Parrot Walk and Spider Assassin Pt. 1

Image by Jesus V via Flickr

It was quite the evening yesterday. My wife and I spent the majority of it cleaning/gutting/reorganizing the garage. “Why?” you may ask yourself. Uh… “Cuz we’re dumb” would be the knee-jerk answer, but in this case, we were looking for…something…a while back and couldn’t find it. We knew it was in the garage, specifically in one of the boxes or tubs and so we spent–

Really? Do you care? You just want to know about the Parrot Walk and Spider Assassin. It is what drew you here in the first place, right? It’s all about clever title, you know. Marketing. Grab their attention. “Flash Before Cash” was the motto of a successful coffee house I used to work in years back. That place was awesome. It was–

Holy crap, I’m doing it again.

Coffee has no effect on me. Nope. None at all.

So. Where was I?

Right. The garage.

After spending most of the day doing all that garage-type stuff, we decided to go get some dinner with the kids. So in the car we go. About 100 yards or so down the street, we drive by a nice couple walking on the sidewalk pushing a type of stroller. Now, this wasn’t the interesting part. We’ve had our share of stroller pushing couples, so that’s no a big deal. The interesting part of it was, attached to the top of the stroller (which wasn’t even a stroller as it was nothing more than a 3-wheeled platform) , sat a bird’s cage with, yep you guessed it…a bird. And not just a bird, but a beautiful parrot. Big sucker too. “Beautiful plumage,” as Michael Palin would say.

I paused for a moment, thinking about why someone would take their parrot for a stroll. I finally came upon the idea of why not? It was a beautiful evening out: sun starting to settle on the western hills, fluffy white clouds dotting the pale blue sky, a light cool breeze. Gorgeous.

It was so great to witness this. Too bad the joy lasted all of ten seconds. Because that’s when we noticed the silent invasion of arachnids.