We had reached a stalemate with the snake.  I had prepared the right amount of suds and a few drops of Clorox - like heroin addicts do, only I'm not one - to kill the bacteria.  My wife began to get hysterical.  She said some bad things to me, something having to do with "being crazy".  I told her I was busy with the snake and if she would please go inside but she yelled at me, "I'm not sure you could take a snakebite with your chronic fatigue." She was right.  I had become very sensitive to even slight toxins and didn't need the fight of recovering from a copperhead bite.

So my wife is shrieking, "What are you trying to do, giving a snake a bubblebath?"  and "That is a poisonous snake.  What are you trying to do, bathe it under the armpits?"  When she said this, I laughed, "snakes and armpits", funny stuff.

Nevertheless, this snake needed a bath.  I told my son, who is a mechanical genius, to go in the workshop and drill out the useless pivot in the old-people-tongs so that their jaws would grab the snakes body more securely.  But then as he was going inside I became disillusioned with the old-people-tongs and yelled, "Make a snake noose out of PVC tubing." He yelled, "We're out of PVC tubing."  This snake was certainly causing a lot of yelling out in the country.  My wife kept saying other unappreciative things and in her own preemptive strike, dumped out the snake bath water while I was tending the snake tub, standing in the backyard, with only my Calvins, dripping wet.  I told her, "It was dangerous", to go tumping over containers when there were uncovered snake bins on the premises.  I told Nick, "Build a snake noose instead", "Use the double ended nails bent into a U-shape into that scrap 1x2 in the workshop".  He yelled back, "I'm already doing that, just give me some time".  My wife harangued me for 10 minutes saying additional cruel things which I forgave her for, seeing as she had handled the snake so well earlier.  Nick appeared with a reclosable-cable-spring-loaded-snake-nooser, which we shall call the RCSL nooser for short and started to demonstrate how it worked.   When it failed to close properly the second time he uttered those famous Stanford vs. MIT last words, "Oops, wait a second." and started fiddling with some last minute design changes.  In the confusion I had already seen that the device worked perfectly and knew why it snagged.  He yelled to his sister, "Naomi, I just need one more piece of tape".  I bellowed, "just give it to me like it is".  I had instantly formulated a plan of attack and needed to get the device out of engineering and into marketing.  He surrendered the RCSL nooser and I operated it.  I noticed a slight defect in the top attachment of the string, rebuked him for not using a knot and quickly fixed it.  It was time to give this snake a bath.  My wife stood on guard with the water hose continuing to ask the age old question, "Why?"  I slipped the nooser around the snakes head, but it slipped a little past the best capture point...