A Mouse Eating Machine

The other day Casey and I were doing chores together.  I was frustrated because mice had gotten into one of the horse feed bags.  As I was shutting the gate to the horse pasture, I saw him holding something up at arm's length. 
"What's that?" I asked him.
"Don't worry about it."  Whenever he gives me that response it's usually because it's something he doesn't want me to see.  Instantly curious, I started walking over to him and he started walking away from me.  As I rounded the corner, I saw that he had a rather long snake in his hand.
"Cool! Let me see!" I said. 
"What?!" he asked, confused.  He turned around, and as I reached for it, he said, "Wait, you don't know if it's poisonous or not.  It's rattling its tail like a rattle snake, but there is no rattle..."
"Oh, it's not poisonous. Where did you find it?"
"In the hay loft.  How do you know it's not poisonous?"
"Because it's head isn't a triangular shape and the pupils aren't slit," I said matter of factly.  He looked at me, grinned, chuckled, and asked, "How do you know stuff like this?"

I took the snake as it wrapped itself around my arm and said, "I know things.  Do you remember who my dad is?  Plus, I had a geosafari when I was little and I played all of the science cards.  I'm not sure what kind of snake this is, but he'll know...let's take a picture.  Maybe if we're lucky it's a mouse eater..."

Sure enough, within a few minutes of sending him a picture message of the snake, he informed us that it was a Fox Snake and a mouse eating machine!  I let it go in the feed room...Our mouse population has dwindled significantly...My dad also told me that a common characteristic of a Fox Snake is that it shakes its tail like a rattle snake, however, it does not have a rattle, of course. 

Later that night I was in the kitchen cleaning up and saw a dead cockroach on the floor.  They gross me out, so I said, "Honey, can you please come and pick up this dead cockroach on the floor?"

He looked up me with a puzzled look on his face and asked, "Seriously?"

"Yeah," I replied with a wrinkled face, "Those things are gross. They scuttle around and if you don't step on them they just die and they don't even have the decency to die on their stomachs with their nasty little legs sticking up in the air.  Those are the bugs that you think are dead because they're laying on their backs and then when you go to pick them up and they move their legs like they're coming back from the dead.  They just creep me out...Plus, did you know that a cockroach can live up to ten days without a head?"

By that time Casey was getting up chuckling and shaking his head (he does that a lot, with me) and said, "Let me guess...you learned that on your geosafari too, right?"
"No, no that one I learned in my Kid's Almanac.  Did you know that giraffes only have seven neck bones?  Same as a human."
"Of course you did..." he said as he scooped up the lifeless impostor and threw it away in the garbage.  "Those must be pretty big bones..." he added.  As he was walking away he said, "You can skin a deer, butcher a chicken, and have no problem picking up snakes, but you get grossed out by picking up a dead cockroach.  What if it were alive?"

"Then that would be fine," I said. 

He just sighed, laughed, and walked back to his chair.