oedipus' online complexes

this saturday, i was reminded of the downside of using software synthesized speech -- today's laptops and computers don't have any COM ports to which to connect the hardware speech synthesizers i already own (and which, in their time and relative to my circumstances, cost a pretty penny) -- i suppose i'll have to get a cheap USB TTS hardware device...

what brought this to mind was that my laptop had crashed mid-afternoon on saturday, and as had happened once on my main tower, when i rebooted everything was irreversibly silent... i knew from the last time it happened on the tower that it was most probably due to something having reset the volume down to 0% -- but i had to wait once again until jorge came over to check the sound and volume settings, which was a bonus, for he had really come over to help me catch a snake...

oh, i haven't mentioned the snakes, yet? my felines have, this year, developed a decided taste for catching and tormenting garter snakes... at least, i tell myself they are only garter snakes, the only other possibility being a timber rattlesnake

so far, the first two snakes were relatively small, and one was definitely dead, but today, one of the cats caught an adult, who survived my inadvertantly stepping on it while wearing my boots... my assistant, who normally comes but once a week was here, having driven me to a doctor's appointment and then to a diagnostics lab to get 4 vials' worth of blood drawn... she saw the snake and made haste to inform me that it was headed for my bedroom...

alas, i was to slow and uncoordinated to catch the snake before it slithered into my room, under the bookshelf next to the bed, and, finally, under the bed itself...

i figured that, since there was nothing anyone could do, the cats would take care of the snake in the morning, when it moved towards a source of light and heat, snakes being cold-blooded creatures...

no such luck... and my assistant, who is the only one who actually had a clear view of the snake, said that it was tan and "diamond-backed", which would eliminate it from being a garter snake, and put it in the "potentially poisonous" class... but then, i came to my senses -- if it had been an infant timber rattler (they are born live and ready to release venom), it would probably have bitten and poisoned one of the cats... besides, the presence of a timber rattler in one's house raises an ethical dilemma, as timber rattlers are an endangered species...

i have nothing against snakes, and no fear of being bit... i will admit that i don't much cotton to keeping snakes as pets, but that is solely because i once had a white lab mouse as a pet, and many domestic snakes live on a diet of crickets and mice...

so, the snake remains, supposedly, under my bed... if he is still there, he must be in hibernation, or possibly dead, through a combination of cat-inflicted wounds and its inability to keep its body temperature high enough to sustain life...

i really don't know... all i know is, according to all the sighted people who've investigated the situation, there's a snake under my bed...

i wonder what samuel l. jackson would do?