A cool tiny little frog on Josh’s arm.

We cleaned the basement, taking everything out and putting it all back in, and didn’t find the snake.  I was hoping he/she was long gone, and really hoping the he/she didn’t have any babies.

But then we found this, in our driveway:

Obviously a baby of the much larger snake skin we found three weeks ago, uggh!

How many skins does it take before you have an infestation?

Should I be worried?

We are taking a break because, last night,  instead of working on the Las Vegas posts, we decided to go for a hike.  The hike itself was fairly uneventful, except that for the entire way up the mountain it was pouring down rain.  It was really no big deal,  our camera bag has all-weather cover, but we were pretty soaked.

Despite the rain, it was perfect timing for a hike up blueberry trail, the wild blueberries were ripe, and after it stopped raining  a beautiful mountain haze developed.  A view and a snack, can’t beat that!

I will post pictures of the mountain soon.

Until then, I wanted to show you the most interesting thing we saw during our hike:

A red-spotted newt eating an earthworm! Bizarre, huh?

This newt is in the juvenile stage of life, during which they primarily live on land, and are bright orange (with red spots, obviously).  The color is to warn predators of their toxic skin.

You can’t tell in these photographs, but he was actually slowly swallowing the worm whole!

PS- I do realize that a newt is not a reptile; perhaps one day I will create a tab for amphibians. Thanks!

There is more about Blueberry Trail, here.

Ryan says its name is “holy Sh@!”, he says I named it. . .

Luckily, our basement is just a storage area/mechanical room under our house, which has no access to the inside of our house; but, it is still unnerving that there is was a 6 foot long black snack in there!

Yesterday, Hank, the tile guy, stopped by, because we were going to give him some of the stuff out of our basement.  He asked where the stuff was, we told him that it was still in the basement, and I asked, “Hank, are you afraid of snakes?”  Hank quickly said no, and went into the basement to thoroughly investigate.

He found nothing.

I will assume the snake came in to shed and promptly left when he was finished.

Thanks Hank!

Oh yeah, Hank doesn’t always wear a wig, he recently discovered an age related bald spot developing and is still a little insecure.