Deer, oh, deer!

Today, I left my small college on the hill for a day of shopping and an early dinner at a nearby mall in a car full of my minority junior faculty friends, two African Americans and a Puerto Rican from the Bronx, who sometimes seems like my double (we're constantly being confused for one another).

I haven't had this much fun for a while, and the outing was the perfect antidote for the pervasive exhaustion that has settled over me for much of this semester. While I went off to do girly things, my husband stayed home and was able to take these pictures when a number of uninvited guests showed up in our apartment complex for lunch.

The first one, above, is of a deer tip-toeing in from the woods into our courtyard.

The second is of another deer sampling some fresh shoots from a tree that has only recently flowered, and the third captures yet another deer grazing on the parking lot shrubbery.

Thankfully, we city girls had no encounters with wildlife on our way back. Spending hours inside a huge mall going from store to store to store while we helped each other choose the right shirts and pants and colors was the perfect way to forget all the hard work we've done this semester and the lots of work that still remains pending before we can put this academic year truly behind us.

When all was said and done, we had stocked up on new summer clothes, eaten until we could eat no more (just like the deer in these pictures!), gotten to know each other a little better, and laughed a lot more than we've been able to do recently. Not bad for a day's non-work!