Friday, July 20
So, as promised, the story of how I came to own a parrot. (We won't get into how long ago I promised it....) But first, a visual aid!
So back in November, shortly after deciding to move to San Francisco, my brother and his girlfriend bought a Jenday conure. Bro's gf already had cockatiels and loved them, but they were looking for something a bit more personable and intelligent. They brought him to visit and I was most fascinated and envious. I'd been interested in parrots for years, ever since happening across Irene Pepperberg's research, and had even looked into getting myself an African grey before concluding that I had neither the money, the time, or the right to commit to such a resource-intensive bird (they are very, very smart birds, and thus about the same as buying yourself a chimpanzee. Or a three-year-old who's going to stay three for about, oh, 60 years.) I didn't know much about the smaller, less demanding parrots, and hadn't expected them to be so tame nor so clever.
But bro went off to San Francisco, and I blathered on about parrots for about a month until Dan and my mother told me I was nuts to think of buying such an expensive pet, and life did its thing.
Without getting into details, let's say that the move to San Francisco didn't work out for my bro. GF's promised job turned out to be working for rich snobs who backed out on the housing they'd agreed to provide, drove her to distraction with their demands, and started advertising her job the minute her agreed trial period was up (without telling her they'd done it -- pity she found the ad on their website.) Both of them found themselves commuting much further than they'd expected and in the all-too-common San Francisco situation of making twice as much money but spending three times the amount they had elsewhere. They got tired, and as a result they had no time for their parrot, who started developing the usual bad behaviors of neglected parrots -- mostly screaming his little head off all hours of the day. If you've never heard a parrot scream, dear gods, can they scream. Not a noise you want in your house, much less in a small suburban California community.
By the time they moved back home, about six weeks ago, they were both really broke and sick to death of the damned bored screaming parrot.
Enter me, my soft heart, and poor Dan's inability to say no to stuff that makes me happy.
Yeah, I took their parrot home -- supposedly on trial, but, eh, yeah. Got attached. Dan is less attached than resigned, but he is a sweet boy who spoils me. Particularly considering that he'll be living with the birdie for the next 25 years.
So, I have a parrot. His name is Alfie. He still screams, but in relatively normal, manageable amounts, probably because he now lives with a human who carries him around on her shoulder whenever she's home, feeds him grapes, makes him toys, and generally spoils him rotten.
A month or so along, I am still utterly and completely thrilled by this. We're not supposed to have pets in our apartment, you see, but a bird -- a bird sneaks by. And he's a cool pet! He does tricks! And plays in my hair! And talks! (Only one clear phrase, so far, but he's got another far enough along that I'm catching recognizable words, and I suspect he's working on one or two more.)
Twenty-five years is a long time, and these birds are not cheap, and left to myself I probably would have chickened out on buying one. But sometimes life is just good to you.
(This post brought to you despite the help of Alfie the conure. This would be the day he decided to be fascinated by the keyboard.)
So back in November, shortly after deciding to move to San Francisco, my brother and his girlfriend bought a Jenday conure. Bro's gf already had cockatiels and loved them, but they were looking for something a bit more personable and intelligent. They brought him to visit and I was most fascinated and envious. I'd been interested in parrots for years, ever since happening across Irene Pepperberg's research, and had even looked into getting myself an African grey before concluding that I had neither the money, the time, or the right to commit to such a resource-intensive bird (they are very, very smart birds, and thus about the same as buying yourself a chimpanzee. Or a three-year-old who's going to stay three for about, oh, 60 years.) I didn't know much about the smaller, less demanding parrots, and hadn't expected them to be so tame nor so clever.
But bro went off to San Francisco, and I blathered on about parrots for about a month until Dan and my mother told me I was nuts to think of buying such an expensive pet, and life did its thing.
Without getting into details, let's say that the move to San Francisco didn't work out for my bro. GF's promised job turned out to be working for rich snobs who backed out on the housing they'd agreed to provide, drove her to distraction with their demands, and started advertising her job the minute her agreed trial period was up (without telling her they'd done it -- pity she found the ad on their website.) Both of them found themselves commuting much further than they'd expected and in the all-too-common San Francisco situation of making twice as much money but spending three times the amount they had elsewhere. They got tired, and as a result they had no time for their parrot, who started developing the usual bad behaviors of neglected parrots -- mostly screaming his little head off all hours of the day. If you've never heard a parrot scream, dear gods, can they scream. Not a noise you want in your house, much less in a small suburban California community.
By the time they moved back home, about six weeks ago, they were both really broke and sick to death of the damned bored screaming parrot.
Enter me, my soft heart, and poor Dan's inability to say no to stuff that makes me happy.
Yeah, I took their parrot home -- supposedly on trial, but, eh, yeah. Got attached. Dan is less attached than resigned, but he is a sweet boy who spoils me. Particularly considering that he'll be living with the birdie for the next 25 years.
