Is it obsession or wisdom?

I was awakened shortly after 3am this morning by a nightmare.  In my hellish dream, I had gone out to the orchard only to discover that some particularly insistent deer had taken the top two feet off of most of our apple trees.  They had bulled their way over and through the deer netting and removed the most tender branches in a particularly brutal manner leaving green shreds behind as evidence of the ripping and tearing they'd done to the trees.  Despite my best efforts, I wasn't able to drift back to sleep until shortly after 5am.

My dream hung with me through the morning, through Pastor Robert's again-excellent sermon, and all the way home.

So it was that I found myself just a little bit ago copiously applying deer spray to the ground around everything out in the orchard.  So what if it's only 23 degrees outside?  Those flea-ridden deer won't eat my goodies! 

(This is where you imagine a crazy-eyed Greg shaking his fist at the invisible deer out in the woods behind the property as if they were kids riding bikes on his grass.)

Just for good measure, I also resurrected the riding mower and mulched the last batch of leaves that came down in the fall.  Because that's a common-sense sort of thing to do in the dead of winter, after all.

This homesteading thing is lunacy.  Craziness.  And I'm doing snow-angels in the stuff.  At least my babies (the orchard) are safe from those brutes!

Good grief.