(no subject)

[which_chick]

Did not horse this evening due to thunderstorms and ninety-percent humidity. No desire there, sorry. Did visit horse (fine and entirely uninjured, amazingly catchable) and held her out on grass until the rain came.



I got home and walked into my house. I do not make a habit of inspecting my coffee table, but today something about it looked odd.



Can you see what is wrong with my coffee table? No? How about a closer look...



Can you see the problem now?

Right. There is a black rat snake (or similar not-poisonous black rodent-eating constrictor thing) on my fucking coffee table. I am not a huge fan of snakes, but I would like to state for the record that (following the obligatory scream like a girl episode) I got a broom and swept the snake out the door pretty gently and restored it to its natural habitat.



Bad snake! Bad! Please not to be being on coffee table! In the house! Bad snake! Snakes do not go in the house.

I totally have got to get a fucking door sweep. It is an action item on my to-do list.

Comments

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

The snake got into my house by way of the inch-n-change crack under my door. A door sweep is a thin strip of material affixed to the bottom of the door to close up that space and make it (among other, more minor considerations like improving the weather-tightness of my house) impervious to snakes.

Neither of my brothers is stupid enough to put a fake snake in my house.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Also, as an FYI for folks on the eastern half of the United States, this is a black rat snake. It's a constricting snake, not poisonous. Note round pupil, head-n-neck roughly the same size (East coast poisonous snakes except for coral snakes (which don't live around here anyway) have great big triangular heads and wee little necks whereas our nonpoisonous snakes have heads-n-necks that are about the same size).

The wrinkled way that it's all kinked like that on the coffee table is what black rat snakes do when they are scared. They wrinkle up and don't move. (That's why I could take pictures of it. With flash.) The head/neck posture is defensive, but the snake made no movements to attack the broom, just kind of tolerated being swept out into the yard.

In the yard, I used the broom and a five-gallon bucket (put bucket near front of snake, who was balled up as in the last picture, gently push with broom to sweep snake into bucket) to scoop it up and take it across the road into the woods, where it sort of waited for me to leave and then crawled off to do whatever it is that black rat snakes do in their spare time.

[electroweak.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia informs me that in their spare time, rat snakes date Angelina Jolie. Man, Wikipedia is well-informed!