love it Jim
Anyway, this palm lady lives about 30 miles east of Sarasota on several acres. It is a pretty piece of property but way out in the country. When I rang the doorbell, a hired hand answered and he looked terrified. He asked me if I was good with snakes which I view as always being a bad question. My next door neighbor called me in the middle of the night a couple of months ago and asked the same thing. Next thing I knew I was in his dining room in my night clothes playing hide and seek with a big black garden snake. To my advantage, snakes don't move well on porcelain tile and I managed to get him out the door. Anyway, I asked the guy what the problem was and he said there was a snake of unknown type under the chair in the computer room. I went in to look and sure enough, there was a 30 inch long coral snake (yes, red touching yellow) on the tile floor. That started my adrenaline pumping and increased my heart rate substantially. My first instinct was to get the heck out of there but this guy was scared out of his mind and saying how I was sent there by God and all of that. So, I asked him for a machete, thanked the Lord for the tile floor and dropped to my knees. It took about 5 minutes, seemed like an hour, but the snake made a wrong move and lost his head. I know some of you are upset at that and truth is I would have gone to great lengths to save a garden snake or a rat snake but this fellow was not to be messed with and I didn't want him loose in the lady's house. It turns out the lady had forgot I was coming but this guy called her, found out where my palm was and I left with it in toe. I think he shook my hand twenty times before I got out of there. I'll post my new orchids later on the "I Just Bought" thread.
