So. Working at home has it’s positives and negatives. I would say more positives than negatives…. but still. And then, there are some things that can be both positive AND negative, such as the puppy dogs. I LOVE my dogs. I mean it, there are the cutest little toots e-ver. Oh, you want to see them? Okay good…

Hazel (my Labradoodle) is on the left - Romeo (my Maltese) is on the right. You know they’re adorable.

They’re adorable MOST of the time. Sometimes, not so much. Such as - when it’s raining and they go outside clean and come back in muddy. OR when Hazel gets bored and decides it’s a good time to chew up my GLASSES (that was today). OR when Romeo gets jealous that I took Hazel for a jog and I come home to find that he’s escaped and 30 minutes later I find him 3 blocks down the road …… (BIG BREATH OF AIR)… but MOST of the time - they’re adorable.

Yesterday, they were on my “negatives” list of working at home. They wanted to go outside, so I let them out. I’d get upstairs and just in the rhythm of post processing, and then…. BARK! BARK!…. BARK! BARK!!! So I’d go down stairs, let them both in, go upstairs and get back to work. A few minutes later they would be downstairs by the backdoor barking to go out. Ahh. So - I did what any normal person who wanted to get ANY work done would do - I left the sliding glass door open for them to go in and out of. I mean - it’s 70 degrees - and sunny - why not?

I’ll tell you why not. Because around 1pm yesterday I was upstairs working and I heard a bunch of commotion downstairs. “Hello?” I yelled. Not that I expected anyone to answer… I figured it was the dogs - but it SURE sounded like a person in my house. I heard a bunch of chairs moving around and things being knocked over. Ummm… weird. So I creeped down the stairs to see who had invaded my house. By the way - I was SO ready for an attacker, with my leapord house shoes on - just saying. I walked in the living room to find no one but the dogs. Nothing was torn up and it didn’t seem like anything was knocked over.

Then I smelled it. It smelled like a skunk had sprayed in my living room. I thought, “There is no WAY a skunk just crawled its way up 2 stairs, onto my porch, into my house, and sprayed my two dogs.” I looked for a skunk in my house. I looked outside for a skunk. No skunk. Hmm… what the heck? I also noticed Romeo was rubbing his face on the hard wood floor. That was odd, he normally does that on the carpet, but not the hard floor!

I look outside again… then I walked around to the kitchen, and I saw it.

A HUGE. BLACK. SNAKE (I just shivered in disgust as I typed that). It was curled up  on the floor about a foot away from Romeo (who was still rubbing his face on the floor), and had his head up ready to attack again (I then knew Romeo had been bitten). I quickly hurried the dogs outside (so as not to get bit again…) and ran as fast as I could in my leapord print slippers to my 70 year old neighbor, Pat’s, house. I quickly rang the doorbell, told him the scenario, and a few minutes later we were back inside my house with a shovel to kill the beast.

Unfortunately, he was no longer there. Hm… unfortunately just DOESN’T seem to do this situation justice. It seems a little more than unfortunate to me. I had a snake in my house and we didn’t know where it was. A big snake. A HUGE snake. So… my legs were shaking and poor Pat was carefully looking under couches and tables while I stood in open areas that the snake was OBVIOUSLY not in. He looked for probably 15 minutes with no luck. I called Eric and my dad to come join the search and rescue destroy team. The men all looked for the snake for what seemed to be forever - it was probably an hour. No luck. We even let the bloodhounds back in to sniff the trail of the snake. Romeo just started eating and Hazel wanted to be rubbed. Fabulous.

*By the way - I knew the snake was a bullsnake (not poisonous) because Romeo got bit by one last year at my mom’s house and we took them both in to the vet for testing. Otherwise, I would have been at the vet at this time.

Finally, AND I MEAN FIIINAAALLLYYY, the boys pulled out the fridge and saw the snake curled up behind it. That little sucker was sneaky, though. Any time they moved the fridge, he slithered underneath it to protect himself. Here’s the boys trying to formulate a plan.

I think at this point, my dad had knocked the snake coo-coo and he crawled up under the fridge. So, then my dad unscrewed the back of the refridgerater and got the snake out and killed him. Oh, and for you PETA people, I’m sorry we killed a non-poisonous snake, but he deserved to die. He came right up onto MY porch, into MY house, and bit MY dog. He was SCARY, too. Say all you want, but if I see another one, he will also be a gonner.

And here is little snakey - I mean - HUGE snakey.

Lessons learned:

1: Snakes are only good if they are dead - and even then they are not good.

2: Leaving the backdoor open for extended periods of time is a no-no.

3: Twittering and event while it unfolds is always a must.

One day, that will make a great story. Oh wait, that’s today. Wasn’t that a good story?