"Snakes Are A Pain" by Troy H. Cheek on Jun 08, 2009
Well, no more programming humor for a while, based on the number of people who wrote in because they didn't get the joke. No matter. It provided enough material to get us to June. The month of June, I'm told, is Hernia Awareness Month, National Home Safety Month, and National Aphasia Awareness Purple Monkey Dishwasher.
However, a couple of months back, I had a little adventure which bears repeating here. It was the middle of Spring, which around here means that you can suffer hypothermia at night and heat stroke during the day, especially if you're wearing your full Winter coat like your mother demanded while you were waiting for the bus that morning, the sweating getting so bad that you stuff the coat in your school locker and forget to take it home because by then you're considering cutting your pants into shorts, so you don't have a coat at home the next day and your mother dresses you in seventeen layers of shirts and light jackets in the morning and everybody on the bus laughs at you.
Not that anything like that had ever happened to me, mind you. Just saying.
It was one of those times when you have to get up in the middle of the night to switch the central heat and air from COOL to HEAT, hoping to remember to switch it back in the morning. You'd think that the switchover would be automatic, but every system I've ever used has to be switched manually, regardless of outside (or even inside) temperature. Would it be that difficult to program an upper and lower limit, say 5 or 10 degrees below/above the desired temperature, and change mode when it hits that? Is that really so unreasonable?
I'd already had to get up once that night to knock the icicles off the thermostat and switch it to HEAT mode. I picked up an extra blanket on the way back to bed. I knew the HEAT had worked an hour later when I half woke up long enough to kick the extra blanket off. I'm an expert at doing things while half awake. I've reportedly showered and shaved while still half asleep. I know I routinely turn off my alarm clock (having to reach around to the back slide and slide a switch) instead of just hitting the snooze button (huge push bar on the front), which is why I set my alarm a half hour early. Either I hit the snooze bar three or four times which comes out to the desired time, or I turn off the alarm in my sleep and my brain wakes me in a panic a half hour later convinced that I've overslept. It's win-win.
As I rolled back over and drifted quickly back into a deep sleep, some dark corner of my brain sent a message up into my forethoughts, blasting away dreams of sweet nothings: "Your butt feels wet."
Well, that certainly got my attention. I wondered why my butt felt wet. I certainly didn't remember wetting the bed, there are no water supply or drain pipes over the bed, and the hot water heater would have to leak quite a bit without my noticing it for the water to rise that high.
I concentrated on the sensation and realized that it wasn't so much wet as cool. In fact, it was cool in a circle. Not a disk, mind you, like a spreading water stain, but a ring, a halo, a race track. In fact, it felt a lot like the carabiner I'd been using as a keyring. I'd had one in my pocket earlier and vaguely remembered having tossed my pants on the bed before ultimately dumping them on the floor, so my sleep-addled mind decided that it must have slid out, floated around under the covers for a while, and finally ended up under my butt.
A carabiner or karabiner (colloquially: crab, D ring, snap-link, krab, or 'biner) is a metal loop with a sprung or screwed gate. Carabiners are widely used in sports requiring ropework, such as climbing, slacklining, caving ("Single Rope Technique"), canyoning, and sailing, and in industrial rope access work, such as construction or window cleaning. Or, in my case, the offset D shape made a perfect keyring. (Thank you, Wikipedia)
I reached underneath me to fish out the keyring and toss it on the nightstand.
It moved.
There are few things that can get you out of bed faster than realizing that something under you just moved under its own power. I fairly levitated out of bed and found myself halfway to the door without conscious effort. I stood there and panted while quilts and blankets floated down like giant calico snowflakes. I'm not sure how I turned the light on, as I don't remember ever getting close enough to the switch to reach it.
Laying in the middle of my bed, curled up in a little circle in the warm spot left by my right butt cheek, was a small snake. It had grey and black bands from its spoon-like head to the tip of its pointy tail. Its eyes had round pupils. From this, I gathered that it wasn't venomous ("poisonous" to you city slickers) and therefore harmless to humans aside from the occasional heart attack caused by them climbing into beds with them. Looking a little closer, I decided it was probably a young grey rat snake, which probably isn't an official wildlife service name, but it's what we call them around here.
Well, at least I'd have an answer the next time somebody thought I was in a bad mood and asked what had crawled up my butt: "I little grey and black snake about this long."
In spite of the rude awakening, I had no hard feelings towards the snake. I don't mind snakes. I even encourage nonvenomous ones to hang around the house because they kill insects and rodents and, old wives tell me, venomous snakes. How a small, toothless, venomless snake kills something kills something twice its size with poison-filled fangs, the old wives never mentioned.
While I want them around the house, I do draw the line at sleeping with them. This one had realized that I had de-assed the area and was looking for another warm spot. I grabbed him as it (he? she?) tried to slide under the pillows.
Well, I tried to, anyway. Although they are not slimy as portrayed in popular media, most snakes have scales which are rather slick and hard to hold onto, especially if you're trying not to injure it. The best I managed was a controlled fumble as I staggered about the room before finally tossing it in the general direction of the door leading to the unfinished side of the basement, which is probably where it came from in the first place. It slithered away, probably thinking unkind thoughts toward me, as I shook out the bedclothes and tried to get everything back on the bed in the proper order. I was snuggling back under the covers when I thought of something else the old wives used to tell me.
In cold weather, snakes of all kinds tend to gather together in large balls to conserve body heat. I'm told that during a cold snap, normal inter- or intra-species rivalries are put on hold. Rat snakes might bunk with rattlesnakes which might cuddle up with copperheads which might snuggle with cottonmouths aka water moccasins which the Fish and Game people swear aren't native to my neck of the woods. Then again, they tell me that I didn't hear cougars in the woods at night in my youth and that the civets my grandfather used to trap have been extinct in North America since the last Ice Age. He's not quite that old.
Regardless, old wives tell me that huge balls of snakes can be found during unseasonably cold weather. Sometimes, for reasons unknown, the tails of numerous snakes become stuck or knotted together, forming "snake kings" (not to be confused with king snakes) which are supposed to be signs of ill fortune. It's an indication that the house is cursed or something. On a more sensible note, I would think that anybody who found a conjoined mass of half a dozen venomous snakes in understandably bad moods would not have a very rosy personal future, at least in the short term. Half a dozen different bites are pretty hard to treat, as I understand that antivenoms tend to counteract each other.
(Hmm. While I'd thought that snake kings were common knowledge, a quick Internet search reveals that I'm alone in this. Really? Aren't snake kings thought to be the origin of the hydra of Greek mythology? Didn't I learn that in school? There are a lot more people than I thought who believe in rat kings, however. Weird.)
The upshot of all this was that while I'd found and removed one harmless snake, if he'd gotten in, so could others. Not so harmless snakes, perhaps in great numbers, would also be seeking warmth on this cold Spring night. Maybe their tails would get stuck together. Maybe, just maybe, at this very moment, two rattlers, a cottonmouth, and trio of albino copperheads were huddled at the foot of my bed, tails entangled, desperate to break free, and ready to lash out at the first warm body that came within reach. Perhaps they were just waiting for their tails to grow together, for their nervous systems to link up, so they could move as an individual and stalk their prey. I'm told that snakes like mice.
I'm told that human toes look like mice in the eyes of a snake. The thermal signatures they give off are similar to those of small rodents. Don't get me started on the scent.
I don't think I slept at all the rest of the night.
