(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

[wootsauce.livejournal.com]

How the heck did a snake get in your house!? At first I thought it was a rubber snake and the entry was gonna be all "my brother snuck in my houes and put a fake snake on my table to scare me" or something.

Clearly, the snake wanted to steal your sock chart, since it wasn't patient enough to chart out its own socks.

[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.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

And just in case anyone was wondering why I didn't kill it...

1. If I killed the snake in the house, I might get snake guts on assorted furnishings and/or the floor. Eeeewwww!

2. There are not very many easy and nonviolent ways to kill a snake. You can have death by Sir Blunt Instrument, death by Sir Sharp Implement, death by Lady Firearm (I have one to hand)... but none of these are tidy. If you think I'm beating a snake to death in my house, you're insane. It'd be messy. There would be ick. The snake would object, possibly in an escape-and-evade fashion. Cutting off the head of the snake is not a project that the snake would hold still for. It'd be sudden and violent and messy. If unsuccessful at decapitating the damn thing, then I have a bleeding and icky snake hiding in some inaccessible portion of my house. Ewwww. Shooting a snake inside my house? No. Not doing that, either. Ick.

3. If it were dead, I'd have to touch it to get it out of the house. And then I'd have a dead snake to dispose of. (A live snake can dispose of itself.) Even the magical barrier of paper towels can not save me from having to touch snake ick.

4. Only stupid summer people kill black rat snakes.

Honestly, the broom solution was the neatest, easiest way to solve the problem. No touchie the snake, no snake ick in house, no partially-dead snake hiding in house, no dead snake to dispose of.

[wootsauce.livejournal.com]

Yeah, really... why WOULD you kill it? It's just a little snake. It's not even going to hiss and rattle at you (the only snake I am familiar with in the wild. Man, talking about rattlesnakes makes me feel like I'm a cowboy in the wild west. We done got co-yotes out here in these parts too.)

Your snake is pretty. I kind of want to pet it except I know better than to pet wild things that could bite me.

[galena417.livejournal.com]

As a biology teacher, I can handle a lot of creepy-crawly critters... but snakes are not one of them. There's just something about them that makes my skin crawl. Congratulations on keeping your head (mostly) and getting out of the house alive.

[electroweak.livejournal.com]

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

[not-your-real.livejournal.com]

Wow! That was a nice snake. Corn snakes (of which our pet is an exemplar) are considered by some to be no more than a rat snake variant.

Must be good eatin' around there; was a healthy-looking snake.