The “glamour” of Wine Country living

Ah, the glamour! They never show this stuff on the TV travelogue In Wine Country.
Our garbage collection is on Tuesday and as we mainly spend weekends up in Napa, I usually take the cans down to the main road before departing on Sunday. I decided to be lazy and rather than rolling them down through our meadow, I would load them on our little 6 x 4 John Deere “Gator.” I was not dressed for farm work wearing shorts and flip-flops.
I rolled one of the cans towards the gator and looked down. A small rattlesnake, about a foot long, had been hiding under the can. So much for rattlers avoiding humans! This one was hanging out 10 feet from our front door. Fortunately, he seemed as determined to get away from me as I was of him. I ran to the shed and grabbed a spade and (voila!) I had dispatched my first rattlesnake. It was a youngster, with just two sections on his rattle, but he was definitely striking at the spade. I learned later that the babies are more dangerous because they tend to inject a full load of toxins when striking while adults may not release poison at all.
It was with just a little bit of swagger that I called and told my son that I had killed a rattlesnake. (The rattler may have grown in length and ferocity in the telling.)
What is really weird about this encounter with the wild is just a few hours before, as I was moving some wine around my wine storage room, I noticed that I had apparently stepped on (and killed) a scorpion.
I think it may be time to sell it all and give up this glitzy life.