Laughed long and loud reading your story. A rat snake is at the center of my snake story too. Built a new house in Upstate NY and thought I would put the garden in before the house was built as I was quite pregnant at the time. While turning over a spade full of dirt I noticed about 50+ small snakes all about the size of earth worms. Having kept king snakes as pets as a kid, I thought great, a batch of garter snakes to get rid of pests and carefully set them aside. Little did I know that they were rat snakes which will grow to 3-4' in length and which are somewhat territorial when raising babies. Since I knew my days of being able to reach the ground to weed were limited, I set in my rhubarb, blueberries and asparagus and put black plastic between the rows to control weeds. Although I did not see them the first year the snakes grew and prospered. I evolved from running out to the garden in my bare feet and feeling these things wriggling out from under my feet to carrying a bamboo rake to beat on the plastic ahead of me to meeting good sized territorial snakes when pulling rhubarb and doing other gardening chores. They were numerous enough to become nuisances and some even acquired names. There was one particularly large specimen that like to hang out beside the pool and I told one of my associates in Ukraine about it. We decided that its personality was much like someone we had to deal with who was particularly unpleasant and promptly decided to name the snake after this person. At that point I got my camera out and decided I would take a picture of the snake to e-mail over so everyone could see our nemesis' namesake. About that time my sister and my mother arrive from FL for a visit and we are all laughing about naming snakes after our least favorite people (my sister was going through a nasty divorce at the time and my mother thought we should name it after her soon to be ex-husband). Apparently my sister told one of her friends about the snake naming and unbeknownst to us, this friend puts an ad in the paper saying for $1 we would name a snake after their least favorite person. I found out about it when envelopes started arriving addressed to me containing $1 and a name. To make a long story short, we received enough requests to go out for a nice dinner at a Chinese restaurant and see a movie.