Posts Tagged ‘Parrot’

Last week Sammy, big lummox that she is, let loose with some really horrible gas. Honestly, I’ve never seen (or thankfully, smelled) another dog like this one. It’s not her diet, we’ve tried everything. It’s just her. She can take the most innocent kibble and turn it into toxic waste.

So Sammy lets one go, and I jokingly say to her “Sammy! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Pew Pew pew!”

And, you guessed it. Pratchett LOVES the sound. So now, even when the dog’s not doing it, the parrot’s sounding the alarm.

I’ve been trying to get a video of Pratchett doing this so, of course, he stops as soon as the camera’s out, which is why it’s so far back and showing off my beautiful vacuum and the Halloween Harlot which has yet to get put away.

When I was closer, all he wanted to do was show me just how much noise he could make:

He’s got a real talent, as you can see. My favorite move is when he hangs on the outside of the cage with his beak and one foot and searches around with the other foot, trying to find something to bang around. I took this video first, before stepping back to get the longer one, and I even tried to get him to echo me, but he wasn’t having it.

I know you’ve got to be careful what you say, around parrots, but it’s kind of maddening how they’ll ignore the hundred things you’d like them to say and pick up on the one thing you said in a random moment. I’ve been trying to get him to say “WHO DAT!” for weeks and he couldn’t be less interested, but the dog farts and now I’ll be hearing about it for the rest of my life.

a new dSLR! Whoopie!

Did I need it? Uh… what, exactly does ‘need’ have to do with it? The Canon had a great run, fantastic camera, and after 10k+ photos it’s been passed on to a wonderful new home where it’ll be appreciated.

But I thought it’d be nice to not have to carry around multiple cameras to get video. And we do a lot of night shooting, so not having vibration control has been a major PIA. Plus this one’s got a great tilt screen so when I’m holding it above my head shooting into a crowd I have an idea of what it’s looking at…

Need? No. But after all the craziness with the sale after all the drawn out stress of closing the business and the transition, I decided I’d earned a new toy.

And, apparently, Pratch thought he did too:

It seems that every kid, every where, just loves to play with boxes.

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Pratchett stole a Saints clapper and went to town on it pre-game on Sunday. I can’t say he gives a damn about football, but he’s a big fan of anything that makes noise. After the Herculean task of hauling the thing up to his veranda, he got pissy. He thought it worked like a bell and when he couldn’t get it to work he decided to break it instead.

Still. How ’bout dem 6-0 Saints!?

They’re well known for breaking our hearts, but the feeling around here is optimistic. Half the city’s hoarse from screaming on Sunday, and it’s only going to get more intense.

Ali came home with roomie Elizabeth for LSU’s Fall Holiday, which ran from Wednesday afternoon through the weekend. All of which would’ve been much more fun if they weren’t both totally sick- Ali with a sinus infection/cold, Elizabeth with allergies/cold and needing a little TLC.

Which, in this case, consisted of a combination of being taken out to eat, home cooked meals, and sleep. Upon their arrival, she used what little voice she had to croak out a pitiful plea for Craig and Kimmie’s food. While there she took out her prescription, and I just couldn’t stop laughing:

I mean, really. Even the freaking pill bottles are in the school colors? I’ll have to check with my cousin Carolyn- a foamingly rabid UGA alum who was not exactly thrilled at Alison’s school choice- to see if this sort of detailed brainwashing is SOP for these southern schools.

At any rate, several requests were made for food to be brought back to LSU- Charlie’s special chicken, a tray of fancy-schmancy mac n’ cheese and chocolate chip cookies.

The ‘homemade’ part was stressed. Repeatedly. So how do you resist that one? You don’t. In the midst of preparations I discovered that Pratchett loves cheese.

Loves? Adores. Worships. To get his greedy talons on some, he will actually ‘fly’ over from his cage (poor lad. It’s more like semi-controlled falling, but he didn’t seem to care if there was the potential for some cheesy goodness to ease his rough landing).

Unfortunately, I also discovered that I have my grandmother’s hoarding/feeding/stockpiling genes. Every time I visited her while I was in school she sent me home with food, which I appreciated, but also started to wonder if she thought the only grocery store in existence was the one in her neighborhood. In the end, the girls were packed up with loads of food- cold cuts, chips, Special K bars, boxes of tissues, juice, only slightly parrot-nibbled mac n’ cheese, etc, and sent off after one last meal out, at Cafe Atchafalaya.

I do despair of ever getting a normal photo of them together. Here they are, ‘sizzling’ in Atchafalaya’s huge frying pan.

