SNAKE!!!!!

Okay, so I'm sitting here enjoying Labor Day reading Janet Evanovich and contemplating dinner, when all of a sudden, Gatsby starts freaking out and heaving himself at the patio door. Not having seen this behavior before, I go to check it out.

The biggest snake I've ever seen outside of a ZOO is sidling up to my patio chair. BIG HUGE SNAKE. I go next door and tell my neighbors, because they have a dog too, and Jeremy asks me how big around it was. I show him and he give me the "yeah right" look. Melissa, his wife, cracks open their patio door and there it is, and she's all "Oh my fucking god!" So Jeremy goes outside and then duly apologizes to me for thinking I had exaggerated the girth of this snake. It was 3.5-4 feet long. I would exaggerate, but there's no need to in this case.

It totally has to be someone's pet. It didn't have a rattle, and no, it's not a garter snake. Or a bull snake. So we call animal control, and they're going to charge $25 to come out and LOOK for the snake. While we're discussing all of this, and the lawn guys have all gathered round to check out the ANACONDA in our yard, a baby bunny comes hopping along totally unawares. Jeremy put our ghetto neighbor's screens (they lay in the yard rather than on the windows) up around the bush that the snake just crawled into, and the lawn dudes shoo the bunny away to avoid a total National Geographic moment.

As it sits now, we don't know where the snake is and Gatsby is going to need to get used to peeing on the street because I'm not walking through the grass at night ever again.

What was that I was saying earlier about being a fiction writer because this stuff only happens to me?