Spiders and Snakes, Give me a break! (repost)

This isn’t the actual snake skin I found in the feed room, but you get the idea.  The one I found was about 3 and a half feet long.  Long enough to freak me out and impress Mr. P.  Now I know what happened to the mouse problem we had.  I was complaining about the little mice, but now I think I preferred the mice.  At least I saw them and was creeped out.  Seeing a skin and no snake really is MUCH worse.  Who knows which feed sack he’s hiding behind?  or even worse, which feed sack he is IN.  Miss A pointed out that it might be a mother snake.  Oh! Please let it not be a mother snake.  I can’t even let my brain think that for one minute.

And with snake season comes spider season.  The spiders return every summer and take their posts in the barn to help with the fly population.  I’m thankful they eat flies, but still I get all worked up if I walk into their webs when I enter the barn.  ("All worked up" =  the dance I do when taking laundry down under the guard light. )   I have no less than two dozen spiders that look just like the fellow above, on fly patrol.  After the last couple of weeks, we seem to have come to an understanding and they are no longer making their webs directly across my walkway (since I knock down their webs every, single day).  Instead they have moved their webs above my head.  I could squish them, but I really like that they eat flies and they don’t jump, so I let them live.  Any spider that jumps at me is dead.  I cannot deal with jumping insects.  So if you visit the barn at our farm, just don’t look up….unless of course you really like the haunted house look or just love spiders. 
I will say that Mr. C loves to come to the barn at sunrise or even the porch for that matter.  We say we are watching the spiders go to bed, because after a long night of eating they all fix their ragged webs and go to the edge of the web like they are tucking themselves in.  It truly is amazing to watch as long as no spider jumps AND I do not touch any webs.  He also thought the snake skin was the coolest ever and immediately went on a snake hunt.  Me, on the other hand, I just pray daily that I don’t find a snake IN a feed sack.  It just might cause irreversible mental trauma.  (I mean worse than the mental issues I already have with spiders, snakes and bugs.)  Maybe I should teach Mr. C to milk the goats and cow and he can do chores with the snakes and spiders!  Except for the chore part, he’d have a blast. 
Your insectandsnake-aphobic dairy maid,
Mrs. P