Ok so our bird has been added to the rest of our special needs pets. First – for those who do not know me well – we love animals. We have 3 cats, a toy rat terrier, a Nanday Conure, and about 10000 birds and squirrels in our back yard. Ok so we went a little crazy with the 15 bird feeders in the back yard. I swear we are going to have to get second jobs to pay for our animals!

Ok so back to Ike. Ike has Narcolepsy and Jagger – our dog – wants to eat him for a snack. I have never seen a bird with Narcolepsy. He can just be sitting there and poof he is asleep. He wakes up sometimes and get a little disoriented not knowing where he is. And omg he does NOT like to be in his cage. He would much rather sit on us than be in his cage. He lets us know about it too very loudly!

We went to Gatlinburg last weekend. It was nice to be out of Ohio. We went down to hike and had a lot of fun. We went to Cades Cove and took lots of pictures of the cabins and animals and then on Monday we went to Cherokee, NC and then stopped at Newfound Gap. Once at the gap we hiked up the Appalachian trail there and got up pretty far till the ice got too bad and it started raining ice too. So we started climbing back down the mountain – keep in mind the trail is only 2 ft wide with a 6000 ft drop on one side and covered in about 2 inches or more of ice – and then we lost our light completely. we were doing really good until we heard something follow us down the mountain! I am guessing it was a cat of some sort since the bears should have been hibernating still but I was not going to shine the light on it to find out what it was! We made it off the mountain but not before I fell in a waterfall and goddess only knows how many times we both fell on the ice coming down.

We want to go back there and camp some and hike some more. We need to get out and hike more. I like it and I enjoy the exercise and the scenery.

So other than that work is hell – I dread going there every day now especially since I have to work in office again every day. 124 miles round trip every day just to get to work. It is making me tired and cranky and my new boss refuses to stop trying to micromanage us. Our department does not work that way.

Costa Rica is still in the plans. We need to finish getting mine and Matt’s passports soon! They are so expensive though.

Ok enough of an update for now.