Friday evening Michael invited over some friends, we had a great time.

arrived around 7:30, and showed up soon after, with a couple gifts for me! They’re so sweet %) In the big red bag they brought along Scene It? Deluxe Disney Edition. I had no idea that Scene It? was a whole line of games, so when I said I’d do great if a Disney one existed I had no clue a Disney one actually did exist. It was a very thoughtful gift, we had to play it.

It was fun. I fell on my face when it came to live action Disney movies, but was sickeningly good when it came to most of the cartoon ones. Still, and Michael came very close to beating me! It made for a very fun game.

We ordered some pizza and had a great night. Spent some time talking, and took the opportunity to invite the 3 of them to our wedding. This was a big thing, we had previously thought that we’d only have 3 people at our wedding, but the logistics of the castle wedding made it easy to invite more of our close friends and fill up the place. I’m so excited, we now have our wedding party!

They left around 1:30, after watching the three Wallace & Gromit shorts (which hadn’t seen, gasp!).

Saturday we got up early for no reason. We didn’t have solid plans for the day and I was in a lousy/sad mood. We wanted to go hiking, but weren’t sure were. I messaged to find out their plans for the day, changed my mind about what I wanted to do about 324 times (that’s a symptom of my lousy/sad mood) while talking to her. After much thought and talking with Michael over a yummie pancake breakfast Michael and I decided to go to Hawk Mountain, just the two of us. They were holding an educational event, teamed up with Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center to show off 3 birds of prey, the most notable being a Golden Eagle.

Most people who know me, know all about my fear of birds. Most of the fear is completely illogical, but I was perfectly fine to live with it until we started studying Shamanism. There is a lot of bird stuff in shamanism. Spirit guides that can be birds, smudging with feathers and whole wings of birds that died. At first I just toughed it out and tried not to freak out when I had to touch a feather, but it quickly became apparent that I needed to deal with this fear. So recently, parts of my journeys and some of my waking thought has made use of spirtual guidance to explore this fear and deal with it properly.

Seeing a golden eagle up close was a huge step, I thought it might be too big of one. The last time I saw one was this summer, I freaked out and it was in a cage 1000 feet away from me.

We left home slightly later than I wanted, but arrived at the center early enough to catch the final, 2PM show with the birds.

I took pictures and didn’t freak out.

The golden eagle has a 6-7 foot wingspan, and weighs a mere 12 pounds. They’re powerful birds, can kill baby deer and lambs, but often stick to rabbits and smaller birds as their prey. They fly 45-60MPH, but when they dive they can reach speeds of 120MPH. Yowza. See, there is good reason to be scared of these! The golden eagle that they had was a female (which are larger than males) who had a pretty sad background. She was born in captivity, but raised so she could be released in the wild. Once released she lived fine for a while until being electricuted (from powerlines or something similar). The center found her badly hurt, and today she’s a 15 year old bird that suffers from permanent damage from that, she has a talon missing, part of the bone in a wing is missing (she can’t fly), and her beak is crooked so she can’t tear up meat like she used to be able to so they need to cut up all her food for her. Poor thing! I let my sympath
y emotions take over.

I was able to get relatively close to her without being too scared, something I wouldn’t believe was possible a few months ago.

The next bird they brought out was a Screech owl. She was SO CUTE! We only got one little picture of her because she was so small and wasn’t out for as long. She had the feathers on the top of her head up in a defensive pose, trying to look as large as possible, which as adorable for an animal her size. She had a similar sad story though, after being hit by a car she was brought to the center for help and when she was all patched up they learned that she had lost sight in one of her eyes. The center also has two other screech owls, same injuries from similar accidents. The owls like to hunt in open spaces, and quite often the open spaces they find are roadways which also have prey that come for the trash people throw out of their cars. It’s a bad combination, they said that many of the birds treated at the center were brought in after accidents with cars.

The final bird was a barn owl. He was a nice looking bird, injured somehow and so he’s lost the use of one of his wings. We got very close to him.

It was a little after 3 when we left the presentation area and headed for the trails. It costs $7 per adult to walk on their trails, and that seems to be the only thing they charge for, the whole presentation we watched was free. The walk wasn’t nearly as nice as some of the ones we’ve been on in West Virginia because there were so many people. The birds migrate at this time of year so this is the busiest time for the park. There were a lot of people and most of them were being noisy, even the adults. We got some nice view pictures.

So, people aside, the trails are nice and the views are great. We’ll be keeping this place on our list of good places to go, it’s only about an hour from home. Perhaps next time when it’s not one of the busiest days of the year.

We left the park around closing time at 5. Our plan was to just go home, but we decided to go meet up with Bob at The Drafting Room in Spring House. There we were able to tell him about the plans for the wedding (he’s Michael’s best man). The food was good, beer was great (I wasn’t going to have beer, but how can I resist the Lindemans Framboise on tap?), and for once, the service there was really good. We had a nice evening and went home around 8:30. About halfway home I realized that I didn’t have my purse – I had left it at the restaurant! We turned around and I called them to see if they had found it, they had it and when I went to pick it up a quick inspection proved that nothing was missing. Phew.

Today the only solid plans we have are to do some work in the yard.