Kenny the Kingsnake, and other adventures in desert living

Off and on through this early part of the summer I've spotted a fair-size kingsnake in and around the barn. Unlike rattlers, kingsnakes are to be encouraged in barns and even under houses, not only because of their voracious appetite for rats and mice, but also because they consider rattlesnakes prey animals. Exactly how they pull that off I don't know, but I've heard it from several quarters. So I just named this one Kenny and left it alone. It's not a friendly guest, but a relationship doesn't have to be friendly to be mutually beneficial.

On the other hand, Kenny is still a snake and so there are places you don't want him to go. I was unaware that he'd gone into one of those places sometime Friday, when nobody was looking.

Landlady came in Friday night after I was in bed. Yesterday morning she came over for coffee and informed me that she had spent the night in her car, because there was a great big snake in the barn apartment. It went behind the bookcase when she tried to shoo it out, and refused to leave. Could I please do something about my snake? Suddenly it was my snake. So I went looking for Kenny, but he'd split sometime during the night.

Unfortunately while I was doing that, I took my eye off the ball - or rather off Little Bear. LB took mere seconds to gather up his two closest friends and disappear into the desert.

Now, this disappearing act has been the subject of quite an ethical dilemma for me, for some months. The dogs know where they live; they'll eventually come home, and rewarding their bad behavior by chasing them down and giving them a Jeep ride (which they love) isn't really helping. But their most common destination is D&L's place, a couple of miles away. D&L don't want the dogs there, and I can't just ask them to put up with my pooches until they come home on their own. Shooing them away doesn't work, because D&L have dogs of their own with whom my dogs love to play. So I must go get them. And it absolutely doesn't help to hit or even yell at a dog who just ran joyously to you when you chased it down. All you can do is bring it home and confine it.

But this time the dogs didn't go to D&L's. Or S&L's. Or J&H's. I don't know where they went. I eventually had to come tell Claire about this, and she was understandably annoyed. It's always my dog that gets us into this, and I'm supposed to keep him under control. So now we're both out trolling the desert for dogs, when we already had a busy morning planned, and it's not getting the day off to a good start. I was just checking D&L's for the second time when Landlady texted me - the dogs had come home on their own from wherever they'd been hanging out.

Yesterday was shit-shoveling morning. Paulo the Stallion from Hell has been much more consistently mellow lately, because two of his three mares are pregnant and that apparently chills a stallion out. The mares, on the other hand, have been in an uncertain mood. Roxxie, in particular, the one unpregnant mare, has been positively hostile. My duties as an Equine Excrement Engineer require me to drag my shitwagon through pretty much every part of their one-acre corral (I can't call it a pasture, since it doesn't contain a single blade of grass) gathering up their offerings. There's one corner near the front I call the "swamp" because it's where the horses seem to prefer to empty their fifty-gallon bladders. It's a low spot near the (electric) fence, and a fellow can feel just a bit hemmed in there - especially when there's a mature mare staring him down with her head down and her front legs spread, daring him to shoo her away from the spot where he really does have to go with his manure fork. Look, lady, I'm just cleaning up after you. Could you give a proletarian a break here? If this is some sort of class struggle, you're already in the upper class. But I have never successfully reasoned with a horse. Eventually waving the fork at her gets it done, but you do want to watch her after you've pissed her off. Thing about a horse - both ends can get you.

Then it was work on Landlady's new house. When I got back from the Shitfields of the Desert, she was already on the roof installing scuppers to get water off the roof and it wasn't going well. She'd been at it for a couple of hours in the hot sun, and she was in the sort of mood that makes you treat a lady like a big bottle of mercury fulminate. This is great - three ladies in murderous moods and it's still nowhere near noon. This is why I became a hermit, right here.

Claire and I got to work on installing windows, and things started to go better. The dining room, which is at the very front of the building and has a fantastic view, sports four big windows. Naturally, since neither of us was completely sure what we were doing, it seemed perfectly logical to start with the biggest, heaviest windows. There was a flaw in that logic somewhere, but we didn't see it at first.

Anyway, we spent the afternoon installing six of the house's nine windows, and after a brief encounter with the learning curve it went really well. Except that in the afternoon the wind comes up. The last three windows were on the windward side of the house, and for that reason we hadn't cut the OSB away from the window frames. As soon as I attacked each frame with the Sawzall, wind started whistling through the hole. This had the effect of whipping all the sawdust right into my face. The last cuts on each frame have to be kind of persnickety. You can't just hack away at it from the inside, because you'll always angle the OSB away from the frame which makes it kinda hard to screw in the window frame afterward. But it's hard to make precise cuts - with a sawzall, which isn't exactly designed for precision anyway - when your eyes are all full of sawdust. It's a hassle, and you need to go slow to get it right.

By the time we got the sixth window tacked in, it was only about 3:30 but we were all ready to quit. Landlady got the shower, of course, it being in the barn apartment. But cold water felt really good by that point. I felt like solid sawdust inside and out, and spent a blissful ten minutes or so washing my head with cool water from the cistern.

We'd just got situated on the new house's porch with ciggies and a box of Claire's fine supermarket wine when S&L quit work and came over. We sat chatting on Landlady's breezy porch while the shadows lengthened. Little Bear, still in disgrace, was cabled up to one of the porch pillars. He's only ever been tied out in my yard, and there he knows the limits he can move. Here he hadn't figured out that the same limits applied. So when S&L came he tried to launch toward the truck with the other dogs and got a rude surprise when he hit the end of the cable. He didn't try that again, but he still got a nice walky when we all decided to troop out into the boonies to show S&L the progress on The Secret Lair. Then they bid us adieu, and we three had a late supper and retired.

So no post yesterday, but not because nothing was going on - precisely because quite a lot was.