This canyon has brought us many adventures, but today has to be one of the biggest for me and I hope will be the ONLY one of it's kind. I was in working on the computer and decided I needed an aspirin. When I got to the kitchen, Maggie, who was in the dining room, started barking like mad. On occasion, she will spot something that she had somehow previously missed like the plastic cactus that sits by the sideboard in the dining room and "alert the media".
I reached down to pick the cactus up to show her it wasn't an item of danger, spotted the real reason for her alert. Under the sideboard was a long and I'm not exaggerating here, long, looking suspiciously like a rattle snake...brown snake. It had to be two and a half feet long. I held my breath while I waited for the tail to appear before I ran screaming from the house with Maggie. I couldn't see rattles and believe me if it had been a rattler...I could have easily seen the rattles! Confident it wasn't a danger, I put Maggie outside and kept one eye on the snake while I yelled for Bob, who was out painting on the plane, hence the rubber gloves. He cautiously watched the snake and concurred that it was of no danger.
A check with this web site gave us the identification as that of common gopher snake, which is what we thought. We certainly welcome the gopher snake given our rodent population. Just, please, oh please, not in the dining room. Funny how, even if we aren't sure it really works, we all start praying. I know I did. "God, if you're listening, this is Sharon and it's about a snake in my dining room."
Snakes/CA Cental Coast
Bob saved the day for me, Maggie and the brown snake. Left to my own devices, I'm afraid the snake might have had to do battle with a long handled broom. I've always told Bob that if I saw a rattle snake on our porch the next thing he would hear is me packing. For me, today was a very, very close call. I'm still wondering how many boxes I could get into the P.T. Cruiser. 
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