So I have this friend who says she never wants to get married, and she never wants to have kids.  She's 19 years old and she has no romantic interst in guys period.  This unnamed friend has a standing bet with everyone that she will be the last one of them to get married (since she intends for that to never happen).  Well, as a huge joke, I came up with the idea of signing her up on eHarmony.  I wasn't actually planning to do it, but it was a huge inside joke between me and my friends for a few days.  Then I just decided to go through with it.  It took me like 30 minutes to b.s. all that profile stuff to sign her up, but it was so worth it!  Of course I signed up using her e-mail, so she got an e-mail that day saying, "Thanks you for signing up for eHarmony."  She knew I had done it.  The next time she saw me she attacked me and threatened to push me over a bridge, but we're friends so she didn't kill me.  Every prank must have its calculated risks, and this one was well worth it!

So I went running down to the Montreat Gate this morning and I was met there by the most surprising creatures.  There were three of them and they appeared to be some large game bird, but I didn't have any idea what exactly they were.  They were about two feet tall and they made some loud cackling noise for no apparent reason after I'd been sitting on a bench, stretching for a minute.  While I was trying to walk past them they felt compelled to always stay one foot ahead of me, so they moved forward every time I moved forward!  It was so funny!  They were the strangest looking things, too!  One was all white and the other two were dark grey with black speckles.  One was a juvenile and had soft brown neck feathers.  Their bodies were very square-shaped, and they kind of reminded me of quail on steroids.  The weirdest part of all was that their heads were white with two red flaps of skin on their cheeks that stood straight out when they were excited.

As soon as I was done with my run I went straight to my bird books and tried to identify the strange creatures at the Gate.  I looked through all the pictures, but I couldn't find anything that remotely looked like these things.  Then I went on the internet and started looking up game birds.  Eventually I came across a page with guineafowl on it, but all of them were from Africa.  After a little more research, I determined that the newcomers to Montreat were indeed domesticated guinea hens originating from Africa.  Perhaps someone's dinner just escaped from their yard.  I don't know much about game birds, but it could be that some guinea hens are now wild in North America after centuries of importing them for food and eggs.  Guinea hens were originally imported from Africa to help the slaves adjust to their new homes in North America.  The eggs are such a good source of protein and their cackling makes them such good "watch dogs" that they were also adopted by the colonists and raised widely.  Today the meat can still be bought in nicer grocery stores but it is very expensive and a delicacy.

This week I had some extra time off work so I went to the library and started browsing the fiction books looking for something exciting to read.  I saw lots of random books that I've never heard of by obscure authors.  With most of those I figure somebody was duped into buying them and they weren't worth reading twice, so they decided to donate them to the library.  Keep looking.  I saw some books by well-known authors, but there was just no spark, you know?  I just didn't feel like I would enjoy them.  After a disappointing half hour of searching I finally see high up on a shelf, not only one, but a series of three huge black, hard-cover volumes with a big invisible neon sign above them saying, "These are worth your time."  They were the books from which the Bourne movies were made:  "The Bourne Identity," "The Bourne Supremacy," and "The Bourne Ultimatum."  The books go by the same names and same order.  I checked out the first one and began reading it immediately.  It was so much more complex and intriguing than even the movie, and I love the Bourne movies.  It took me about three days to finish that massive book, but I hardly put it down.  I even decided not to go to work and just read instead!  My roommate Elena would come in and out a few times each day and she would say stuff like, "Get out of the room and go somewhere."  But all I wanted to do was finish the story!  I thought about going outside to read, but there are always so many conferees outside and they're so loud, that it's actually much more quiet and peaceful in the room.  An outsider might have been worried about me living in a small, dimly lit dorm room for so long without leaving, but I was in another world and it was amazing!  Of course, now I need to actually get some other stuff done, so I'm not allowing myself to check out the next book in the series for a while.