If You Love Them, Let Them Go.

Around a month ago, my older sister, Kari, and her fiancé (both my housemates), Kurt, found a very tiny little snake on our front porch. So small that they confused it with a worm at first - around 8cm long. But they saw that it was sidewinding, which is a trait particular to some poisonous rattlesnakes here in the desert, so they killed it and brought it to me.
I thought it was fascinating because the head was so miniscule you could barely see the eyes or mouth, and the tail was pointed. However, the specimen was smashed and hard to identify. Because it was silvery, my first conclusion was that it was a Silver Snake of Bonaire:

It did seem strange, though, that there would be one here. Perhaps a released pet?
Two weeks later, while helping Tobin move, I found the same snake - one of my own! I was so excited at the opportunity to watch its behaviors live and take a picture that I could use to help identify it. I didn't have our camera, so to do this I had to take it home for a bit. So I held it in my hand and it wound around and around my fingers, using its pointy tail to latch onto places it could hang from. When it realized finally that it wasn't getting eaten, it settled down and quit squirming.
Here it is in a cup - very difficult to focus this photo, but if you click it it gets larger. Much larger.

I spent so long with it that I was quite reluctant to put it outside again, but I did eventually. I was already attached to the little guy. You can see how he really did look exactly like the Bonaire snake (albeit slightly larger)! The first one was grayer too. The top pictures are my accidents, terribly focused pictures-made-art.
After consulting with Whitney and the internet, I've found that it is actually a Western Blind Snake, Leptotyphlops humilis (not surprising that those eyes aren't functional with the underground living), native to our desert and eater of ants and termites. I'm amazed I never saw one before this year, having survived the last 22 years here. Ants surround our house, so I think it will be happy in our yard instead.