What I find in my quintal

My front yard is not really a yard.  It's a scrubby 10 foot wide corridor between the back fence of my director's house and the sidewalk outside my front door.  It's mostly rocks with some scraggly plants and a lot of trash.

My 11th grade friends were over yesterday morning, typing up some homework on my computer   Vito was running around with my broom and Avo was drawing yet another picture of a house to tape to my wall.  I was sitting in my front door way, drinking some coffee (STARBUCKS COFFEE, thanks Laura) and lazily looking through my binoculars at a tree full of blue wax-bills.  I lowered my binoculars and scanned the quintal in front of me, to see if there was anything else interesting going on.  Puffin was scapping with something at the base of the orange tree. Cute!  I brought my binoculars up again to get a better look at....

THIS COBRA.

Ok, not actually THIS cobra.  I took this picture from the internet somewhere...but it looked JUST like this cobra.

And Puffin was antagonizing it.

"Puffin!  Stoppit!"  I yelled at her.

She's not really much for taking orders.

I picked up a rock and threw it at her, thinking it would make her run away.  Instead she jumped about 2 feet in the air and the cobra struck out at her and slithered away.

Puffin ran a few feet away and laid down in the scrub.  I was afraid she'd been bitten so I walked over to pick her up.  She tried to jump out of my hands and scratched the heck out of my palm but I held on to the scuff of her neck and looked down to see the cobra, slithering away from my vulnerable flip-flop clad feet.

And that is how I nearly died yesterday.

Puffin did Not get bitten, or she's immune to cobra venom because she's still skulking around my house looking bored.

The end.

In other news: It was too windy to go bike riding/ bird watching today and I've been kind of bored.  I did an extreme home-makeover Mozambique style (that means I cleaned my room and moved my bed).  I learned to play Mario Brothers theme and the Jeopardy theme and "Queen of the Savages" by Magnetic Fields on my ukulele.