Snake Charmer

------UPDATE-------
Still no sign of the damn thing. Husband had get up and turn on the lights for me each of the 400 times I had to pee in the middle of the night because my dad said that's when it would come out. Thanks Dad. I'm almost convinced it escaped through some special sneaky snake spot somewhere. (how many s words can you string together semi-coherently?) Luckily the consensus seems to be that wherever it is, it's NOT poisonous.
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Today is a work from home day for me. I’m lucky enough to do that a couple of days a week which is REALLY helping with my gas bill. It’s amazing how much money it costs to sit in traffic for two hours a day to and from work. My favorite advantage to working from home is that I can sleep until 8:30, the roll out of bed and be at the computer on time at 8:31. Well, almost on time. Usually Husband is here until about that time when he leaves for work, he only has a 20 minute drive the lucky bastard. But this morning he was up and out the door by 6am. Such a go-getter my husband!

Around 7, the dauggers woke me up because they needed to go outside. I know that’s what they needed because they have a very specific way of telling me. Bella puts her head on the pillow beside mine, does a simultaneous wine/grumpy growl, and nudges me with her head or kisses my cheek. And Chloe stands there and watches her with an expectant look on her face. It’s just about he sweetest thing they do, second only to when Bella chews/sucks on a plush toy like it’s a pacifier and goes to sleep. That might be the cutest thing ever seen in this world.

Not wanting to experience another “accident incident” I jumped out of bed with nothing but a t-shirt on. I didn’t bother putting my contacts in my eyes even though I am blind as a bat, or putting on pants or shoes because I was hoping to crawl back in bed and sleep another few winks as soon as they did their business in the back yard.

We hurried to the back door which is off the kitchen, right next to where I’m typing this now. And I opened the door for them to go out.

They didn’t get far.

Directly on the other side of the back door we simultaneously saw something strange. My first thought was, why did mom’s rubber snake end up here on my back porch? (we helped her move from an 1800 square foot house to a 600 square foot apartment in Vancouver so a lot of her stuff found a home at my house). Chloe’s first thought was “I should definitely stick my nose into this creature and smell it.” Bella’s first thought was “what the hell is that thing I’m not going near it, I’ll let my sister find out what it is.” And about 1 millisecond after it registered in my sleepy brain that that is actually a REAL snake and I have no shoes or pants on and I can’t see what the fuck it’s going to do, the snake reared up like a cobra and bit Chloe’s nose. Then it lifted it’s whole body so it was supported by just the end of it’s tail. That scared Chloe enough that she backed up which the snake took as an invitation to wiggle as fast as it could INTO MY HOUSE and hide in a corner of the kitchen. Thankfully I was able to grab Chloe before she went after it again, and the three of us ran into the bedroom.

The first thing I did was put my contacts in so I could take a good look at Chloe to make sure she was OK. She was rubbing her face all over the rug like it was hurting her, and her breath smelled like a skunk (which surprisingly is not what it usually smells like). Other than that she was her normal self. Once I did that I must have pulled some Animal Planet knowledge out of my ass because I put on jeans and thick sneakers just in case the snake ended up being poisonous. I knew I couldn’t deal with it myself since I am pregnant and would not for one second take the chance that a maybe poisonous snake could bite me and hurt the baby. So I had to call Husband at work. Normally I would have called my mom back when she was DallaMa, and not CanaMa but alas, I don’t think there was much she could do from Vancouver. (I did call her for moral support of course)

I had to sneak back into the kitchen to get my phone and saw the snake was on the move. It looked like it was actually up on the baseboards. Let me just say this. I am not a woman who can’t deal with bugs or snakes or reptiles. We have a tortoise, I love to find geckos around the house, and if this had been just a little green garden snake I would have simply swept the thing back outside. This thing was LONG people. Not Python long, but longer than you want wildly slithering around in your house when you don’t know if it’s poisonous or not. And it was a really dark gray color and a good thickness although not super thick. I went back into the bedroom and put towels under the doors leading in and out so that the snake couldn’t slither underneath them, and waited for Husband to get here.

Once he did, he began looking for the snake in the kitchen out of which it had apparently escaped. He looked for around 20 minutes before I joined his search. The damn snake had completely disappeared. It’s too big to hide that well, it must have some sort of mystical powers. We turned couch cushions over, we turned kitchen chairs over, we pulled out the refrigerator, all of which were snake free zones. We looked from 7:30 until 9:00 and NEVER FOUND THE SNAKE. Husband finally had to go back to work, and I started getting calls from my office so the search was called off. So now I’m sitting in the middle of the kitchen typing this, expecting any minute for that damn snake to come bite the living shit out of me. If it’s not gone by dark I’m calling Animal Control.