[CH] Overwintering Plants
Byron (byronbromley@tellink.net)
Sat, 26 Oct 2002 16:35:08 -0400
For those of you that are going to try to overwinter a chile or 2, I would
like to repeat a story that floated around a couple years ago.. Check pots
and plants
very closely before bringing them inside.
Enjoy
L.B.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Green Garden Grass snakes can be dangerous. Yes, grass snakes, not
rattlesnakes. A couple in Sweetwater, Texas, had a lot of potted plants,
and during a cold snap, the wife was bringing a lot of them indoors to
protect them from a possible freeze. It turned out that a little green
garden grass snake was hidden in one of the plants and when it warmed up, it
slithered out and the wife saw it go under the sofa. She let out a very loud
scream. Her husband, who was taking a shower ran out into the living room
naked to see what the problem was. She told him there was a snake under the
sofa. He got down on the floor on his hands and knees to look for it.
About that time the family dog came and cold-nosed him on the leg. He
thought the snake had bitten him and he fainted. His wife thought he had a
heart attack, so she called an ambulance.
The attendants rushed in and loaded him on a stretcher and started carrying
him out. About that time the snake came out from under the sofa and the
Emergency Medical Technician saw it and dropped his end of the stretcher.
That's when the man broke his leg and why he is in the hospital. The wife
still had the problem of the snake in the house, so she called on a neighbor
man. He volunteered to capture the snake. He armed himself with a
rolled-up newspaper and began poking around under the sofa. Soon he
decided it was gone and told the woman, who sat down on the sofa in relief.
But in relaxing, her hand dangled in between the cushions, where she felt
the snake wriggling around. She screamed and fainted, the snake rushed back
under the sofa, and the neighbor man, seeing her lying there passed out,
tried to use CPR to revive her.
The neighbor's wife, who had just returned from shopping at the grocery
store, saw her husband's mouth on the woman's mouth and slammed her husband
in the back of the head with a bag of canned goods, knocking out and cutting
his scalp to a point where it needed stitches. An ambulance was again
called and it was determined that the injury required hospitalization. The
noise woke the woman from her dead faint and she saw her neighbor lying on
the floor with his wife bending over him, so she assumed he had been bitten
by the snake. She went into the kitchen, brought back a small bottle of
whiskey, and began pouring it down the man's throat. By now the police had
arrived. They saw the unconscious man, smelled the whiskey, and assumed that
a drunken brawl had occurred. They were about to arrest them all, when the
two women tried to explain how it all happened over a little green snake.
They called an ambulance, which to! ok! away the neighbor and his! sobbing
wife.
Just then the snake crawled out from under the sofa. One of the policemen
drew his revolver and fired at it. He missed the snake and hit the leg of
an end table that was on one side of the sofa. The table fell over and the
lamp on it shattered and as the bulb broke, it started a fire in the drapes.
The other policeman tried to beat out the flames and fell through the window
into the yard on top of the family dog, who, startled, jumped up and raced
out into the street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid hitting the dog
and smashed into the parked police car, setting it on fire. Meanwhile, the
burning drapes had spread to the walls and the entire house was ablaze.
Neighbors had called the fire department and the arriving fire truck had
started raising it's ladder as they were halfway down the street. The
rising ladder tore out the overhead wires and caused the electricity to go
out, and also disconnected the telephones in a ten-square city block area.
Time passed........both men were discharged from the hospital, the house was
rebuilt, the police acquired a new police car, and all was right with the
world once again.
About a year later, they were watching TV and the weatherman announced a
cold snap for that night. The husband asked his wife if she thought they
should bring in their plants for the night. She shot him.