No, I didn’t go. We drew straws at the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse to see who would get to go experience a part of Americana; I didn’t get the short straw – nobody did. We looked on the floor and everywhere but we couldn’t find it – turns out Emmy Sue didn’t include one. She said she was afraid AJ (that would be me) would draw it and everyone would have to spend the weekend picking her up off the floor from her dead faint and then waiting on her hand and foot until she got some spunk back.

But, anyway, I took a quick look to see if anyone had written about the goings-on and found this little gem of information telling you what to do  about snakes in sleeping bags, running into snake dens and being surrounded by snakes. What dreams may come tonight, I don’t even want to imagine. Here are some interesting sections  from the article:

A handler crawled into a sleeping bag and then maybe 30 snakes were herded into the bottom of the bag around his feet. The bag was then zipped up as the handler remained deathly still. (I don’t know if the person writing this deliberately chose the adverb “deadly” or not – I suppose it just came to him.)

“Snakes will only strike when they are hungry or afraid,” said Mike Darrow, one of the handlers, but not the one in the bag. (No, the handler in the bag was being deathly still, remember?)  “So don’t panic. If you’re in the wild, always take someone with you so that if this ever happens your friend can help you.”  (Maybe you should carry a bag of MacMouse sandwiches to toss at any snakes you see . . . and it would probably be good if you didn’t point at them and do a Dirty Harry impersonation. “So how about it, snake, do you feel lucky?”)

Lonnie Ybarra, the one who was in the bag, slowly used his hands to lift his upper body off the ground and then delicately dragged his feet inch by inch out of the bag.

“You have to pretend your legs are paralyzed,” Darrow said. “Don’t ever set your sleeping bag up until it’s time to go to bed because of the possibility of snakes crawling in.”

The handlers also demonstrated what to do if one meets a snake in the wild on a camping trip, hike or other activity.

“Don’t run in the opposite direction because of the possibility of running into a large snake den,” Darrow said. “Dens have been known to have 300 to 350 snakes inside at a time.” (And what is the “opposite” direction? It seems to me if you turned around and ran the way you had come you would know there wasn’t a snake den that way. Or maybe they mean don’t run in the direction the snake was coming from.)

And if one becomes surrounded by rattlesnakes, staying calm is a key to avoiding being bitten, he said.

Then taking off a hat or a jacket and using it as a broom to slowly clear a path inch by inch is one way to escape as the snakes will strike at the hat or jacket rather than the feet that are moving into the cleared space, Darrow said. (Actually, surround by rattlesnakes is an image that had not occurred to me until this article. I always thought of meeting a snake not being surrounded by them. But now I guess my horizons of imagination have been broadened.)

Uh, I hope they held the Easter Egg hunt somewhere else . . .

Apple has sent me a new magnetic power cord and all I have to do is send the defective one back. I checked it one last time to make certain it was not working, and it wasn’t. I have 10 days to return it or Apple will charge me for the replacement. So, I have already packed it up and am just about ready to pull off the sticker that will reveal the “return label” and tomorrow I will send it on its way. Right now, my little MacBook is making little noises that sound like ooooooh and aaaaahhhhhh and oh yeah as the power flows through the sacred wire to its innards. Oddly enough, I find myself making little humming noises such as mmmmmmmm and ahhhhhhhh  and mmm mmm mmm.

We had some excitement this weekend. Saturday, around one, I got a call that my dear friend and former neighbor, Kathryn,  was in the ER at the local hospital. I grabbed my daughter-in-law, a nurse, ran upstairs and threw on decent clothes so the staff wouldn’t think I was some bum and headed over to the hospital.

She was in one of the big rooms, lying there in the center on a gurney and hooked up to monitors. She would not mind my saying she was there because she had just slumped to the floor while pushing Emory’s wheelchair down to lunch. Somehow, the wheelchair then fell on top of her.  I guess it was a fairly chaotic few minutes at the nursing home while the staff came running.

It was quiet there in the ER room, though. I was on one side and Alison was on the other, watching the cardiac monitor, which was, frankly, somewhat chaotic itself. She said, “Maybe someone should call the minister.” Alison asked her if she was frightened and she calmly replied, “No, what will be, will be. I’m just sorry this happened on Easter weekend.”

Then the beats evened out, grew regular and steady. We went upstairs to a room where she was again hooked into telemetry. We thought she’d be staying at least a day or two. But she bounced back and on Easter afternoon, I took her back to the nursing home and Emory, who had been pacing the hall in his wheelchair. He said, “We’ve got to stick together and not get separated again.”

We took back with us more than she had brought in the ambulance. She had a new knitted lap robe and a shawl, made by the Parkview Noble Hospital Needle Workers. On the tag, as you can see, it says “made for you with loving hands and caring hearts.” I remember a church in Gano, Ohio and a stained glass window that read “willing workers”; I once wrote an article about it. “Wiling workers” is a phrase that has stuck with me, making me feel the touch of  the best in people.

I took these pictures with my cell phone and in this one, you can see the colors of the yarn, the card and the hospital bedrail. I had intended to crop the picture to show just the colors, but then decided that the bedrail emphasized the kind purpose of the needle workers efforts.