Fanta the Phantom Bird.

Around two weeks ago when Chelsea and I first moved in to this house something very strange happened. Throughout the day Chelsea and I had been in and out of our room and we had both noticed a very large (about a foot long) black and white bird feather laying gently on our desk that hadn’t been there the day before. I figured Chelsea had picked up the feather while walking or something and didn’t really think about it much. Chelsea is after all obsessed with birds, thinks its her spirit animal and talks to birds whenever we are out so it was a reasonable deduction to make. But then dundundunnnn! Chelsea asks me if I brought the feather into the room. Unlike Chelsea I usually think birds are kind of dirty, freak out when too many fly close to my head, and am too afraid to pick up the feathers out of fear of getting some strange bird disease so of course I would NEVER in a million years pick up this huge bird feather and think to myself hmmm, this might add some lovely ambience to our otherwise barren room. Puzzled we decided it was  just some strange thing that happened, left the feather on the desk and never thought about it again since, until today that is…

After spending the morning at our house in gloomy  Wollongong, yes it has been raining and yes it looks sunnier in Colorado, we decided to head out to the beach with our brand spanking new friend maker, our beach volleyball. We have this vision that if we get really good at playing volleyball and bring it down to the beach everyday really fun awesome cool australian people will magically appear on the sand and want to be our best friends for the summer and take us on road trips (roadies as they are called here) and invite use to good ole fashion barbecues, and sail us around on their fancy million dollar yachts. Pretty good plan, right? Anywayyys  we frolic in the sand with our volleyball and read books for about two hours, come back to the house, think everything is fine and dandy until we discover a pile of bird poop on our office chair inside of our room. It was the strangest thing. Our porch door was closed, the windows and screens were closed meaning the bird that pooped on our chair would have had to go through the front door of our house, take an immediate left enter through our door that opens to the hallway, frolic around without messing anything up except pooping of course, and then leave as quietly as it came. After thinking about it very diligently and putting together all the evidence, ie. bird poop, feather, no visual sitting of actual bird, and no disturbance to the food we have stored in our room we feel that we can affirmatively and rationally deem this bird a GHOST BIRD!!! AHHHH so we have playfully named it Fanta (short for fantasma which means phantom in spanish), have decided to love it and cherish it (well me kind of, Chelsea wants to leave it apples), and hope it visits us again soon….

Other than this wildly exciting day I am pleased to announce that I have more wildly exciting news, I HAVE A JOB!!! yahoooo It is the cafe/restaurant that sits right on the beach that lets me go on swim breaks at lunch! It is perfect because I get to see the ocean every day and it is less then a ten minute walk from my house. Chelsea and I are also testing out a surfboard this week and if we like it we are going to buy it and start our slow transformation to those cool surfer girls with sun kissed faces, and stone hard abs getting our surf on some pumping one foot waves. We are prettty hard core i’d say. The only other interesting thing I can think of that has happened so far is that the other day we went swimming at this beautiful beach that our New Zealand friend Timmy took us to for the day only to find out that a week prior a three meter great white had been caught at the same beach. Now that I’m thinking about it i’m surprised I kept swimming there after hearing that story.

Well that is all for now. Miss everyone back at the States so much!! I start work on Friday so wish me luck!

Jessica