First off:

Gas cards save lives.

Grandma and especially Aunt Sally, summer would not have happened had you not been there with those little envelopes I’ve come to love. So this is my lame thank you, on the internet, heartfelt nonetheless.

Also.

The lymph nodes in my head are swollen. I don’t feel good. I’m exhausted. I hate my job, my manager, the uniform…everything.

On one of the rare days that I get out of work before midnight (this time at 6), Danny and I went up to Red Rocks to see the sunset. It had been one of those marvelously hot days, but the clouds had rolled in and there was no sunset to be seen. We decided instead to just hike around for awhile while there was still light in the sky.
As we were hiking, we came to this rocky place where the trail obviously stopped. Since it’s Red Rocks, you are forbidden to do any climbing, which is of course the one thing you really want to do. There, maybe fifteen feet in front of us, across the rock, was a deer. I stopped and we spent a few seconds looking directly at each other. Danny, behind me, whispered, “Don’t move,” and we stood there as the deer came closer and closer. I waved, some lame attempt at trying to communicate my own fear and the fact that I wasn’t going to harm it. It came closer still. We walked back, and it went parallel to us for a minute, before finding some apparently delicious shrubbery.
We saw five deer that night. Little babies with their mothers, one jumped out of the bushes not five feet from us and nearly gave me a heart attack. Another was eating grass by the side of the trail and we almost passed it before it jumped away.
There were some bunnies, too, but seeing the deer that close was amazing.
We made it to the car right as the sun had dropped beyond a preferable level of light and we headed home.
7/11/08