So, I have a parrot. His name is Alfie. He still screams, but in relatively normal, manageable amounts, probably because he now lives with a human who carries him around on her shoulder whenever she's home, feeds him grapes, makes him toys, and generally spoils him rotten.
A month or so along, I am still utterly and completely thrilled by this. We're not supposed to have pets in our apartment, you see, but a bird -- a bird sneaks by. And he's a cool pet! He does tricks! And plays in my hair! And talks! (Only one clear phrase, so far, but he's got another far enough along that I'm catching recognizable words, and I suspect he's working on one or two more.)
Twenty-five years is a long time, and these birds are not cheap, and left to myself I probably would have chickened out on buying one. But sometimes life is just good to you.
(This post brought to you despite the help of Alfie the conure. This would be the day he decided to be fascinated by the keyboard.)
Monday, July 09
Well, seeing as I was tagged by Pandababy:
1. I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
2. Each participant posts eight random facts about themselves.
3. Tagees should write a blogpost of eight random facts about themselves.
4. At the end of the post, eight more bloggers are tagged (named and shamed).
5. Go to their blog, leave a comment telling them they're tagged (cut and run).
Of course, I've already shared most of the random and useless facts about myself on the blog, because what else are blogs for? But we'll see what we can do.
1) I don't drink soda. At all. Partly this is because soda tends to try and sneak caffeine up on you, and I have a very strong reaction to caffeine (my loved ones have been known to bravely throw themselves on a cup of coffee, just to avoid having me around on a caffeine high.) And partly, well, I just don't like soda. It's all sweet and stuff. I'm not even that keen on most fruit juices -- give me milk any day. Or failing that, water.
2) In a possibly related random fact, I've never had a cavity.
3) I have a somewhat inexplicable weakness for Marx Brothers movies. Seriously. Show me A Night at the Opera or Go West (which I just watched on Friday, in fact: comfort movie) and I will be rolling around on the floor, while my poor ignorant husband, who was not indoctrinated to the wonders of Harpo at a young age, looks on in bewildered horror. I can't entirely blame my upbringing -- after all, the Three Stooges and Tarzan didn't really take -- but I'll get what milage I can out of it.
4) The last time I was in a hospital (for myself) was that time when I was three and told my parents I'd drunk gasoline (I hadn't. I'd put my mouth over the spout and breathed a lot of fumes, but I hadn't actually drunk it. My parents were lectured on how they now had to buy locking gas caps and a padlock for the medicine cabinet and I was going to grow up to be a drug addict, but I haven't been able to stand the smell of gasoline since.) That brought my grand total of hospital visits -- not counting being born in one -- up to two. I've had antibiotics once, for a staph infection when I was thirteen, and I've yet to break a bone, have stitches, or do any other scary hospital-requiring things. Given that I've lived and worked on a farm all my life, that makes me scarily lucky.
5) I own a television, because it is necessary to make the DVD player work and without the DVD player I cannot watch Marx Brothers movies. But I don't have television. No reception in the sticks, donchaknow, and I have this moral objection to paying people to flash advertising in my face. Besides, I have enough distractions in my life.
6) My hand-to-eye coordination is zip. This is a random fact of the week because I'm trying to learn racquetball and it's brought home the hand-eye disconnect in a painful fashion. There's a reason my sport is swimming. I mean, everyone else is getting a kick watching me confidently swing the racquet only to miss the ball by several inches, but it's a tad embarrassing.
This is also why I don't play video games that rely on fast reflexes. It wastes time and makes the pig cry in sheer frustration. As the "twitch" style of video games accounts for, oh, 90% of the market, that's another distraction my nervous system has spared me.
7) I cut my hair to its current length in 2003, because long hair was just too damned impractical. I mean, it was pretty and all, but it tangled at every breath of air and had this tendency to get caught in stuff, so I kept it pulled back most of the time. And me with my hair pulled back was not pretty. It's the nose that did it. I looked like a hatchet being aimed.
So, I cut it back to chin-length. It was the first time my hair had been cut since I was eleven. The unlamented remains measured just over a foot long and got donated to Wigs For Kids.
8) I have a parrot. This isn't so much a random fact as something I hadn't gotten around to telling y'all about yet, since I've only had him about two weeks. He'll get a blog post of his own one of these days.
And now I'm supposed to tag people, but... I'm not keen on the idea of picking and choosing. Also, lazy. Everybody consider yourself tagged.
1. I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
2. Each participant posts eight random facts about themselves.
3. Tagees should write a blogpost of eight random facts about themselves.
4. At the end of the post, eight more bloggers are tagged (named and shamed).
5. Go to their blog, leave a comment telling them they're tagged (cut and run).
Of course, I've already shared most of the random and useless facts about myself on the blog, because what else are blogs for? But we'll see what we can do.
1) I don't drink soda. At all. Partly this is because soda tends to try and sneak caffeine up on you, and I have a very strong reaction to caffeine (my loved ones have been known to bravely throw themselves on a cup of coffee, just to avoid having me around on a caffeine high.) And partly, well, I just don't like soda. It's all sweet and stuff. I'm not even that keen on most fruit juices -- give me milk any day. Or failing that, water.
