The last couple of weeks have been strange. Now, I don’t mean strange as all bad necessarily but things were definitely not normal. The first of two baby showers happened two Saturdays ago (the one I wrote about earlier). Our friend Lori, who helped throw the shower, was leaving and I walked outside with her to say good bye. Suddenly, we heard a flutter of wings which made us both look instinctively up on my roof. Perched on the highest part of our roof was a humongous pigeon. It was more like a peacock, actually, but slightly smaller. Anyway… this pigeon was strutting around on the roof and Lori and I stood transfixed, watching this grotesque bird do an odd dance of sorts. Then Lori, with a little gasp asked, “JP! What if it goes into your house?” Now this is the last thing I was expecting to happen, and so I replied, “Well Lori, if that happened, I would have to go get myself a gun.” No sooner had I said gun, when the bird did exactly what I did not want. It found a small little opening under an eve, and squeezed its gargantuan body through it. This prompted a wild flurry between Lori and me, and among what appeared to be a whole family of birds greeting their newly returned parent bird. Soon, Katy and others joined us outside, and it didn’t take long to figure out that we needed to get the bird out. Katy’s dad and I went inside the house and worked our way into the crawl space to see if we could locate them. Fortunately for us, the birds did not penetrate the final defense and instead settled into the space between the siding and the house. Still… yikes!
I did not have a ladder tall enough to get up there, and the only other way to get to where I needed to go would be to negotiate a very steep sloping roof, so that idea was quickly banished. I had to hire somebody to come and take care of this bird problem. It was hard for me to go to sleep that night. I could practically feel the family of pigeons flapping their wings around my face all night!
The wildlife removal professional did show up late last week, and after spending little more than an hour on my roof, got the “family” to “move.” He then cleaned it out and sealed the opening so we would not have any more peacocks lodging in the house in the future.
Normal Bo!
In addition to all of this, Katy’s parents are in Seattle celebrating with Amy and Kyle, at their out west reception, and we’ve been dog-sitting for them. BO is a great dog. He is very mellow, and probably has the greatest temperament of any dog that we have had stay in our house. Unfortunately, he does have a long epiglottis. So every now and then, he gags on it and makes this real gut wrenching “puke” sound. We have mostly gotten used to it, but still catches you off guard every now and again. Katy and I, on Friday, were just remarking on how great BO was when he began his “gag.” Except that this time it was an actual case of “reverse peristalsis.” In other words, BO was throwing up. And it wasn’t a dainty little puke. It was a shovel-worthy offering he laid in front of our TV. I am sorry for the graphic nature of it, but there is no easy way to put it! Katy and I were freaking out because we were headed out to Grand Rapids and now had to pause and clean up this mess. We sent BO outside to “freshen” up while we proceeded to deep clean the carpet. We got most of it done when suddenly Katy said frantically, “JP, what’s wrong with his eye?” I looked and it looked like BO had dislocated his right eye-ball! I know I know, it was really weird, and it scared us both. We had read of instances where people could sneeze so hard that their eye ball popped out… could this be one of those strange occurrences? Katy and I could barely even look at him, but we eventually decided that his eye was just extremely swollen. Poor guy! So we called Katy’s parents, who weren’t exactly sure, but suspected that he may have been stung or had some sort of cactus or other plant prick him in the eye. Both were logical guesses. We said we’d let him hang on till we got back from GR and if he still didn’t look better, we’d have to think about taking him to a vet. Like I said… WEIRD!
The weird eye-ball
Well fortunately, when we got back later that night, the swelling on his eye was down but it still looked a little swollen. The swelling subsided further that night, so when we woke up Saturday, BO’s face was almost back to normal. Meanwhile, in our backyard, we saw a pile of feathers. Pigeon feathers? I don’t know what it was, or who was there, but essentially there was a bird that was seemingly vaporized. And of course, BO left some offerings in the middle of that pile as well.
So, there you go… weird week. Gargantuan pigeons squeezing their way into our house, a dog with a dislocated eye-ball, and a vaporized bird. I’ve come to realize that this might just be God prepping us for what is to come in three weeks! 
Oh and we also had another shower on Saturday. This was thrown by Katy’s friends from college.
The Gilmore Gang
