my sissy and i were talking the other day about some of the superstitions that our mother held.  the conversation came up because i was telling her about a few days back when we had the doors open one night and had several giant grasshoppers intrude on us.  hubby got one of the little fish nets out of the beach-toy-box and chased them around, scooping them up and throwing back off the balcony.  what the heck they were doing twenty-three stories up is beyond me but we had a good laugh at our house being “plagued” by locusts.  sissy proceeded to tell me about having a dove fly into and get stuck in their screened pool deck recently and how it reminded her of mom telling us that a bird flying into the house meant someone was going to die.  i remember hearing those sort of sentiments growing up as well.  funny how you think of those things, even if you never bought into them.  i laughed and told sissy that she must be the lucky one because she had a dove, which is a blessing, and i had locusts, which are a plague.  clearly mom was mistaken.  we then talked about our mother’s new year’s superstition which involved the necessity of having a dark-haired man enter the house first after midnight of the new year.  i’m surprised our neighbor didn’t kill her the year that she woke him up asking him to come across the street and walk through the front door so that she could go in and go to bed.  sissy said that she recently came across the origins of that tradition on the internet.  anyhow, it seems i’ve gotten a bit off topic here.  the reason i brought all of this up is because we just had some cute little bird fly into our home.  and immediately i thought, “someone’s going to die.”  not because i believe that, but because that’s the association that was burned into me growing up.  i just found it funny after having that conversation with my sissy not three days ago.  we chased the poor, scared, little birdy all over the house.  he was resting on whatever light fixture or a/c vent he could land on.  hubby finally managed to catch him in the fish net and his itty-bitty head was all bloodied from crashing into the ceiling so much.  we gently set him on one of the chairs on the balcony with the hopes that he would catch his breath and be okay.  although i’m a bit dubious since that was thirty minutes ago and i just went out to check on things; he must have been in the chair still because opening the door back up spooked him and made him start flying into the window again.  i really hope he regains his strength and is able to fly himself to safety before we get back home tonight.