Skipped a beat...

is what my heart just did. I walked back from team pizza dinner at the Myhre's through a beautiful star-lit night, but with my eye on the ground since the Myhre's goat died of a snakebite last week. I unlocked my door by the light of my cell phone (what can I say, I'm a child of my times) and stepped inside. With the light switch on the far side of the house and having forgotten a flashlight (as I usually do), I walked (as I usually do), through my house in the dark. And that's when the skipping-a-beat happened. Just before I put my bare foot down on the concrete floor, I jumped forward to avoid stepping on something that could have simply been a funny shadow, but was vaugely snake-shaped. And sure enough, it slithered slowly under the couch. I ran to get a flashlight and a large stone, and promptly dropped the stone on the head of a black snake about a foot and a half long. The small size is encouraging because it likely indicates that it was neither a cobra nor a black mamba, but I am nonetheless a little flustered at having nearly stepped on a snake in my living room in a place where both of those species live. And this all happened within the last five minutes. So now I have a dead snake outside and snake blood on my floor inside, which will have to wait until morning to be cleaned up because I just don't feel like doing it now. I'm guessing that this doesn't make any of you more likely to come visit me, and I'd want to ensure you that this is a real rarity (hey, it's only happened once in almost three months), but then again I did just have a snake on my floor. I don't know if I'll ever be able to identify it, since I pretty much destroyed its head with the rock, but perhaps it's better that way. In the very most literal sense possible, life here is certainly keeping me on my toes.