So we've got lawn guys over at the house today to clean up the yard and flower beds and stuff. While we were standing outside talking to the manager, one of the guys who was working on the flower bed held up what initially looked like a dead branch and said "look". I saw that it was a baby snake about eight inches long, which doesn't surprise me because I've seen lots of them around. But then he pointed out that this was a copperhead! Eek. Apparently copperheads are occasionally found in residential areas, but they are rare. They figure that the snake wandered up from the greenbelt behind the house.

I like snakes and leave them alone when I see them, but a poisonous snake like a copperhead just doesn't need to be hanging around the house. Sadly, we had to execute him.

There are no snakes, at all, in New Zealand.

This morning when I left home, I saw a cat that had probably been hit by a car, lying in the middle of the street in front of my house. It was definitely dead. I recognized this cat as an outdoor cat that I often saw around the neighborhood, and it had regularly used my porch as a shady spot to relax.

I looked for a collar and while there was a collar lying beside the cat, there was no tag. I don't know whether the cat never had a tag or whether somebody had already removed it. I don't know which house the cat calls home, either.

I went home at lunch and the cat was still there. I flipped through the phone book looking for somebody to call, and called the Williamson County Humane Society. I said I was in Round Rock so they gave me the Round Rock Animal Control number instead. I called and left a message there (it's actually a branch of the city police department). A few minutes later they called me back, but apparently where I live is not within the jurisdiction of the Round Rock police department, so they couldn't directly help me. They gave me the number of the Williamson County animal control department.

I called Williamson County, and after being on hold for five minutes found that they had given me the regular dispatch number. I explained that there was a dead cat in front of my street and I was trying to reach animal control. The dispatcher told me that while they do have an animal control department, it only controls animals that aren't dead. For dead animal removal, the Roads and Bridges department will remove large animals (deer etc) that are blocking a roadway, but not anything as small as a cat.

Everybody I talked to was sympathetic to the problem, but bureaucracy doesn't let any of them do anything about it. I hope the owner finds their cat soon.

I am borrowing this convenient bullet-point style from lizzbeth1.

1. It has been nearly four weeks since I last went soaring. This weekend, one of the tow planes is back in service but no instructor is scheduled for either saturday or sunday.

2. Some types of computer books (I had some ranging from 4 to 12 years old) sure get worthless quickly. Half Price Books is cool for happily accepting a box of books to recycle.

3. I picked up a radio controlled plane last week. It's fun! I haven't even crashed into anything yet, either. There is a nice park near my house that offers lots of open space.

4. Near the corner of my garage door, there is a wasp nest (wasps are good, so I leave them alone). Recently a spider has decided to build a web directly in front of the wasp nest. I wonder about the sanity of that spider.

5. I have turned off greylisting on my mail server. I think this time it's permanent. I decided that the disadvantage of greylisting (delayed mail delivery, occasional loss of legitimate mail) outweighed the disadvantage of not having it (more spam). I can control the spam volume problem in other ways.

6. I did some cursory analysis of my incoming spam. Of the email that fails SPF filtering (all of which is guaranteed to be forged email), 15% is from greg@hewgill.com; 31% is from various other @hewgill.com addresses; 18% is from email addresses associated in some way with VNC (my email address is in the VNC whats-new file); and the remaining 36% are from other domains.

7. Some international calling cards are a huge scam. I got one that offers a low rate of 1.9 cents per minute to Greece. $10 should get you nearly 9 hours of talk time, right? Well, there's a $1.99 per-call connection charge (that's 104 minutes), plus a $0.59 biweekly fee for just having the card (that's another 31 minutes). I'll be lucky if I get a couple of hours out of it.

8. Mono is really cool. I was able to get SOAP client stuff running in C# on Linux with no problems at all. It just works.

9. I'm trying to renew my ability in French. It has been 17 years since I last took a French course, yet I can still struggle along. I got a French review book and some readers with collections of short stories. I think I should get a dictionary too. Meanwhile, I want to continue learning Spanish, I want to continue taking informal classes in Japanese, and I am continuing to practice Esperanto.

10. nucleartacos last wednesday were very hot. Hottest tacos so far, we figure. Wow.

Part of my commute to and from work involves a couple of miles of winding two-lane road next to a stream. There is plenty of wildlife around this road, which requires vigilance to avoid running into or over any other creatures with whom you might be sharing the land.

This evening an opossum wandered into the road ahead of me. The first thing I saw was the reflection of its eyes, two little beady eyes nonchalantly looking around and sniffing at something on the road directly in front of me. I stopped a short distance from it (no other traffic) and waited for its attention to be directed my way. Possums don't seem to notice or care about bright headlights attached to a ton of metal six feet away making whirring noises. It went right back to sniffing something on the road. I waited some more. Finally it seemed to get frightened at something and dashed away across the road.

Another common inhabitant you see around the road is the deer. They're somewhat more wary than the possums, but all too often you see a deer carcass by the side of the road, a victim of either a too-bold crossing or a too-careless driver. Yesterday morning a deer bounded across the road a couple of hundred feet in front of me and gracefully vaulted a six foot barbed wire fence on the other side. Just like that, in one fluid motion.

I was inspired to create some haiku.

Possum lives by night
Crossing the road is a risk
The threat comes too fast

Munching on the grass
Deer searching for a good meal
So gracefully leap

I hope it's a long time before that road is brutally transformed into a mundane suburban four-lane boulevard with a grassy irrigated median, left turn lanes, wide shoulders, and stop lights.