This post has nothing to do with garden spiders really.  I just like this picture that I took a few years ago.  I have had a few of them (garden spiders) on the porch in the last week, and I do love me a good garden spider.  The bigger the better.  They fascinate the children with their trampoline web skills.  And...I did have a cool, huge wolf spider (or maybe not a wolf spider, but whatever it was, it was huge) that had an egg case hatch out on my porch.  There were thousands of teeny-tiny spiders on my gardening shelves.  But, what really caught my attention yesterday as I was tooling down Fern Hollow Lane (towards Mike and Deb's place), and the real reason for this post, was something in the middle of the road that was flopping back and forth.  My glasses are not the right prescription anymore, and I had a hard time seeing what it was until I was right nigh on it.  Then I could see it was a snake. At first glance, it looked like a two-headed snake (like the one at the Cape Girardeau Conservation Building).  After I was able to untangle it in my mind, I could see that it had just one head with one very large and open mouth trying to swallow a huge frog.  I must have spooked it because the frog got loose, but only for a second.  The snake snatched it back up and quickly slithered off into the weeds with the frog squealing.  It was a nice size black snake-maybe two feet long.  May it live to have many successful hunts.

Oh, I received a text today from Natalie.  She said, "I was going to take a picture of Peeta's new praying mantis pet but a hen ate it."  She knows that much as I like spiders and snakes, I do not like praying mantises.  I answered her, "Poor Peeta; happy hen."