It's like living next door to the killing fields some days, I swear.

Lucy seemed pretty confident that if the new diversion gave her any trouble, she could just bat some sense into it with her paws. And you know what? She was totally right.

Sphinx-like, Lucy then prepared to ask the snake a convoluted question involving a mysterious animal who walks on different legs at different times of day. Sadly, shortly after this was taken, Kate brought Lucy inside to spare the snake the consequences of its inevitable failure to answer correctly. Snakes, after all, are dumb as posts.

It wasn’t just a snake that day, though. Lucy’s currently got not zero, not one, but two, count’em, TWO goodsized mice/voles/somethings out on the back porch. (Thoroughly dead and vigorously dismembered, of course. “The Quality Goes In Before The Head Comes Off” seems to be her motto, this summer.)

Because I don’t particularly relish high resolution pictures of mangled rodents, I’ve used one of the chocolate mice John and Mike got us for our anniversary to provide a dramatic re-enactment of one corner of our back porch.