This is a deviation from my normally music-centric musings, but humor me. I'll be quick.This weekend the clothes dryer seized up mid-load. Being the wanna-be-handyman that I am, I investigated and found enough lint in the trap to knit a sweater for the entire cast of "The Biggest Loser." Yep, I blamed my wife.
Since I had time, I excavated the dryer from it's home in our laundry closet and removed the exhaust hose. There I saw a little black, rubber looking belt and thought "Oh good, we only busted a belt, shouldn't be too expensive to fix." I grabbed the end of it, and decided I needed to remove the entire back panel from the dryer to remove the broken belt, and possibly install a new one.
As I stepped out of my shadow, I saw that this "belt" looked sort of funny. It thinned toward the tip, and had scales. "What's wrong?" my wife answered my girlish shriek. I'm not afraid of snakes in the wild, but the thought of one hoisting itself into my outdoor exhaust pipe, slithering through 20 feet of duct work into my clothes dryer scared the hell out of me. I kicked at the tail once or twice more and it didn't twitch. As I finally removed the back panel that covered the personal pan pizza-sized fly wheel I confirmed that his days of twitching were behind him. He was folded up like a load of bath towels.
The snake measured about 16 inches - maybe an exaggeration, but hey, I'm a guy - and was about as thick as a roll of pennies. Once removed, the dryer started right up. I slapped the back panel on, plugged up any gaps in my duct work and finished the load of blankets and towels from our beach trip. The most amazing thing to me is that the dryer ran for about 20 minutes before "Twitchy" crawled into the fly wheel. Yep, he crawled into my dryer, while it was running.
Later I apologized to my wife for blaming her.
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