A beautiful rainy day today, and don’t ask why today is beautiful and last week’s rainy days were just blah. Temperature, maybe. The fact it wasn’t raining when I got up. I don’t know. It’s turning into a thunderstorm, which probably has something to do with it–negative ions or whatever.

Kevin had the day off owing to Good Friday, so we went out for lunch in Scenic Downtown Pittsboro, visited some of the shops, amused ourselves looking at horrible thrift store clothes. Then we went off to mail stuff, and visited the feed store, which is a lot of fun even if you DON’T need bulk goat de-wormer (which they sell!) Kevin was petting bunnies. I petted them as well. "Yes, they’re adorable, and don’t even think it." And there were baby chicks, which were agonizingly cute, except for the bit where they grow up to be chickens. (No. Don’t even think it.) 

What they DID have were some astonishingly well-grown butterfly bushes for 12.99 (Like three feet tall!) which I couldn’t pass up for the hillside area, and some gorgeous columbine. They also had heliotrope.

I LOVE heliotrope, but I didn’t get any. You can keep it as a perennial in some areas, but not here, and I can’t bring it indoors without getting it eaten by the cats, alas.

Speaking of eaten, the damn deer have finally started to take their toll–they’re grazing down my red chokecherry. Two of them have been grazed back to twigs. The third is completely untouched, well-grown, completely happy. I think it has to do with the age of the leaves–the well-grown one was the farthest along of the three, and maybe they’re too tough when they’re older. I am miffed. Kevin has promised to pee on them under cover of darkness, but I dunno if that’ll help.  That stuff was supposed to be deer-resistant, too!

Meanwhile, inside in the reef tank, where I have only minimal fear of deer (IT COULD HAPPEN!) I’m astonished at the speed at which the zoas are reproducing. I know it sounds weird–coral is like the slowest growing thing anywhere!–but the soft zoa corals are actually moving at a pretty good clip. The eight-polyp frag I brought home a week ago is now a whopping eleven polyps, and they’re spreading out. The tiny red-and-yellow zoas on my mushroom frag have actually reproduced to the point where one is now glommed onto the rock the frag was touching. I’m very pleased by all this, it’s just surprising! It’s the hard stony corals that really reproduce slowly, I know, but somehow I didn’t expect to see the little squishy corals growing at such a rate.

And now, with only three Ninjabreath illustrations left to go, I plan to spend the evening relaxing and playing Assault on Dark Athena. Life is good.

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