"You are freaking kidding me!"

And those were the words I said out loud as I walked into the bathroom of the guest cottage this afternoon.  And as soon as those words came out of my mouth, my throat closed up and I started to run out of the cottage and back towards the house.

Into the kitchen I went, through the hallway towards the front door, and I yelled upstairs to my husband: "There's a snake in the cottage!!!"   Next thing I heard was his footsteps as he came rushing down the staircase, asking me where it was exactly.

"In the bathroom," I told him.
"Did you shut the door so he couldn't get out of there?"
"I didn't think of that... I just ran out."
"How big is the snake?" my husband wanted to know.
"Maybe two feet long."
"What color?"
"Brown."  (I resisted the urge to tell him that the snake was red, white and blue and what difference did it make what color it was.)

 I had gone into the cottage to let the water run, which I do every week to keep the water fresh and clear.... as I turned away from the sink, my eye caught a long brown rope that shouldn't have been there on the white porcelain tub.  After living out here for five years, I knew right away what that damn rope thing was, which was why I said "You are freaking kidding me!" to no one in particular.  Or maybe I was directing that comment to the snake itself.

When we got to the cottage, I stayed by the front door while my husband walked into the bathroom. Thankfully, the snake was still there in the same place. Now it was my turn to ask the questions.
"Is it moving?"
"No."
"How big is it?"
"Your assessment of its size was correct... it's about two feet long."  (My assessment of its size? How can he be so blasted technical in that type of situation?)

I asked my husband how he was going to get him out of there.  "The shop vac," he said.  "I'll use that to suck him up from that ledge, take the shop vac outside, and then I'll shoot him."

While my husband kept an eye on the snake, I went to get the gun, then I rolled the shop vac out of the garage and towards the cottage.  The snake just stayed where it was even as I made all that racket with the shop vac.  We put the gun on the porch of the cottage, but my husband brought the shop vac into the cottage bathroom. As my husband got everything plugged in and set up, he told me to hit the 'start' button on the count of three.

Honestly, you can't make this stuff up.

So there we were..... my husband trying to suck up a two-foot long brown snake into the shop vac while I had my arm stretched out as far as it could go while keeping myself away from the door of that bathroom.

The snake, however, had no intention of getting vacuumed up by that long black hose connected to that noisy machine.  As my husband held the shop vac hose near the snake, it started wriggling and fighting and backing away, and eventually found a slice of space around the ridge of the tub, which sits up on a tiled platform.  Apparently, whoever installed that tub left just enough space for a small snake to slither through once it found its way underneath the cottage itself.

Well, now what?  There's still a snake in the cottage, even though it's not in plain sight.  We got those glue-trap things that we use for mice..... my husband put two of those near that thin opening by the tub, which is probably how the snake got up there on the ledge in the first place.  Then we shut the bathroom door, and my husband used duct tape to seal off the space underneath the bathroom door.  If the snake does get up through that opening around the tub again, he will get caught on the glue traps, and if the glue traps don't get him, at least he won't be able to slither out underneath the bathroom door and go into hiding underneath the bed or the sofa.

Give me a blessed break........ there is just always, always, always something out here in the hills that gets my heart racing and my head spinning, and my peace of mind just shot all to hell and back.

And you can count on this certain fact:  I will not be the one pulling that duct tape off of that bathroom door to see if the snake has gotten caught on those glue traps.