Sheep Attack Part Two

Above is a picture of the cat grass I planted for Leila. It is finally coming up and is doing quite nicely. It took a lot longer to germinate than I had expected, but it is doing very well now and soon I'll be able to bring it inside for her to munch on. 

Last Thursday, Woodley and I decided to once again go for a walk before he left for work. We were a bit nervous about encountering the sheep but I brought my camera with me and we decided to be on the lookout for the sheep. 

As we walked through the first gate, we kept our eyes and ears alert for any sign of the sheep but it was not to be seen or heard. As we were just finishing up with that little stretch of the walk we did see the sheep, but it was way up high on the hill and although it baaed at us several times, it did not appear interested in coming down for a visit. 

So, we continued on our walk. It included a nice view of the California spring hills:

And it seemed as if all the wildflowers were blooming!

When we got back from our walk we noticed that the sheep and come down and was grazing close to the fenced area near our house. I decided to go say hello to the sheep and to try to get some pictures of it. When I first went through the gate he seemed a bit wary but soon he came over to say hello. 

I was just taking this picture:

When he started butting into me. This time while I was facing him. It was a bit unnerving, but I got even more scared as, when I turned around to leave, I felt a strong attack from behind. The sheep was ramming into me with all he had. I bolted for the gate and just barely managed to outrun him. 

From now on, I think I'll stay on the other side of the fence, unless I have a long stick with me to fend him off with. 

He looks so cute and cuddly! It is so sad that he's taken to being aggressive lately. 

We talked to the landlords over the weekend and they helped explain the sheep's odd behavior (and also the absence of the 2nd sheep which we had been wondering about). It turns out that about a week and a half ago a neighbor's dog was running loose and somehow got into the area with the sheep and killed the second sheep. So now, the other sheep is very lonely (since they are social animals) and scared (since it recently saw it's buddy killed by a scary dog, right in front of its eyes!). I don't blame it for being more territorial now. I'm just thankful that Woodley wasn't out doing astronomy when the dog attacked!! What kind of dog is it anyways that could kill a sheep that big or that would want to! I'm definitely going to be more careful when I go out at night and I hope the dog is properly locked up. 

The landlords are looking for a new replacement sheep so that our current sheep won't be so lonely. I hope they find one quickly!

~ElizabethRose

Kitty Company

Leila loves to be around her people. Whenever I'm home working on one thing or another she always manages to find a cosy spot nearby to curl up for a snooze or a bath. Above is a picture from last week while I was blogging. I was sitting on the bed and she came over and cuddled up right in my lap. Actually, we are sitting in a very similar arrangement this very moment. I'm not sure it is the best thing for my back, but it is so nice to have her close by. On a side note, that is one of my favorite skirts in the picture. I love the green wildflowers and grasses in the print and it always feels like spring when I wear it. 

I had a bit of a hard time deciding to include the picture above. It is a photo of Leila trying to make do with my very very messy desks. Paper always seems to thwart me but it is one of my goals to get my desk cleaned up. I'd like to move that box of receipts she is lying in and instead make that into a little bed for her so that she can be near me when I'm working on paperwork at the desk. That desk is also one of the reasons why I often find myself blogging while sprawled out on the bed. It's so much cleaner!

This week I decided it was finally time to finish up our taxes. Leila decided to help me. Woodley had scanned and sent in most of the documents a couple of weeks ago so all that was left was figuring out our California Sales and Use Tax. I had never heard about it before, but now that we are married and have someone to help us with our taxes I have learned. Apparently not too many people pay it but in this age of computers and Internet businesses it seems like it must apply to more and more of us every year. 

Basically, California residents are supposed to keep track of any purchases we make online or while we are traveling but which we end up using in California for which we didn't originally pay California state sales tax. I don't know about you, but I do love finding good deals on Ebay and sometimes I can't resist a new book I discover on Amazon. That tendency, combined with the amount of traveling we did last year meant that I had quite a bit of calculating to do last week. 

I gathered together all of our bank statements and went through each of them, line by line, and created a new spreadsheet to keep track of the date, location, amount, and type of each purchase. Leila decided she wanted to help too and promptly jumped up and sat on all of the papers I was going through. After I finished with that (which took several hours), I decided to go back through the list to find purchases we had made in other states that actually did charge us sales tax. Because we could credit that sales tax towards our California sales tax we did manage to save some money. I'm glad I took the extra time to do that and it didn't take too long. This year I hope to keep track of the purchases we make that would apply to the Sales and Use Tax each month so it isn't so overwhelming next tax season. 

To try to encourage scratching on proper scratching items, we got Leila this cardboard scratching "post." These are some pictures of her right after I applied some dried catnip. She loves it!