Another snake photo

Don't know what kind* of snake this is, but I'd temporarily forgotten I took this photo when I posted the previous snake photos.  Definitely not poisonous, so I didn't mind getting a little bit closer to it.

 

You can see a reporter named Chuck Dovish, or somebody, holding one of these snakes in the AETN video about the Bayou Bartholomew Trail, which is where I was when I took the photo.  I don't see this type of snake out there very often.  Mostly see cottonmouths and nonpoisonous water snakes that look like cottonmouths, and of course the occasional copperhead.  Never have seen a rattler on or near the trail.  Or anywhere in Southeast Arkansas for that matter.

*Update:  Apparently this is a Mud Snake.

A couple of not good photos of snakes

When  I see a snake that could be a cottonmouth or copperhead on the Bayou Bartholomew trail, I just turn around and go back.  After all, I'm just walking or running for the pleasure of it, so one way is as good as the other.  (Yes, there was a day when I was wearing sandals and not paying attention and stepped on a young copperhead who was under some leaves and I was bitten.)

 

A couple of weeks ago, I encountered a sizable snake that could have been a cottonmouth (also known as a water moccasin) or a nonpoisonous water snake.  I didn't want to get close enough to figure out which.  I turned around and started walking in the other direction, but remembered I had a disposable camera (recyclable, so they say)  in my pocket.  So I went back, but not too close,  and snapped a not-very-good photo as the snake was crawling slowly off the trail:

I was hoping since I didn't have a zoom lens that I could zoom in digitally on the photo on my computer, but it gets too fuzzy with more zooming than this. 

Also, last year sometime I took this photo of a grass snake or garter snake out at the farm below where my treehouse is:

Sure makes me wish I had a good photographer with me at such times as nature presents a good opportunity. 
 

Dining Room mess

Well, I have to confess, it's usually a mess.  Magazines, loose papers and newspapers, books, loose photos and undeveloped film.  And in this photo, a plate of shrimp shells sitting on a New York Review of Books I used as a placement (I need to buy some real placemats but keep forgetting to).  An "Obama for President" glass from the Flying Saucer bar that I bought at the Goodwill store in Pine Bluff.  Also, similarly, the floor has stuff, mainly magazines, scattered about.  Gotta go home now and do some straightening up.  Unless something else comes up.

 

This is a very small sampling of my bookshelves.  I measured recently and have about 1,200 linear inches of bookshelf space.  Taking one inch as the average width of a book, which I think is pretty accurate, I have approximately 1,200 books now.  And yeh, one more on the way!  A collection of Robinson Jeffers' poetry.