I NEED MARLIN PERKINS!!!

For those of you under thirty, a little clarification is required. Marlin Perkins was a well known zoologist who was best known for his television show, "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom". He and his partner Jim Fowler, documented many encounters with wild animals. The TV show ran from the late sixties to the mid-eighties. Anyway, enough about the title of this blog. The point is, I have had several...."brushes with nature" over the past couple of weeks that are beginning to give me cause for alarm. The first was last week. I was taking a morning run (or "controlled fall" as it refers to me)at a local park near my home. Things were going well. I had not passed out yet and I was nearing the end. The reason why I run at this particular park is that it has a really cool section of the trail that goes through the woods(no pavement, fallen trees in the path, ect.) Well I come down a steep slope and around a sharp turn and suddenly find myself face to face with a deer standing right in my path. I literally almost lost control of my bowels. I stopped short of a head but with this deer by about four feet. Why does this stuff only happen to me? So there I was (I've always wanted to say that), eye to eye with a big doe. Neither one of us moved. They only thing going through my mind was that video on YouTube when that guy is attacked by the deer, funny then, but not now. All of the sudden, the deer tenses up and......snorts at me, turns, and bounds away. I just stood there for a moment, stunned. I checked my shorts for damage (thankfully none), and went on my way. Crazy huh? But wait, there is more. Last night, I was playing baseball with Nathan in the back yard. It was great. I pitched him a curve ball right over the plate and he crushed it into the back corner of the yard. I run back to get it and find it right in the middle of our huge brush pile. I gingerly step on to the pile to retrieve the ball. As I reached down to pick it up, a baby deer jumps out of the pile a takes off across the yard. Again, a quick shorts check. The next thing I hear is Kaitlin screaming, "Look at that doggie! Look at that doggie! Daddy! That doggie has spots"! The deer is running laps around the yard. Unfortunately, our yard is fenced in and the deer is not quite large enough to jump over so every once in a while it tries to go through the fence. So I spent the next 20 minutes trying to get this deer out of my yard. I go open one gate, it runs to the other. I open the other gate it runs to the back. Nathan thinks this is the coolest thing in the world, he is telling me to catch it so that he can pet it. Kaitlin is also now telling me to "catch the doggie". I'm like yeah right, I've seen the show "When Animals Attack (click that link to see the picture in my mind)! So I keep trying to herd this thing to an open gate. So I'm running back and forth, doing the best I can to keep this stupid deer from ramming the fence when I hear my neighbor yell from his yard "Hey! It's not deer season yet". He was cracking up...I didn't find this amusing at all. Anyway, so finally, I steer the deer to the open gate and out he went. Hopefully not to the park where I run...or maybe...could it be... that these incidents are related...hmmm?