Beware the Dough-Snake!

/ Diane Henders

Sunday evening I was making myself a cup of herbal tea, with my brain completely fried after a grueling weekend spent putting on the conference I mentioned in my last post.  I steeped my tea in the pleasantly dim kitchen, then groped for the compost bucket to dump my tea leaves.

But instead of the expected plastic lid, my hand contacted the soft bulge of something.  A cool, moist, yielding something that moved under my hand like a sleepy snake.

I yelped and recoiled, only to burst out laughing when I discovered that the ‘snake’ was… pizza dough.

We’d made pizza for supper, but as I was pressing the dough into the pan I discovered tiny metal flakes in it.  (Yes, that flour went back to the store ASAP!)  So I remade our pizza crusts from a fresh bag of flour and chucked the contaminated dough into the compost bucket.

But it’s a small bucket.  And yeast rises.  So by the time I zombie-shuffled over there in the late evening, the dough had pushed up the lid of the bucket and escaped, clearly bent on world (or at least garbage-bin) domination.

After patting my thumping heart back into my chest and wiping away my tears of laughter, I dumped the compost bucket out into the recycling green-bin we keep in the garage.  It’s a big bin; but nevertheless, the next morning I opened the door to the garage with caution… just in case the dough-snake had devoured the tasty contents of the bin and grown into a giant man-eating serpent overnight.

Fortunately, it hadn’t; and on Monday the dough-snake went into the collection truck with the rest of the recycling.  So I think we’re safe from compost serpents for now… but I’m still chuckling over my momentary adrenaline burst.

Any surprises in your world this week?

Writing update: I’m (finally!) putting the last of the conference stuff to bed today, and then I’ll start plotting Book 17, woohoo! Soon, soon…

34 thoughts on “Beware the Dough-Snake!”

  1. Pingback: Fate: The Practical Joker | Author Diane Henders

  3. You had me cracking up…so funny!! I would have freaked out as I’m not a big fan of snakes…..but all of that said….to find foreign items in the dough….ugh!! Really not cool!! Thanks for sharing….hope you had a great Halloween!

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    • Thanks, Kirt — I’m glad you got a laugh! Our Halloween was quiet. We didn’t even buy any candy because we don’t get trick-or-treaters at our place; but now I’m realizing that was a missed opportunity. We should have had a least one bag of chocolate bars, just in case. (Not ‘just in case we get trick-or-treaters’; but ‘just in case I want to pig out on addictive, mass-produced sugar bombs’.) Dang. 😉

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  4. I had only a pleasant surprise this week. Some weeks ago, I had submitted a collection of miniature ceramic pots on a wooden shelf I’d also made to a pottery show. Yesterday, as the show was ending, I found out that my piece had sold! That doesn’t happen often, so I’m pretty chuffed about that.

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  5. Now that made me really laugh. I’d have been just as scared.
    Years back when I was working in the Arctic, a British nurse wanted to get the turkey ready to roast as she had never done that. A bunch of is wée sitting in the livingroom of the nursing station when we heard this blood curdling shriek from the kitchen. We could not stop laughing as we knew exactly what she had done. Put her hand inside the turkey and grabbed the neck.

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  6. I could totally see/feel that happening. I’d be leaping backwards as well. although it would take a pretty hardly snake, dough variety or not, to survive the temperatures of late October here.

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  7. Life is full of surprises. Especially when you least expect them. Wait a minute… 🙂 I think you can blame the dimly-lit kitchen, an exhausting weekend, and a creative mind for this encounter!

    Lots of surprises this week, as that’s what life on the road entails. The most recent one, today. Just a few hours ago…

    I am sitting in my camping chair in the 8,000ft foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Southern Colorado, soaking up the sunshine with loads of clothes on. Our dog, Maya, is lying in the dirt next to me, sniffing around her white-grey back leg. I check it out and pet her leg. That’s when I see a fluffy white-grey ball next to it. I pick it up and investigate.

    Then, I scream – like you in the snake story. Except, I am holding a a dead mouse between my fingers!

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    • Oh, no! I’m laughing and shuddering in equal measures. Reminds me of the time I found a small twig-like thing protruding from the air intake of my car when I was replacing the air filter. “That’s odd,” thought I. “How would a twig get into that convoluted channel?” You guessed it: A mouse had gotten in there and died, and all that was sticking out was the end of his/her tail. (That explained the gross smell I’d complained about to the dealer a couple of years ago. Which they “solved” by dumping perfume in my car – ewwww!) Anyhow, by the time I extracted the corpse it was stiff, dry, and crispy. Fortunately I was wearing nitrile gloves at the time!

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    • Very true! And it’s funny how quickly and instinctively my hand jerked back from that unexpected contact, even before I figured out what it was. I guess my reflexes are all set to survive the next elimination-round of evolution. 😉

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  9. Eeek. My heart would have been thumping too. Was thumping.
    Unexpected happenings this week? Jazz is on medication. Which he doesn’t enjoy taking (he has my sympathies). I got out his tablets. He flatly refused them. So I put them to one side to try again later. Then it was MY time for medication. I got out my tablets, went to the fridge for something to wash them down. Came back and downed the tablets. Except I downed his tablets not mine. Which I didn’t realise until the next time I tried to give him his meds…
    All appears to be well. He finally had his (replacement) tablets and so far I am not craving raw meat or trying to wash myself with my tongue…

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  10. Sadly, my week has been very boring – no snakes, dragons or ghosts in the attic.

    However, I do remember when I was a young security guard and working in an old cannery building. One night when I was making my rounds through a semi-dark room, I heard a screech that sounded like a thousand orcs about to attack me. I have to say I was good that night – fast reactions. In a flash I had my baton out in one hand and my flash light in the other and was within half a second of beating the hell out of a refrigeration pump. Luckily for the pump, the light from my flashlight fell on it before I could get my baton in attack position … even better for the pump, I wasn’t carrying a sidearm …

    That kept my heart going for a few hours.

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