The Snake, The Mouse, The Cold & The Heater

     Country living comes with all kinds of adventures and misadventures. Our latest excitement brought about an emergency, late-night evacuation, thoughts of spending hundreds but ultimately a good and hearty laugh at ourselves.

     But what's one paragraph of angst without first giving the other chapters leading up to our most recent country living experience?

     The story begins about two to three weeks ago when the weather finally began to change out here on the Llano Estacado. We had endured another summer of heat and intense dryness when finally cooler days began to dot our extended forecast.

     But who knew that snakes like comfortable temperatures just like we do? I sure didn't. I always figured snakes for the 'hotter the better' kind of creatures. Turns out, I was wrong. We had about two weeks of those perfect temps and in that time I killed two rattlesnakes and saw a third... all in exactly the same spot.

Rattler Alley/Windmill Ranch

     See this breezeway in the picture? I've renamed it "Snake Alley at The Windmill Ranch."
     Rattlers (plural, you see) apparently live beneath the decking that goes into that dark hole. See the white door on the left and the red door on the right? Teresa and I go in and out of those doors at least a dozen times per day. It was just to the left of the bottom left corner of the red door that the rattlers like to lay.... or lie... I never get that right.

     Teresa spotted the first rattler before she ever opened the red door.

Snake #1/Rattler Alley-WRP

     "Oh Bill! Snake!"
     "Where?"
     "Right here!!!"
     "Where?"
     "Right here!!! OUTSIDE THE DOOR!"
     "Ok. Get a video."
     "WHAT? GET THE GUN!"

     Bottom line is: I got the snake. Teresa did NOT get a video, but she did take the picture.... from as far away as possible I might add.
     But that wasn't the last snake. It wasn't a week later that I was in the kitchen, which is inside the white door on the left. I was talking on the phone to my sister-in-law in Albuquerque.
     I think Regina and I were talking football as she's a huge Broncos fan and I'm an over the top SAINTS fan when....
     "Uh, can I call you back? I gotta go kill a rattlesnake." I remember the sentence pretty clearly because I know I've never before said such a thing to someone on the phone. I hung up. I didn't have time to grab the gun. So, I grab a shovel and started pounding this snake just behind it's head.
     The good news is, both snakes are dead. The bad news is, the decking has a chunk out of it from not one, but two shotgun blasts plus the holes my shovel put into the wood as I pounded snake #2.
     Snake #3 showed his head through a crack in the deck just day before yesterday. I think he saw the gun and the shovel because he retreated back under the wood. We put a brick over the hole. Problem solved!

     Moving on...The wonderful weather in west Texas did not last very long. It never does, but we're used to it.

WTX Weather

     The likelihood of the snakes returning gets less and less the closer we get to fall and winter, which in WTX is separated sometimes by a few days or even a few hours.
     But last night we found that other interesting, borderline scary situations come with the colder weather. Here's what happened....

     It was after 11:00. We were asleep. I woke up and smelled something different.
    I suspect about now, you're probably saying: "You had turned on the heat and it had that first time burn smell."
    "Ah, not so fast my friend."
    No, we knew cold weather was coming. So, we had turned on our heat a few times already to get rid of that 'first time smell.' This time, the smell was strong. T & I both said, "It smells electric-rubbery."
     It was dark except for a tiny restroom ligh. T's out. She sleeps hard. I shouldn't say anything more.
     But I'm awake and something stinks. I first said to myself, "Something's burning."  Then after another good whiff... "SOMETHING'S BURNING!"
     I bolted out of bed. T bolted out of bed. I ran downstairs sure I'd left on the stove because the stink was severe, but different.
     No, I hadn't left on the stove. The dishwasher wasn't hot. T laid hands on every electronic appliance in the house. Nothing was hot. It was a mystery. We turned off the heat and decided to leave for an overnight at The Windmill Ranch. So at 11:30 in a howling wind and temps dropping by the minute, we packed up our pillows, our phones & chargers and for some reason a bag of chips and styrofoam cups and came to the ranch.

     Fast forward to this morning... We got up early thinking that we needed to call someone and since it was Monday (10/15/18,) we'd better get on their radar early.
     We packed up everything but left behind the chips and cups and went home to shower and brush our teeth. We turned on the heat but within minutes the weird smell returned and this time it generated enough smoke to set off our smoke detectors. Immediately, we decided it was an HVAC issue. So, we turned off the heat and began texting the most reliable HVAC friend in Snyder, Landry Mathies of Landry's Heating and Air before 8:00am.

Landry's Saves the Day!

     Landry replied almost instantly. We were going to get to the bottom of the smelly problem.
     The heat didn't work without smelling, but the shower did.  Make no mistake about it, you can get dressed faster than you ever thought possible when the inside temp at your house is 50-degrees!

     Finally, I'm at the purpose for the lead paragraph of this blog. Landry and his team came and went within a span of about 20-minutes. I told him the issue. He ordered a couple screw drivers, pulled off a couple panels, pulled out a pair of needle-nose pliers and....
     "Yep. Got it. It's a mouse."
     "A what," I asked
     "A mouse. It got on your heating strips. He's a goner!"

     So, the smell wasn't electric or rubbery. It was mouse. But in my defense, burning mouse at 11:00pm is a pretty scary smell.

Bill Robertson