neato-skeeto kids, a snakey question and an update

This evening we attended a football banquet for Tony and Tee. Tony lettered again, which was a really great ending to his high school football days. I hope that if he'd like to play football in college, he'll get an opportunity to do so.

To our excitement, Tee won the Coaches' Award for the freshman team. This award was for the kid who was always working hard, learning, growing and cheerful, even if he didn't get much time on the field during a game. He absolutely loves football, and worked extra hard this year, so it was super to see that the coaches noticed and appreciated his positive attitude.

One of our other neato kids, Rosie, has been working in the biology lab at the college she attends. This is extra cool, since she's only a junior in high school and attending college. She helps take care of all the lab animals-- animal huggers, please note these are not experiment subjects, but animals the students can observe. Anyhoo, one of the animals in the lab that she cares for is a red-tailed boa. Recently, the snake shed its skin, and the guy who's the head honcho of the lab offered it to her, so she could bring it home. Now we have this smelly snake skin out in our garage that she's quite fond of. She's like to put it into a shadow box. 1) Does anyone know how to treat the skin to get rid of the icky odor and keep it from deteriorating and 2) Is it worth our time to build a shadow box, or will it just degrade in there no matter what we do? The skin is quite long, so we'll probably need to custom build some sort of shadow box. TIA for any advice you can pass along, dear readers.

On to an update: I'm not finished with my project =(. The good news is my computer network is working better, so I've made some headway.