So I had just finished devoting an hour or two of my afternoon to reading The Tales of Beedle the Bard, and had got up to go to the washroom when I saw, through the bathroom window, that a deer was standing in our backyard munching the fallen apples beneath our apple tree.

Rex had been making some odd grunting noises, so he must have realized it was out there. I had to make him wait in the dining room, however, and tell him nothing was out there to chase, in order to have enough time to sneak up on it for a few pictures.

It was pretty cute, actually. It saw me move into the entrance way, directly in front of it by about 30 feet. Stared at me, staring at it, with my camera, until it apparently decided I wasn't a threat and kept munching away. Slowly I opened the door and we went through the staring episode for a minute again until it decided to continue munch, which I now realized she was doing quite noisily.

So I continued to slowly sneak up on it, moving a step forward everytime it bent down to eat and then instantly freezing the moment it looked up, take a picture and repeat. When I was finally about 15 yards away I guess she decided she'd had enough to eat and slowly, and gracefully, meandered away into the woods.

She wasn't even scared! I honestly should have ran after her shouting with pots and pans, Rex at my heels, but I was captured by the beauty, and momentarily fooled into figuring that as long as she wasn't eating the vegetables out of my garden that she could stay there.

And speaking of garden. Here I'll post a pic of the extreme amount of growth that it has incurred since I last posted about it. That is, of course, despite the sundry attacks of deer/skunk feasts on it. I guess I wouldn't have mentioned that.

Well, it's been an insanely busy month. I don't think I've had more than a day or two's worth of rest since I last wrote. We had a huge string of bad luck here in East Lahave. First of the most prominent disasters, I got hit by ANOTHER FRICKIN DEER!!!! driving home from work one night early in the week. I had absolutely no chance in hell of avoiding it. I was driving a little slower that 60km/h at the time when this humungous deer came bursting out of the extremely overgrown brushes and weeds lining the side of the road, directly in front of me!!! Needless to say, we walked back and found the deer dead in the ditch the next day, along with a clear path through the bushes where it burst out (no more than a foot away from the white lines on the side of the road!! somebody nees to call the department of roads & transportation or whatever they're called and get them to deal with it! ....probably should be me!! I'm a good example of the reason they should fix it!!)   Annnyway... after the visible path through the bushes, we saw a deep hoofprint in the dirt on the side of the road, aiming on an angle into the road. Those two little clues together were reason enough for Sacha to believe that the deer was flying out of the bushes full sprint, giving me no chance to avoid it!!!

Soo... now I'm stressing about the deer again, which leads to endless rambling!!! As a result of the deer incident, I wrote off yet another of Sacha's cars. Despite the fact that he, yet again, thanked me for it (as each time the insurance company has given more money than he figured the car was worth), his ENTIRE family (and it's fairly big!) has been picking on me endlessly and will NEVER let me live this down!!! I am now known as the deer hunter!!!

As if we hadn't enough trauma for one week, Sacha had called me at work at 11:45 one night to pass on the news that Rex had got sprayed by a skunk... apparently trying to protect my garden. God that was an aweful smell! That was a weeknight, and we spent hours in the river washing Rex repeatedly by moonlight trying fruitlessly to remove the smell. Somehow Sacha trundled off to work the next morning after a good 2 or 3 hours sleep! That was a couple weeks ago, and Rex still stinks something fierce today whenever he gets wet, so you can imagine the potency of the stench at the time!

The next day we discovered the reason Rex got sprayed was probably protecting my garden. As you can see in the pic above, there are several empty squares, and as you can't see, most of the plants have been munched upon. Both tomato plants had been completely uprooted, it had munched off all of the leaves of the swiss chard, green beans, snow peas, various peppers, and surprisingly, the prickly leaves of the zucchini plant! I was none too happy, as most of my precious year one garden had been utterly destroyed, but I suppose I was partially at fault for not fencing it in. So this happened a couple more times after I replanted some things, so now there are bare patches in my garden, as I refuse to transplant anything else in until I have some sort of fencing structure up. But most of the plants have grown back their leaves, except the tomatos of course, which I will no longer be farmer to. :(


While my birthday was on the 16th of July, in our house we usually tend to celebrate the entire birthday week! Mine started on Tuesday the 14th, as I had it off work, and that night we went to the midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince which was, of course, AWESOME! Aside from the part where a spider was dangling down ever so menacingly from the theatre ceiling, directly in front of the projector. At first, I totally didn't clue in, and thought that it was in the movie. **Spoiler Alert!!** Because it was during the scene of Aragog's funeral!!!! On the screen, you could see a spider oh so slowly dropping down onto the shoulder of Slughorn, who was giving a nice little speech for Aragog at the time. I just thought it was one of Aragog's great great grandchildren attending his funeral!!   God I'm a putz!! lol. Finally Sacha managed to convince me that it was an actual spider in the room, which of course freaked me out when I saw it dangling 3 rows in front of us and just a few seats to the left! But it was also hilarious! The entire theatre (which consisted mostly of 16 year old girls) was too preoccupied giggling and shrieking over the spider to realize that we were missing the extremely important explanation of horcruxes. That was a bit annoying, but I too couldn't help glancing over to where the spider hovered everything 20 seconds or so! The poor girl who was sitting directly beneath the spider even stormed out of the theatre barefoot, never to return. I had to go back to watch the movie a second time to fill in the gaps (not that I minded!!)

