But seriously...WHY DID IT HAVE TO BE SNAKES?

So I had to finally address the elephant in the room.  Why are there practically no snakes in this Indiana Jones themed display?  And the one snake you have is...questionable at best?  *sigh*  Because, like Indy, we share a fear and loathing of snakes, though I don't really have his excuse of falling into a vat of them.  That would be the worst. Ugh.  BUT.  Snakes are also a significant section of the Indiana Jones franchise, mostly poking fun of Indy's fear of them, but still.  So I came up with the idea of adding a small scene like in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy and Marion get trapped in the tomb with the masses of snakes surrounding them.  *shudder*

But given the amount of snakes needed to make the scene even close to the movie, it would be a little financially prohibitive to buy fake ones, and then I'm stuck with hundreds of snakes that I then have to throw away so I don't have nightmares, and then what kind of a fucked up surprise is that to leave for the garbage men whom I'm sure have seen some pretty messed up stuff, but an entire garbage can of fake snakes? One of my bucket list goals is not to be the cause of major therapy for anyone and I feel like that would prevent me from checking that one off.


To that end, I obtained some black contact paper from Home Depot (like $9 for a 15 foot roll) and have been cutting out silhouettes of snakes and taking a silver sharpie and making designs on the backs.  They started out as all black, but given that I want to overlap them, I figured at least some should have designs so it's not just an ambiguous mass of black paper.  I also need to head to Office Max and get a copper metallic pen to do some stripes, get something other than silver in there.

The idea is to put them all over the bottom half of driveway except for in a path leading up to the porch.  Similar to the dinosaur footprints...but in reverse.  Hopefully this will work.  I'd like to have them put down for the party and still be not too messed up for Halloween, so I'm intending to put them up a day or so before the party, then after the party, take a plastic drop cloth and stake it on either side of the driveway, covering them up to protect from the elements and you know, our ability to use the driveway for our cars.  That's the plan anyways, hopefully it will work properly.  In the meantime it's been a confronting few days having to draw, cut out, and then draw designs on a bunch of snakes.  But I think I'm getting better--after the thirtieth one I didn't have to gear myself up for it quite as much.  Also I put on a movie and it helped to focus my attention elsewhere.  Cross your fingers the whole thing works!

**UPDATE**
Sam and I spent the evening laying down tons of snakes with duct tape.  Which resulted in a fairly decent display and cold butts.  But the whole thing looked pretty awesome.  Fast forward to the morning after.  Even though we placed a tarp over them, the massive wind managed to blow away the tarp (though not out of the yard), and take off with a good portion of the snakes. It's also all covered in pine needles.  So that was a bit of a wash.  Tomorrow I plan on taking the blower and blowing away some of the pine needles and I'll see what's left of the snakes.  But for one shining moment, it was pretty cool.  *sigh*