Animal sensitivities

I keep forgetting that I work with a lot of Indians (Native Americans). During lunch, I was complaining that an owl keep hooting near my window last night waking me up.

"Oh, that's a bad omen to my people. We believe that it's trying to tell you some bad news about a family memeber." as one kindly informed me.


To me, there's lots of owls around here. I live close to the high school and you can see them nesting up in the rafters of the gym. So to me, it's just a neighborhood owl doing his thing.

This morning, a medium sized trantula was walking on the sliding glass door. So I just stood (inside) and watched it crawl off the glass, and walk across the patio until it disappeared into the yard.

So I asked the "owl expert" what it meant if a trantula paid you a visit. Apparently, not much to his people. But if you pick fun at it, you'll get sick. Then he started to tell me a story of how when was a boy he took a stick and flipped over a trantula.

"So did it get you sick afterwards?"

"Yeah, I only did that once."