In the beginning 12/27

My neighbor has always decorated his house for Christmas. Nothing ornate or overdone, but he gets into the spirit. A couple of years ago he added to his collection with some of these flat white wooden deer which are all the rage in these parts. Soon after putting them on his lawn, someone came by and assembled the deer in various sexual positions.

One afternoon he came over to my place and after some idle chit-chat accosted me, " Is it you fucking with my deer !?!?!"

Startled I just stood there mouth agape.

" Bah ! I can tell by your reaction it wasn't you. Sorry to startle you, but I had to see your reaction.", and off he went.

I made a decision at that moment that my life mission was to find a way to mess with his deer.

Last year he added a baby deer and the plan was to go over at 4am, with ladder in hand, and put the entire herd on top of his garage. But I found myself foiled. He had anticipated someone messing with the set up and had bound the deer with heavy wire and drove stakes deep into the now frozen ground.

This year I came up with this plan. With warm, wet weather all the planets seemed to aligning and last night, under the cover of darkness, I pinched the deer. For purposes of familiarity, we'll call him Little Rudy. Little Rudy is now sitting in a box in my car, on his way to UPS.

What I'm hoping that you can do is take a picture of the deer at some sort of landmark or with some person of significance. For those of you living near a Golden Gate Bridge or The Alamo, the immediate choices are obvious. But please don't feel limited to those landmarks that everyone knows. If there are spots or people, while not famous, that you find particularly interesting please feel free to include them with the deer. In that case I only ask that you share a story about the place and/or the people. The only thing that I'd ask you DON'T do is to include the deer in any pictures that have anything to do with bicycling or poker…or anything else you think could be traced back to me. Besides signaling my immediate death, it would also ruin the joke.