Conquering Fears: The Birds Edition (at Gatorland)

Housekeeping: I’ve been updating the blog — there’s a new look to the Recipes page as well as my Videos page. Let me know what you think!

I don’t have a lot of fears — off the top of my head, I can only name:

• Birds
• Flying (more like a fear of turbulence)
• Losing loved ones (duh)
• People that look like animals

Shudder.

But back to my point — I don’t like birds. Especially small, screeching, sharp-clawed birds. I don’t like them near me and I CERTAINLY don’t like them on me. (Sidenote: is it just me or does the woman in the background of this photo look astonishingly similar to CatWoman above?)

But I found myself feeling brave when the man at Gatorland’s aviary asked me if I wanted to feed the birds. After Lucas stopped laughing, he grabbed the video camera and started shooting. Even I admit…it’s an instant classic.

I didn’t realize until I watched the video that I was repeating some mantra most of the time and closing my eyes for at least half of the experience. It was a lot of fun, and even though one pooped on my hat (must have been a Yankees fan), I was thrilled to have done it.

Gatorland is definitely a tourist trap, but it was a lot of fun:

And although it’s not that close to our house, it is close to the store where I get my wedding rings inspected. It turns out, they’re due for a dip, so I kissed them goodbye and am now ring-free for a couple of weeks! Sniff.

I was craving french fries for dinner, so we decided to go all college-like and made hot dogs and french fries. Except these hot dogs were organic and grass-fed:

And served with caramelized onions and crusty multi-grain bread.

And also unlike college, dessert was not a six-pack of beer — instead, I whipped up some Almond-Maple-Coconut Macaroons to satisfy our sweet tooth while watching Syracuse basketball WHOOP those dang Villanova Wildcats.

Exciting updates:

• I won the Simply Savor MaraNatha Nut Butter giveaway! I am super excited to get my goodies and start making some new yummies.
• I also won copies of Happy Herbivore’s e-cookbooks, which I’m currently poring through for meal ideas for the week.
• Next weekend, on March 6th at noon, I’m hanging out with lots of healthy bloggers at Orlando’s Pizza Fusion. Some of them are running Walt Disney World’s half marathon, and if you’d like to come hang out, email Lindsey from Sound Eats (Lindsey AT soundeats DOT com). You don’t have to be a blogger, and we’d LOVE to see you!
• Speaking of meetups, Lucas just co-hosted his first Tweetup, and it was a big success! It featured beer, beer lovers and some other cool stuff, so you can learn more here.