Losing Faith in Cats - and Husbands

Elise called me on her way to work this morning, and I thought she sounded a little more awake than usual. She started telling me how it was dark when she fed the cats earlier and how she heard what she thought was one of those beetles making a rattling sound. Uh-oh. Magic word to get my attention. I KNEW what was coming. Texas. Rattlesnake. Ok. She's on the way to work and not crying over a dead cat or in the emergency room. So I keep listening.

Elise has an inside cat at the apartment she and Mike share, but she feeds a mother alley cat and several kittens, so you would think with humans and felines around, one of those vile creatures wouldn't be in their little fenced back yard. Wrong. Bad news. There was a coiled-up snake behind the grill making a rattling noise, or as Elise describes it, a "raspy-breathing noise." Whatever. Obviously co-existing with numerous cats.

She and Mike, instead of pulling out all the stops and blowing it to smithereens (Spell Check won't like that word{edit: Spell Check loved that word}) or chopping it into small pieces, decided to examine it and find out whether it was poisonous or not - from a distance, I assume. It passed all nonpoisonous tests, whatever those are - I'm not interested - and they decided to admire it a little more. Not only did they not kill it, they didn't even discourage it from spending the morning in the yard. Elise went to work, and I assume Mike did too. I've tried to IM him when his green "on" light was on, saying, "I KNOW about it. WHY?" But his green light went from green to amber "busy", and he won't answer me.

Now I'm rethinking that trip I planned to make out there in September.

I'm also feeling a little less confident in my own yard now. I assumed with a hyper herding dog and 2 ruthless cats (as far as lizards and birds go anyway), I would never walk outside and encounter one at my doorstep. Ugh. So no more walking around the yard at night for me. Not that I do much of it, but I have - and barefoot too.

Life is just too hard.