a fear of the second letter of the alphabet

the boy has a phobia.

I can't even talk about bees when he's in the room without using code.

i'm not sure where it came from, but he's already missed one birthday party because of it.

when he sees a bumble bee, he lets out such a blood curdling scream, it scares me to death.

it could be a looooooooong summer if he doesn't get over this.

Oops - make that "crazy" day!

We were out shopping this afternoon and suddenly saw threatening clouds. Turned on the radio and they said a tornado was heading straight toward our little town. A whole bunch of tornadic activity was possible, so we started driving in the opposite direction. We drove to my office in Nashville and took refuge there (I have a TV in my office), and waited it out. Jack Henry was brave. Once the storm passed over Nashville, we headed back home. Nary a broken twig at our house. Whew!

More bugs

Here's a mighty wing-ed beast that lofted upon my windshield this morning. Luckily, it flew away quickly, before I had time to go apoplectic.

Snake Tango: part 1

We took Jack Henry to the river yesterday to throw rocks, and what should we find, but two enormous poisonous water moccasins doing a brazen, seductive dance by the river's edge. These suckers were huge. And did I mention poisonous? Of course after chronicling every bit of useless minutia in my daily life on this blog, I arrive at the most fascinating and terrifying thing I've seen in recent memory sans camera and Blackberry. So I ripped this photo off the Internet. Just try to imagine two of them rising high out of the water, intertwining their heads in a beautiful and scary snake tango. Needless to say, Jack Henry didn't get to throw a whole lot of rocks.

Snake Tango: part deux

Again, these are not the actual snakes we saw, but I wanted to give you a visual on what it looks like when the snakes are upright like this in the water. Freaky. The second part of the story is that right by the snakes were a couple of backpacks, fishing rods and tackleboxes, and we couldn't help wondering where the people were to whom these belonged. So we went looking for them, to warn them of the snake hazard near by. (These snakes can deliver an extremely painful and sometimes lethal bite, and are known for their aggression.) We found the young ladies - they were fishing and floating blissfully in the snake-infested river nearby. When we let them know their things were within biting distance of venomous snakes, they of course shrieked with panic, especially since their keys, wallets and i-phones were inside one of the backpacks. Hubby, being the gentleman that he is, braved the snakes, fishing rod in hand for protection, and rescued said valuables. Turns out that the mother of one of the young ladies works in my building, and is someone I've had lunch with on several occasions! To summarize: Snakes-bad; Hubby-good; Child-not permanently scarred; i-phone-rescued. Moral of the story: Duh! Don't go in the river! And if you do, bring a camera to capture the mayhem.

Terror! Horrors! Ack!

Look what crawled out from under my windshield wiper this morning. This is after I had driven for 45 minutes, dropped off Jack Henry and was nearly at work. Did it ride with me all the way? Was it there all along? Sick with fear, with trembling hand, I took a picture with my BlackBerry. Must. Put. This. On. Blog.