El cuento de las dos serpientes!

The tale of the two snakes! Well:- on Sunday just after I had done my last post we were sitting in the study talking when David said to me 'get the dogs out of the room!' I thought there was a spider or a cockroach or something but it was a snake - half in and half out of the garden door. Lucy (the maid)was summoned as an authoirty on such occurrences and she promptly said: 'kill it!' Of course DD couldn't so he persuaded it to go outside with the aid of Lucy's window cleaning tool. It was about a meter long and black with green markings on its scales - it might have been a Mexican King Snake - that was the closest I could find on the internet.
Anyway:- they've never had a snake in the house before, to their knowledge, so it was even more of a shock on Monday, as Betty was lying in their bedroom talking on the fone to her Mum, when David encountered another snake in the downstairs hallway which promptly disappeared into said bedroom. Betty had said to me earlier on in the afternoon that she thought she had seen a snake in there but, when she and I went (very carefully) to check, there were a lot of cables and things and she thought she was mistaken.
So dogs were again banished to the back yard, the window cleaning thingy was located and DD managed to trap this snake (not the same one - this one was much smaller and a different colour) in one of his furniture cubes on the top of which he put a mat. He tried, unsuccessfully, to contact the gardener for advice and then attempted to encourage the snake to go into a pillowcase (a la Steve Irwin RIP). Snakey wasn't having any of it and got extremely agressive and actually jumped out of the cube at one stage and curled itself around the handle of the tool. So, poor David had no option but to dispatch it - with some difficulty. Not nice.
The gardener came the next day and checked outside for more but found nothing. There's a river below the garden down a steep slope and he thinks they came from there. It's rainy season and there are quite spectacular thunderstorms most afternoons/evenings (think Roffy).
Needless to say now my bed's comprehensively checked before I get into it at night!
What else. We went out for dinner on Wednesday night to a very good tapas bar and were invited to the opening of the guy's new restaurant - 'La Canita' - last night. It was great! Free wine and tapas from 8pm to after 11pm. The owner lived in Madrid for some years so the tapas are authentically spanish.
Earlier in the day we had Frank, an american friend of DD and Betty's in whose garden bungalow they lived when they first came to Cordoba, for lunch and then DD and I went to the weekly poker game in Frank's house before the restaurant opening. Good fun - the stakes are very low and the dealer chooses what type of poker to play that hand.
We're taking the dogs tomorrow to Frank and Anya's cabin in the mountains near Cosco and will stay the night - looking forward to it.
More on that later......x