2) In a possibly related random fact, I've never had a cavity.
3) I have a somewhat inexplicable weakness for Marx Brothers movies. Seriously. Show me A Night at the Opera or Go West (which I just watched on Friday, in fact: comfort movie) and I will be rolling around on the floor, while my poor ignorant husband, who was not indoctrinated to the wonders of Harpo at a young age, looks on in bewildered horror. I can't entirely blame my upbringing -- after all, the Three Stooges and Tarzan didn't really take -- but I'll get what milage I can out of it.
4) The last time I was in a hospital (for myself) was that time when I was three and told my parents I'd drunk gasoline (I hadn't. I'd put my mouth over the spout and breathed a lot of fumes, but I hadn't actually drunk it. My parents were lectured on how they now had to buy locking gas caps and a padlock for the medicine cabinet and I was going to grow up to be a drug addict, but I haven't been able to stand the smell of gasoline since.) That brought my grand total of hospital visits -- not counting being born in one -- up to two. I've had antibiotics once, for a staph infection when I was thirteen, and I've yet to break a bone, have stitches, or do any other scary hospital-requiring things. Given that I've lived and worked on a farm all my life, that makes me scarily lucky.
5) I own a television, because it is necessary to make the DVD player work and without the DVD player I cannot watch Marx Brothers movies. But I don't have television. No reception in the sticks, donchaknow, and I have this moral objection to paying people to flash advertising in my face. Besides, I have enough distractions in my life.
6) My hand-to-eye coordination is zip. This is a random fact of the week because I'm trying to learn racquetball and it's brought home the hand-eye disconnect in a painful fashion. There's a reason my sport is swimming. I mean, everyone else is getting a kick watching me confidently swing the racquet only to miss the ball by several inches, but it's a tad embarrassing.
This is also why I don't play video games that rely on fast reflexes. It wastes time and makes the pig cry in sheer frustration. As the "twitch" style of video games accounts for, oh, 90% of the market, that's another distraction my nervous system has spared me.
7) I cut my hair to its current length in 2003, because long hair was just too damned impractical. I mean, it was pretty and all, but it tangled at every breath of air and had this tendency to get caught in stuff, so I kept it pulled back most of the time. And me with my hair pulled back was not pretty. It's the nose that did it. I looked like a hatchet being aimed.
So, I cut it back to chin-length. It was the first time my hair had been cut since I was eleven. The unlamented remains measured just over a foot long and got donated to Wigs For Kids.
8) I have a parrot. This isn't so much a random fact as something I hadn't gotten around to telling y'all about yet, since I've only had him about two weeks. He'll get a blog post of his own one of these days.
And now I'm supposed to tag people, but... I'm not keen on the idea of picking and choosing. Also, lazy. Everybody consider yourself tagged.
Monday, July 02
The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes by Anne Stuart, Jennifer Crusie, and Eileen Dreyer
The three Miss Fortunes have problems.
First problem: their history. TV personalities courtesy their parents, who were eventually exposed as fraudulent psychics and ruined, their now-adult daughters aren't interested in fame -- but it keeps catching up to them anyway.
Second problem: their magic. Because while the elder Fortunes may have been foolish, they weren't frauds, and the sisters have their gifts in uncontrollable spades. Dee, eldest and responsible, changes shape during times of emotional stress (leading to stashes of clothes all over town and a string of traumatized ex-boyfriends). Lizzie, dreamy and bookish, wants to turn straw into gold, but mostly manages to turn the silverware into bunny rabbits. And the youngest, most reckless sister, Mare? Mare throws things. Mare's going to be Queen of the Universe, as soon as she finishes conquering the local Value Video!!.
Third problem: their Aunt Xan. She's got more magic than any of them. She killed their parents. And now she wants something from them.
But Xan isn't an entirely bad aunt. She's willing to trade. So she casts a spell that brings each of the girls their True Love, their soulmate, the one man they can love and be happy with for the rest of their lives. All they have to do to get their men... is give up their magic.
I was a little nervous about this one. I got it for free, with the caveat I had to review it. I didn't have to like it, but I hate reviewing books I don't like. Fortunately (hah!) it was a non-problem. I wouldn't describe this as paranormal romance so much as a kick-ass modern-day fairy tale. Despite the authors being romance writers, not fantasy, the story manages to blend the normal and the magical far better than most urban fantasy -- the sisters' talents and the attendant problems hit that elusive sweet spot, real enough to believe and magical enough that you want to believe. Romance-wise, I found one of the boys a bit over-done, but the sweet spot is still there -- that marvelous line between touching and funny that Crusie has always walked so well. She brought talented company with her this time; I'm gonna be checking out all these ladies' works before too much longer.
But seriously -- read The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes. It's got three sisters. It's got a wicked witch. It's got sexy motorcycle-riding modern princes, clueless evil minions, and a surprising number of frogs. What more can you ask from a fairy tale?
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