Slug-A-Bug

When my kids were younger - as in this picture of them taken the first day of school in 1978* when we lived on Tuck Corner (Kari 9, Doug, 16, Preston, 7) - they had a 'game' they played whenever they saw a ...

....Volkswagen Beetle automobile. I'm pretty certain it was a game Kari & Preston's father, Denny, taught them. The gist of it was that the first one to spot a VW Beetle yelled slug-a-bug and punched the other(s) in the shoulder. I know I didn't teach them the game because I had to ask why they were hitting one another - other than the usual reasons: "He's looking at me. She's on my side of the car. They're making faces at me." Etc. Etc. Routine sibling stuff.
There are various names and rules for this "game" - Punch Buggy, Slug Bug, Slug Beetle, Punch Bug, Beetle, Slug-A-Bug, Piggy Punch, Punch Dub and, in Great Britain, Yellow Car. 

There's a reason 'slug-a-bug' is on my mind. A few weeks ago I started noticing iridescent trails on the cement of the patio when I went out early in the morning. (Can you see it in the very middle of this picture?) My natural curiosity had me guessing what on earth was making those pretty paths? Did Bud have any idea? "No."

Then I found a shed snake skin in the flower bed. I could see the iridescence of it in the sun. "I'll bet the snake crawled across the patio and left those trails", I told Bud. It seemed a reasonable explanation and I quit wondering about it.

Until this morning when Bud came back from an early walk and called me out to see something on the deck. "Look at the size of this slug", he exclaimed. "I've never seen one so big!" I agreed. "It's four times the size of the one I swept off the patio last week and I thought that one was big", I said.
Bud was going to put it back down in the flower bed. He thought slugs were good for the plants. I told him not to do that, I thought that they were bad for plants. So he carried it away, but I began to question whether I was remembering that correctly. I said I was sure I remembered Mom trying to keep them out of the garden when I was a kid, so I had to google slugs to make sure I was remembering it correctly.
And, guess what I found out - besides the fact that they are a pest you don't want on your plants or in your garden - the slimy trail they leave behind them is iridescent!
So, two questions answered - slugs are bad and the marks left on the patio cement were made by slugs. I also looked up how to rid the pests from your garden because salt was all that came to my mind - it seemed Mom sprinkled salt around the plants - and I did find that you can kill the slugs in salt water - after you pick them off the plants.
E-w-w-w, picking slugs off plants - that memory must be why my face is all scrunched up in this grimace and why I felt sick reading about slugs. The ones I remember as a child were much smaller than the monster pictured above. What I read says they like moist areas. So why, in this extremely dry and droughty year are we having slugs? I just hope there are not any more. Yeck!
Maybe I can get the kids to come back home and 'slug-a-bug'?

(* Grand kids notice: Your dads and aunt did not have fancy back packs. Preston has an old book satchel and Kari has a plastic draw-string bag from a store. High schooler Doug, of course, is too cool to carry anything other than a notebook.)