If you play with snakes...

After two weeks solid of working 10 hours minumum a day and I was ready for a few hours to myself without so much as a thought of work. I drove up the road to one of the ditches close to my house. da f0ssZ and I went there a couple months ago and I found a nice angustidens and a deer tooth. I hoped for a repeat performance today. With shovel, sifter, and The Haunted screaming in my mp3 player, I attacked the layer laden ditch. It was nearly dry, so I could dig in the very bottom in a few areas, but it wasn't fun. The fossils were under a layer of sand and surface rocks, then about 6 inches of squalid, rotting pine needles and leaves. With untiring persistence, I hefted the ditch sludge, black like sewage with an aroma just as pungent, up the edge of the ditch to get it out of the way. In a few areas I just dug below for the fossils because of the low water levels in the ditch. In other areas, the fetid slurry of mud and algae ridden ditch water hampered my efforts to see the teeth. In those areas, I sifted. Each basket fully took a little longer to sift because the "water" had to ooze up through the mud, rocks, and decaying leaf matter. Then I stuck my hands down into the slop and crushed the big chunks of clay with my fingers. Once everything was about the same milkshake like consistency, I moved to a little better water supply and rinsed it enough to see the rocks and fossils. The big payoff came when I found a pretty little angustidens, but other than that the only other good thing I came across was a little water snake. I caught him, but I didn't have anything to put him in to take him home, so I had to let him go. He was a feisty little guy, too. No more than about 8 inches long, every time I reached for him, he tried to bite me. How cute. I told my wife about it, but for some reason or another, she wasn't impressed. I'll never understand women.