Snake Day +1

Well, today is going to be a better day than yesterday. How can it miss? Unless there's another snake in the house. And if there is, I haven't seen it..... and lord knows I've been walking around here with one eye on the floor and the other on the ceiling.

I'm still trying to think how that silly thing got in the house in the first place. If it came in from the back screen-porch, that means that it had to slither all the way through the living room and down half of the hallway to get to the powder room, then it had to slither up the wall (my pretty Victorian lady wallpaper!) to get into the beaded light shade on the ceiling fixture. (That's why I hate even the thought of snakes-- they slither. How can you like something that slithers?)

And of course, now I'm also wondering if a green garden snake can grow larger than 12 or 14 inches long. And what was that snake eating while he was in the house? At any given time here, there will be either cat food or dog food in the pet dishes. Would a snake eat either of those? And wouldn't that make it grow?

At least I can laugh this morning at everything that happened last night. As soon as I saw that snake up in the light fixture, I didn't know if it was curled up asleep or curled up and dead, but I knew I didn't want to wake it up if it was just sleeping. I was so quiet after I saw it... I didn't even scream, which now is hard for me to believe.

Even when I was flipping through my address book and trying to decide which neighbor to call, I remember talking out loud to myself, but I was whispering, so as not to disturb the snake. I even put Gracie in my bedroom on the other side of the house and closed the door. My theory being that if she barked, the snake might wake up.

I really could have called just about any of the husbands on our Charades list last night, but the men that I thought would be the best snake-catchers don't live in this sub-division, and I didn't want to wait twenty minutes or half an hour. I mean honestly, in that amount of time, the snake could have woken up from his nap and started slithering out of the light shade and down the wall.

When I went outside our house last night to see who had their lights on, I saw that C's house down at the end of our cul de sac was all lit up. I knew they were home and awake, and C would have been happy to come and get that snake for me. However, that would have led to three hours of conversation about how he used to shoot snakes when he was young, along with a history of every snake in the state of Texas.

The best snake-catching husbands on this street just weren't available last night..... their houses were all dark so they were either all asleep or out for the evening. I never would have thought that ML's youngest daughter would be the one to get the snake out of the light shade for me. Looking back, as everyone from ML's house paraded across the street last night, R was the first in line, followed by her sister S, then ML, and then the two sons-in-law, each of them with their little boys in their arms (one boy saying "Wow!" at every mention of the word snake, and the other one about to cry each time he heard the word).


As I said... today will be a better day. A snake-less day. I've got to drive back to SteinMart because they left one of those snapped-on plastic tags on the white capri's that I bought yesterday. I didn't notice the tag until I went to iron them last night. Try as I might, I couldn't get that tag off and they fit so well that I didn't want to damage the fabric.

Speaking of "fit," I looked through my closet last night and saw that all of my capri's and slacks and jeans are size 8. Now, if all of those, bought last year, are size 8s, then why on earth don't the size 8s in the store this year fit me? I'm telling you, it's not me, it's them. (Sounds like a Seinfeld episode.) They're not making the size 8s the same way. Either that, or it's another cosmic joke.... seamstresses in overseas countries are cutting the fabric short on the patterns, just because they think American women are too spoiled and they want to torture us with too-tight sizes.

So, back I will go to SteinMart. I'm determined to just walk in the store with those capri's and my receipt and let them remove that stupid tag-- I am not going to browse around the store again. Browsing there always means buying, and I spent enough there yesterday. I will, however, stop into the shoe store on the way home, and see what's new there. Maybe they'll have a pretty pair of snakeskin summer pumps.