@FreestyleArt I don’t care for them but know what a garter snake and some others look like. But if I get too close to one I may scream too. If they get scared bad enough they’ll throw a stinky musk that smells like a dead mouse. That’s all the warning I need to slowly back up and turn around and leave. I have smelled that smell 3 times here. Once inside the laundry room, the small snake was caught in a sticky trap. And once behind the fig bushes when I was pulling grass. That smell wasn’t there till I was pulling weeds. And another time by the shed when I was weed-eating the weeds that popped up by the shed. I figure the snake was under the shed and got scared by the loud noise. The outdoor ones smelled really strong. The little snake in the house was a lot fainter in smell.

@cherokeepatti Oh WOW!!! He sure does have a servant's heart. I'm just so proud of him.

@LadyGrace I am too. He is majoring in electrical engineering. At first he said he didn’t want to go to college, he wanted to work. Because college is “pricey”. His grade were good enough that he got the Oklahoma Promise Scholarship that will pay for all of his tuition. And a $2000 grant. Me and his grandpa talked to him one evening about the end of April and convinced him that it’s pricier to not go to college and that if he lived at home he wouldn’t have to pay for housing and the meal plan (which is in fact pricey”. So he applied to get out of that and they approved of it. It won’t cost much for anything else he needs. He jumped into applying quickly & stayed on top of everything he needed to do, and took a pre-engineering math Zoom class in June & July. He also goes to 2-hour seminars for engineering students to network. They feed them dinner that the sponsors that speak to them donate so he got hyped up about that too. I think Vo-tech helped to build his self-confidence too.

I figured from the time he was in first grade that he would be good for engineering. I had a set of magnetic building toys that I got at a yard sale. Took him & his great-grandma & sister to a large outdoor mall so they could buy something. His grandma asked if it was OK for us to sit and wait in the car. I let him play with those magnets and he started putting them together making things. I told him he should be an engineer. Could tell by the way he played with them. He asked me what an engineer was and I told him all the kinds that I could think of.

@cherokeepatti wow, I'm so proud of him. He sure has a good head on his shoulders cuz he learned from the best. He's going to make good money in that field. Congratulations!

@Delilah5 I have an old male parakeet and I think about 3 years ago he decided he should get part of our dinner. Threw a loud fussing fit yelling Thank You! Over and over In an angry tone of voice for about 20 minutes. We tried to ignore him but didn’t want to give in to his demands. We were sitting at the dinner table with a meal and about 4 dishes. The boy was bragging on the food and saying how good it was. I finally told that if he didn’t want to watch us eat dinner to turn around and look the other way. So he turned around but every minute or so he would turn his head toward us and give us the side-eye. Then he scooted over to the other male’s cage and started saying “Parakeet, what do we get? NOTHING!” And “What do we have?” Attempting to stir him up to join in. He had such a grumpy disposition that I tripled the vitamins in his drinking water and gave him Smart Water. The combo of the vitamins and magnesium in the smart water helped him and he stopped being so grumpy and his appetite for his seeds and greens returned.

I should have took a video of that fit, I have never seen any other parakeet go off like that. And his tone of voice when he was saying all this was like a human would speak when they were angry, even when he said NOTHING!

@MrBrownstone She has never laid eggs, but likely a combo of instinct and listening to us talk. She must be very sensitive to our tones of voice too. She loves to interject herself into our conversations sometimes. When we are talking back and forth sometimes she’ll say “yep, yeah, yeah…” to show she agrees with one of us. And also says some sentences to add to it too.