The Bird

When I was younger, maybe 5th or 6th grade, I got a Cockatiel for Christmas. His name was Piper and he was a sweet bird. That is he was sweet until Steven and Brian tortured the poor thing and turned it against everone. If you think I'm kidding you should ask them, they still laugh about it. Anyway, Piper did a lot of interesting things. Once he ate a black pearl after bending the earing it was in while still attached to my moms ear. Another time he flew away and ended up landing on a neighbors bald head while he was outside in the garden. Finally he met his demise when left outside in his cage one night. He got eaten by a raccoon. There are differing accounts as to what really happened but he was dead. Well...

Today Katherine and Natalie and I were leaving my salon to go home. As we stepped into the parking lot a hear a bird and it sounded familiar. I looked down and there was a Cockatiel in the parking lot! Just chillin', hangin' out. Flash backs from my childhood swarmed through my head and me having a soft spot in my heart for animals and not wanting it to meet the same fate as Piper, we tried to catch it. It took a few minutes and a piece of chocolate cookie but I got him. He was squalking and trying to bite me. Poor thing didn't realize I was there to help him! So we have this bird, now what do we do with it? Of course, there's a pet store right around the corner! They'll surely take the bird. We walk into the store and this girl tell us they can't take it because they don't know where it's been and it could disease the other birds. Whatever. So what did we do? We left it in the Bird World parking lot for some other person to deal with. Yep. Serious. Now I have guilt.

Moab 2009

This past weekend Jeremy and I went to Moab with the Barclay's, Steven & Tara and some friends. Jeremy's dad works with a guy who got a permit to run the Westwater seciton of the Colorado River. A 17 mile section of river with a series of 17 rapids. Of course we were in the smallest raft. There was lots of rowing, lots of sun and lots of water. The first few rapids were pretty small. I thought "if this is as bad as it gets, we're good". Boy was I wrong. We went through some pretty amazing rapids. The one that I have the best recollection of was called Skull Rapids. Ya, the name really instilled a sense of saftey for me. Well, the 6 of us in our little raft (that included a guy who's run the river a lot and was our "guide") headed into the rapids and after we hit the first big one we got thrown over to the right and pinned against a rock wall. The raft went up on the wall and we thought it was going to flip and we'd all fall out. Instead Jeff (my brother-in-law) fell into me and I in turn fell into Jeremy and Jeremy and I both fell out! It was pretty scary. Luckily I was right by the raft and could feel the side of the raft. I kept reaching for something to grab onto but couldn't find anything. I was still under water and couldn't get any air. Suddenly I was ripped out of the water and was back in the raft. Literally ripped. In the process I got a huge bruise on my leg somehow. Jeremy on the other hand had gotten sucked down when he fell in. Finally he came up and was right under the raft. He finally got out after being under long enough to feel "uncomfortable". When he popped up the other rafts in our group were yelling at him to swim left. We finally made it out of the rapids, picked up Jeremy from another raft and tried to calm down. It was at this point that our "guide" told us that 3 people have died this year in that exact spot. He didn't tell us before so we didn't freak out. Overall the rafting trip was AWESOME! Definitely scary in spots but way fun!