Friday, 22 May 2015

I got up very early this morning and got in a nice walk. It was so cool that I actually wore sock and shoes and a tank top. But I didn't feel cold. Before breakfast, I also walked down to recycle cardboard and buy challah for Shabbat.

I taught 3 units of Berlitz lessons today: 9:00-9:45 and 11:00-12:30.

For lunch, I had my usual Friday fare at Il Pentolino.

In the evening, my friends, Annette and Tony, invited me to their place for Shabbat dinner. Isobel also came, and we had a lovely evening. Tony is a retired London cabbie, so you can imagine the interesting stories he has to tell. And the view from their balcony is very nice: the Port of Aqaba, Jordan, and Hakl, Saudi Arabia.

Here's today's story about David, one of several highlighting his love of animals:

Stories about David: Saving a Gopher Snake on Reche Canyon Road

This story happened sometime during the years that we lived in a mobile home in Reche Canyon (in Colton, California).

David was driving home (or perhaps away from home, I don’t remember for sure, and I wasn’t with him) on the road in Reche Canyon. He saw a snake in the road and decided to help it. He blocked traffic (there must not have been much right then) and used the Club (a device we used to put on the steering wheel of our cars when they were parked to make it harder to steal them) to get the snake out of the road. I’m not sure if the snake crawled onto the Club or just moved due to some nudging. In any case, David saved it from almost certainly getting run over.

From his description, we later figured that it must have been a gopher snake. It certainly was NOT a rattlesnake, and those are about the only kinds of snakes one would see in the wild there (and not very often, at that). This, by the way, was quite some time before we began breeding snakes (but no gopher snakes).