Tag: deer

Scoreboard

Words to agent: More than 7k. I’ll be cutting & pasting for another day before I know what the count is.
Miles: 125 flights of stairs yesterday; gym today
Deer: The dogs are now dealing with the deer on their own, waking me up but pleasing me nonetheless.

Scoreboard

Words: 2,897 2,947
Deer: 3 removed by clever ploy, to be detailed later
Miles: 3.4

That fucking slow, painful chapter is DONE, all the notes overwritten. I can finally move on. I shall celebrate with … another hundred fifty words, I think.

Scoreboard

Words to date: 2316
Deer: None showed up. 🙂
Miles: 2

The morning’s words were more than they seem; there was much rewriting, and the new coherency to the work should ease adding words tomorrow.

Scoreboard

Words to date: 2,287
Deer: 4 frightened last night, all caught standing at the newly-erected fence with looks of confused betrayal and naked hunger.

Scoreboard

Words: 2,046
Deer: 1 deer discouraged

The deer came to the garden early, and looked into the flashlight in that “I can stare out headlights” way that deer have. I shot her, and she jumped, ran a few steps, and stopped, confused. Nothing was there to eat her. So I shot her again. She jumped, ran, stopped. She was a bit far for my next shot, which hit the fence post behind her and startled her, and she took cover in the thicket on the drain field. Another three or four shots and she was tired of the air buzzing and occasionally stinging, and left.

Chaos Asserts

My current “gotta” list is growing. The deer are eating the vegetable garden so quickly that it is visibly diminishing daily; a fence must be erected*. Cinderella’s wedding flowers must be completed. Paperwork for loans must be completed before collections agents stalk and slay me. The carburetor on the truck must be reassembled before I lose parts or forget what I’ve done.

I’ve been swamped with “gottas” at night, and then stay up too late so that I don’t enter the work-work-sleep cycle and get pissy. Unfortunately, the work-work-read-sleep-don’t-write cycle makes me pissy, as well. And the wakeup-stare-groggily-write-slowly&uselessly cycle doesn’t please me, either. Bridgette, normally more than able to accept half (or sometimes more) of the load, is down with a shoulder injury & meds.

I have a finite number of things to do, and they’re not repeating tasks. I am not, for instance, obsessing about housework. Perhaps I should just clobber as many as I can and see if I can regain control of my schedule.

*Granted, the vegetable garden could be written off; the money it took to grow it, the time spent creating the beds out of sedementary rock, the emotional commitment could all be tossed out. But I’ve lost every damned thing I’ve grown for two years to those thrice-curs’d ungulates, and will be damned if I’ll feed them another season. The past two nights I have chased them across the acreage, flashlight in one hand and a rock in the other, naked under the full moon with a mind washed in blood. I don’t know that I care that much about the vegetables. But I loathe those deer, and will sooner see us all go up in the forest fire I will set to slay them than support their smugly well-fed faces another year.

…and, yes, I meant literally that, unclothed and armed with stones, I chased the deer through the night, murder in my heart and a primitive growl at my lips. The dog lay up on the deck, watching the spectacle with incurious eyes each time. Oh, she’ll bark and howl at descending darkness, point and lunge at moths, and she’ll whip herself into canine meringue fury over the neighbor’s pig, but when the deer casually step through the living room, eating the houseplants as they go and checking the refrigerator as they pass the kitchen, she just passes the time of day with them in a familiar and comfortable way. Dog! Hah! Don’t get me started.