Wednesday of my birthday week I worked, and Thursday, my actual birthday, we spent in the city car shopping, and ended up buying the beautiful diesel Jetta wagon I have pictured above. I'd won tickets to a Molson party at this bar in Halifax, The Toothy Moose, so we stayed in the city til about midnight, drinking energy drinks and dancing to a really awesome live band. We even ran into a few people I knew from Bridgewater to hang out with, which made it a bit more fun. It was totally spontaneous and we had a blast :)

Friday we went to the Valley to celebrate Sacha's mom's birthday with her, and on the way back home stopped into the bar to watch Karaoke and have a couple drinks, which we never do, so that was fun too. Saturday was the big day and we drove to Halifax for, wait.... wait for it..... THE KISS CONCERT!!!! Which was SO AWESOME!!! This was my second time seeing KISS live, but I could go over and over again and love them every time! Sacha had bought me the tickets as a birthday present, and had originally been telling everyone that he wasn't a KISS fan, and was just going for me because I love them, but since seeing them live he's been going on about how awesome they are, and recommending their concert to anyone that has the opportunity to go. That mad me quite happy that he had a great time too :) The bar (where I work!) paid for our hotel room at a pretty snazzy place, which totally made our night, both being able to drink and party and not have to worry about driving home! And then, of course, I have bar staff in the city, which really impressed Sacha, when we decided to go to the bars downtown after the concert. He loved the fact that tens of thousands of people headed downtown to the bars and there were at least a hundred waiting in line, while we walked right in, no wait, free of cover charge. He mainly enjoyed the nasty looks we got from people standing in line.

I'd say that covers the first half of the month in which I haven't written here on LJ. There's still another half a months worth of really exciting stuff to cover, but I've already written half a novel tonight, so I'll update you with the rest later. Warning: many, many, many pictures to come in upcoming posts!!

XoxoX

I guess I forgot to mention that I'm knitting a Gryffindor Scarf! It's based on the Prisoner of Azkaban movie.

Sacha says I won't have it done in time for the movie (July 15th), but we'll see!

It's only short now, I've gone through 2 balls of yarn and have 6 more to go, but if I take it with me to work every night on the weekdays....!

Can't wait for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince!!!
Wait til I post pics of my Harry Potter T-shirts that I made!! "I solemnly swear I'm up to no good"  and Gryffindor Quidditch Team - that's most people's favorite, and it's orginal!! ;)

Oh... let's not forget to mention my current cell phone ringer... Hedwig's Theme! Weirds people out when my phone rings!! ;P

Anyway, that was a real nice visit, but that's all the news I've got, so I'm off to make my "from scratch - Spinach & Ricotta Canelonni" for supper now!!! ;) yummmmy! :)

To tell you the truth, I have been caught up in all the drama of the epidemic, and I am a tad bit worried. I usually don't worry at all about any of these types of things. But then I heard the Swine was in Nova Scotia. And I thought about it: I work at a bar. There are always tons of sick people at the bar.

Everyday you hear at least a couple customers complaining about their cold, or the flu they have. Half of them come out to try and forget about it, and half of them come because they think a shot (or 10) of tequilla will help them get over it!

In any case, after these sick people are done downing their drinks, I pick up their filthy glasses (or plates from food) and put them in the dishwasher. That brief bit of contact could cost me some or many germs. Also, I have a terrible habit of scratching my eyes, and that is one way to infect oneself.

Not to mention, of course, that apparently the Swine Flu can be contagious and passed before you even know you have it. So I could contract it easily through any of the hundreds of people I come into close contact with every day without suspicion. Scary.

What brought on this outrageous fear that I don't normally apply myself to? Well, when Sacha told me all about the Swine (I don't watch much tv, nor partake in the reading of the newspaper - lately, so I tend to miss out on most news), he first mentioned that people are dying from it (just Mexico I guess?), and then, that it's made it's way to Nova Scotia. I suddenly thought: what if I got it? What if I died? And all I could think about was how that would affect everybody around me. The pain of losing someone is so great, I know that now, that  I couldn't stand to know that someone I loved was suffering so greatly because of me. And could my parrents handle the pain of losing another child?

It was just a terrible feeling. And I suddenly realized how serious something like this is. And I thought of all the people out there who have contracted it and have died, or hold the fear of dying from it, and all of their families and loved ones. And that's when I started thinking about my possibilities of contracting it through work. And then I started freaking out a bit! ....weird for me, huh? So I've basically been sticking around home, and when I'm at work I wash my hands frequently and use hand sanitizer (we have it all over the bar) after handling dirty dishes!

Paranoid much???!!