oh mercy. we had a touch of excitement on the farm yesterday.

and by excitement...i mean sheer terror.

yesterday morning the gals and i were outside. kaye was riding her bike. sawyer, i'm pretty sure, was eating a rock, and i was watering the flowers out front.

i glanced into the yard, as something had caught my eye. it was slappy our cat. she was pawing at the grass. i chalked it up to a mouse and thought, "yeah slappy. get those mice."

note - kaye named slappy. i have no idea where she got that name...but it stuck.

i continued watering the flowers until i saw slappy leap into the air. i was like - ???????

 what the frick was going on over there?

i started walking that direction until i noticed it. it was a snake and it was hissing and lunging at slappy!

that's when the snake and i locked eyes. all i could think was that i didn't want slappy to experience death by snake. i mean...coyote, that's honorable. snake? that's just horrific.

okay...both are terrible, but let's just say slappy wouldn't be the first cat to meet his demise via coyote. we have an epic amount of them out here in farm country. you can hear them howl nightly...especially on clear nights.

so anyway, i turned the hose on the snake so it would leave slappy alone. (at this point there were about 30 feet between the snake and me. slappy ran from the water and the snake wasn't phased. huh?i know...cold-blooded and all that. that damn four foot snake didn't hesitate for a second. it immediately turned on me and started charging. and i do mean charging. it was slithering so so fast.

i jumped into action and hopped onto our front porch for a shovel that was there from our previous landscaping projects. i came down the steps, took aim (at this point the snake was just hissing at me) and i started swinging.

ummm...please stop reading if you have any sort of love for reptilian creatures.

i swung and i swung and i swung...and yes, i swung some more. sometimes i missed, but usually i hit. and mind you - i was screaming the entire time. thank god we don't have neighbors.

i swing until that snake wasn't moving anymore. i swung the blade of that shovel until it was in eight pieces.

by the time i turned around...my girls were standing behind me with bewilderment across their faces.

mommy is a snake murderer.

and that's what you do when a snake charges you.