The Blonde in the basement, a rememberance of the snakes!

So the last couple of weeks we've spent some quality time in the basement. It's tornado season and has been kinda wild. I must confess that if it's light out I'm usually on the front porch watching the clouds whirling and twirling on by. But in the dark I'd rather be safe than sorry. I was raised in the days before the weather channel and live coverage when the way to forecast tornadoes was to stand outside and watch them touch down. I lived (and live) in the country where there weren't and still aren't sirens. I 'knew' what a wall cloud was before they called them that. And if the clouds were twirling above you and were an interesting shade of green it was time to go inside.
Back to the basement. During the whirling time I was relaxing on the futon in Pat's room thankful that we don't have the company of snakes down there.
One of the reasons we got a nice little price break on this property was cause of the snakes in the basement. At first I was thinking there were just a few big ones but during the months that followed we (I use the term we loosely I provided more support as in "boys go downstairs and do a snake check")killed around 60 snakes. Some small, some large, as in I'm 5'1+" and they were as long as me. We've been snake free for 8 years and I'm quite happy about that. I can hide in the basement and not worry about 5 foot long crawly things joining us in our safe place.