Me, that is, doing the fastest line-dance you've ever seen while swinging my pants above my head and speaking in tongues. If you were Connie, my wife, you'd just sigh and go back to eating sunflower seeds and drinking your pepsi....
It all happened when I decided that it had been too long since anyone mowed the path around the pond. There were a couple of hours of light left when I got home from work, so I climbed on the riding mower and bumped down the hill to get the job done.
I had mowed about a third of the way around the pond, with the thick vegetation between the path and the creek brushing against my left leg, when I felt a stick brush against my ankle, then begin to scrape upward on the inside of my pants leg. In a microsecond I realized two things:
A. The stick was wet B. The stick was slithering.
It was instantly very clear that a snake had taken refuge from the blades of the mower by sliding up my pants leg.
My pants were off faster than they were on my wedding night as I did a double back-flip with a half twist off the mower. My mastery of the art of creative expletivery was severely challenged, as "Cheddarcheesecheetahflipper!" was about the best I could come up with on such short notice. However, I feel pretty confident now that I could win any speed-stripping contest that I'm ever called to enter.
After dancing around for a few minutes, spinning in circles while holding my pants over my head, I realized that I had not been bitten and the snake was long gone, so I calmly put my trousers back on, looked around to make sure there had not been any witnesses, and went to get the mower out of the creek.
The fact that Connie saw all of this from the front yard and didn't even mention it when I got back to the house speaks volumes about life in the country, or at least OUR life in the country, anyway.
-- 
Chuck (woah@mission4me.com), January 26, 2002