Snakes and things …
Sometimes I feel my life is so ordinary. I only get to lift it away from the mundane by living through the life I write for the characters in my books. And these last few days have been bordering on the ‘very ordinary’ – the hard-work type ordinary that makes my world function. The garden and hedges were in dire need on Friday, so OH and myself spent a day rather like Edward Scissorhands, with stuff flying everywhere.
Then, because its summer and because its been wet, the sheep are eating green feed which is making them dirty and the humidity is inviting the flies and we then have the potential for that ghastly thing all Australian farmers hate called flystrike. Back into the yards come the sheep (we only had them in a few days ago for drenching for worms) and then we shower them with an anti-flystrike (organic) spray. We return to the garden with the days getting hotter and I spray the copious weeds, OH mows and whipper-snips and finishes building the retaining wall on the edge of the cliff.
I look at my sadly under-used riding gear and decide it needs a clean and drag out the rags and the saddle-cleaner and it is in the middle of martingales, bits, bridles, reins, girths, stirrups, and lovely German leather saddles, that I hear my Young Dog (a Jack Russell of ten as opposed to Old Dog who is Jack Russell of 14) going gangbusters at the back door. I race out thinking she’s chasing wasps and bees (she either has no fear or is immeasurably stupid) to find she has a snake on the patio and is having a great time flipping it in the air and generally waiting for its tail to drop off as normally happens when she hunts lizards.
The snake is about a foot and a half long and only a whip-snake so I am not as petrified as I would be with tiger-snakes, but nevertheless, catch both dogs, shoo them inside and try and catch the snake to remove from the property. It moved with the speed of light and has disappeared down a crack between the paving stones. And I am not really terribly happy.
I empty the dogs’ outside waterbowl (snakes search for water), birdbath and remove OH’s boots to inside the back door because the way I figure it, where there’s one small snake, there can just as easily be another bigger one. Young JRT is fine, she has eaten dinner and is lying cuddling her sheepskin ‘toy’. I check the internet and find that a whip-snake bite can cause a necrotising abscess but nothing too dramatic. 
But then my phobia kicks in and I start scouring the internet for snake repellents because at the farm we KNOW there are BIG tiger-snakes and LOTS of water. I find one that emits vibrations through the ground (snakes are deaf and essentially don’t see all that well, but respond to vibration) and only have to convince husband that it is an important outlay for his wife’s sanity. I pour my evening glass of wine, take a breath and sit back wondering if perhaps I can introduce said snake episode somewhere in my writing…
