the doctors who treated her wounds. File it in the “now I’ve seen everything” category!

I’m sure if I sat here long enough and thought about it, I could come up with a life lesson or moral to attach to this situation. Something along the lines of, “you never know what will happen when you come between someone’s life and someone else’s dinner…” It seems almost oddly symbolic, too… given the crazy political situation in Texas right now, and how certain people in that state are preying on the weak and gentle to stay in power and keep being “fed” money and power.

This story makes me even more glad to be living outside of Texas… where there are literal venomous snakes, as well as political ones.

Well… that about does it for today’s fresh post. Got to talk to one of Bill’s colleagues, rescue the laundry, practice guitar, and walk the dog. Perhaps I’ll be back tomorrow… Perhaps you will be back, too.

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Uncategorized

Persistent spammers…

Boy, are they barking up the wrong tree…

This morning, I found two pages of lesbian porn spam in my Google mail account. I’m kind of amused by this, because I’m definitely not into women. I kind of wonder what causes this phenomenon. Does this spammer have a glitch that causes him or her to send out dozens of lesbian porn spam emails? Or are they just really enthusiastic about getting people to sign up?

Something tells me that this method must be, to some extent, relatively effective. Why else would they do it? There must be lesbians out there in Internet land who want to view this shit. Or maybe there are horny and curious males who want to see it. I don’t want to see it because lesbians aren’t my thing. I mean, I have lesbian friends, but I am myself straight.

Ah well… this is a problem easily dealt with with a push of a button. I won’t be viewing any lesbian porn today.

What I do hope to do is cut the grass. We have nice sunny weather this morning and my new lawnmower and weedwhacker are here. The only issue is, it’s a robotic mower, and although it will save me a lot of tedious time cutting the grass, the set up is going to require some work. We have to lay down wires around the yard that will tell the mower where to go. We have to fill in potholes and remove obstacles. We have to wait for the grass to dry. What’s really funny is that my new mower is made by a British company, but they didn’t send us any manuals in English. We have them in Spanish, French, Dutch, and German. Fortunately, I found a very helpful video made by McCulloch, the manufacturer of our mower. We watched it last night and it gave us more of an idea of what needs to be done.

Bill is working this morning. Hopefully, he’ll be finished by noon so we can get this project going. Despite my hatred of housework and substandard skills, I do like a neat yard. I probably should have just bought a plain old lawnmower, since our yard is so small. At our first German house, we had a non-motorized push mower. It did the job. We could have opted for another one at this house, but I don’t really want to hassle with it. It wasn’t very easy to use, although it was quiet, clean, and needed no fuel other than my muscles.

At our last house, our landlady insisted on doing the yard work. She did a good job, but frequently let the grass grow too high for my liking– especially during our last year in her house. More than once, I wanted to cut the grass myself, but knew it would cause her to freak. We never did complain about it, but I have a sense that she knew she was shirking her duties, since she showed up to mow the day Bill asked to stop by to speak with her. I think she assumed we were going to complain about the lawn, but actually, Bill served her notice that we were leaving. I was oddly happy to hear that we’d be doing our own lawn work at this house. It means more privacy and less bad juju coming from a resentful person.

So far, I’ve spent the morning mopping the kitchen floor, doing laundry, and cleaning one of the bathrooms. For such a filthy person, I sure do a lot of chores. I probably should do more of them, so my house will be sparkling clean… only to get dirty again.

March has been a pretty crappy month. I spent most of it by myself, watching too much TV and not reading enough. I also got hooked on Sims 4 again. It’s kind of fun, although my favorite of the Sims franchise was Sims 2. It had more quirky humor and more interesting gameplay. The original Sims was fun, too. I didn’t like Sims 3 and never even bought any of the expansions.

Hopefully, April will be more fun. I’m ready to go see some more stuff and remember why we left Texas.

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Duggars

Things you shouldn’t do while barefoot…

I love going barefoot. I always have. Although I will sometimes wear socks when my feet get cold, I inevitably shed them because I don’t like the feel of anything on my feet. However, there are certain things I don’t do while barefoot.

This morning, in the Life is Not All Pickles and Hairspray group, someone shared a photo of Joy Anna Forsyth. She looks beautiful in a very flattering floral print dress. Her face is made up; she’s slimmed down; and she wears a beatific smile. But then, when you cast your eyes downward, you see she has bare feet. This would not be a big deal, except she’s also standing next to a horse.

I grew up riding horses. It’s been a long time since I was last in the saddle, although I took lessons for years and went to many horse shows. One lesson I did take from those years around horses is that you really should wear good shoes when you’re working with them. It’s not just because horses take enormous dumps, either. Horses are bigger than most people are, and their behavior can be unpredictable. The horse Joy is standing to looks pretty calm in the picture, but what if he or she spooked for some reason? Joy would have to jump out of the way, which is not so easy to do when you have tender feet.

If Joy walks around barefoot a lot, she may very well have hard, tough calluses on her feet. But I doubt even the toughest callus can stand up to a horse’s hoof, particularly if the horse is shod. She really could get hurt, which would not be a good thing. I remember when I was a teenager, coming home from a horse show. We had to stop on the side of the road and unload one of the horses for some reason. A small pony jumped off the trailer and landed on my big toe. It hurt like hell. Luckily, my toe was just smashed and bruised, not broken. I did lose the toenail, though. Thank God I was wearing shoes.

As I write this, I remember quite clearly on an old episode of 19 Kids and Counting another time when Joy went barefoot. It was right after Josie was born, and the whole family was temporarily living at a historic house in Little Rock. Joy and her brothers were in the yard and the lawn needed to be mowed. Joy did it barefoot in her skirt, claiming that she enjoys cutting the grass. I suppose if you keep your feet away from the mower, you might be safe enough. But it really isn’t a good idea. On the other hand, at least Joy isn’t a drinker. Plenty of people would drink beer and cut the grass, perhaps barefoot. It doesn’t seem like the smartest idea.

In Touch Weekly has an article about this Duggar phenomenon. Joy isn’t the only one who does this, although she appears to be the worst offender. There is a picture of her at age 12, starting up the lawnmower with shoeless feet, along with lots of other pictures of the Duggar women (I see none of the guys doing this) with no shoes on. I’m of a mixed mind about it myself, since I don’t like wearing shoes and have been known to step outside without them. But I do wear them if I’m in public or in a place where going barefoot would be dangerous. I would say hanging out with equines and cutting the grass definitely qualify.

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