Even the manliest of men...

James is very manly. You may have already picked up on that. Good job. Now, when I say he is manly, I mean that in every sense of the term. He owns tools. He uses them. He is outside all of the time. We could never own white furniture. You get it.

Exhibit A: James, covered in mud, fixes a stalled Jeep.

So one day we were out back, fixing the siding that one of Louisville's notorious storms had ripped off of my house. The siding had fallen earlier in the year and had been sitting, unattended for several weeks before we were able to make time to fix it ourselves (because that's what we do - fix things ourselves, of course *eye roll*).

We both had on a pair of gloves and we got the ladder all set up on the side of the house. James was getting his tools arranged and asked me to drag one of the pieces of siding up to the ladder. I went around back and plodded through the tallish grass that was wet with morning dew, but already steaming from the mid-spring warmth. I leaned over to flip up a piece of siding and found myself face to face with a swarming, squirming, slithering mass of snakes. Hundreds! Maybe not hundreds... maybe like 20-30... but 20 snakes certainly always seems like at least a hundred, am I right?

I jumped back a little at the shock of finding so many unexpected visitors, but quickly reached down and grabbed up a few in each hand. I have never been afraid of snakes, but birds on the other hand...

I ran around the side of the house, 3 or 4 little snakes wrapped around each of my wrists and yelled "Look! Look what I found!"

James looked up from his tools, dropped them, sprinted back about 20 feet and yelled back, "EW! NO! Drop them! Put that down! Put that down right now!" waving his hands at my the whole time.

Definitely not the reaction I was expecting. I looked at him, bewildered, and looked back at my handfuls of snakes. I trudged back to the pile of siding and let them go, back with their friends, to live in my backyard indefinitely... or at least until the lawn guy came.