Then they were off, with a stop at The House of Shock. I was a little worried about that one- two years running Alison went with friends who were got scared just by the freakshow outside that they were sobbing and quit before they even got inside the building.

For the uninitatied, here’s the House of Shock, named by the Travel Channel as the most extreme Haunted House in the US:

(If you don’t have the patience to sit through it, skip to the 3:58 mark and you’ll know everything you need to about why I was worried.)

Needless to say, Alison loves it and can’t wait to go every year, but Elizabeth is a sweet, semi-sheltered religious sort of girl. In fact, they were leaving a day early so she could go home to practice for a play her church is putting on- you can see why I just wasn’t sure how this would go over.

I have yet to hear just how it went, but hey,they’re still coming for Voodoo Fest later this month, so it couldn’t have scared her off too much, right?

“And very tasty, might I add,” said Pratchett.

I STILL haven’t explained the mania that I’m gripped by at the moment, but I’ll try to get into that this afternoon. For now, a few pics of the pets helping me out.

Here’s Jack, playing his favorite game- throw everything on the floor and have the human retrieve it.

I’d read that giving a grey a chicken leg with a little meat on it is a fine thing to do- they like it, it’s a new texture, and unlike with dogs, the cooked bones won’t hurt them.

So Pratchett took it in his talon and sort of poked at it, but he looked rather conflicted. I had to wonder if he sensed he was literally picking over a distant relative’s bones.

When I extended my hand to him, Pratch dropped it right way before washing out his mouth and returning to his vegetarian ways.

Okay, so our last Sennie didn’t work out so well. Poor Dewey.

But Pratchett’s breeder Tracy had her annual throw-down and show last weekend, and I had to go see her to say hey and pick up some bird toys. It was only being polite, really.

The funny part is that Charlie made me promise not to come home with another bird. And I yanked his chain, like, “oh…I can’t promise, you know how it is…” But truthfully, I had zero intention of doing any such thing. No, seriously.

See, my plan has been that once there are fewer other pets around (hopefully many many years down the road -May Kassie and Sammy live forever and ever, Amen) I’ll adopt somebody from a rescue. These little guys live so long and there are so many have horror stories you wouldn’t believe. I’ve always had pound-puppies and street cats- why would winged friends be any different?

Good plan, right? A socially conscious and well reasoned plan?

Yeah. That’s all well and good until a tiny 14 week-old green fluffball runs up your arm and start literally cooing in your ear. Then seals the deal by willfully entangling himself in your hair.

So…it looks like we’re going to try this thing again. Pratchett’s not thrilled, but he’s cultivating his own little patch of denial. They’re living in separate cages in opposite sides of the house, so he just pretends the little one doesn’t exist.

He/she (too young to sex) is as yet nameless. This is the part I’m bad at, but we’re working on it. I even googled ‘pet names,’ figuring there’d be something interesting- sure enough, there are multiple out there sites to assist the naming-disabled. This one even has a species selection guide, but their bird names are particularly trite, so we’re going to go it on our own.

Any suggestions are welcome, and we’ll see how it goes!

You know, you try your best. You try to raise ‘em right. You love them, teach them, and send them out into the world, hoping they’ll make the right choices.

And then they break your heart.

:::sigh:::

So the other night I was in the kitchen working on dinner and flipped the radio on. I’m an NPR junkie, but Alison’d had it tuned to one of her stations. It was getting late, and I didn’t bother to fiddle with it; it was just supposed to be background noise after all.

And then, like in some terrible, mullet & silicone-filled horror movie, things…changed. Apparently after 7 the station switches over to some sort of light n’ easy format: Air Supply, Bee Gees, Bette Middler, you know the type. But I was up to my elbows in frying beef, and tuned it out. How many parents say that? “Oh, I thought it was harmless, I didn’t think anything of it…” Until Kenny Rogers came on. I groaned, but still didn’t grasp the seriousness of the situation.

Pratchett started whistling, very excited. I won’t say he was dancing, but he was running back and forth across the top of his cage. He even puffed up with his wings curled around him in a semi-aroused stance. It seemed my little boy had experienced his first rush of sexual excitement.

For damned Kenny Rogers.

God, where did I go wrong?

I grabbed the pocket Canon, hoping to document this shocking behavior and show it to him later, maybe do a little “Scared Straight” act. “This is your brain on Kenny Rogers” kind of thing. But he was so worked up he lunged at the camera, grabbing the case and pulling the protective cover off the inside of the lens. See what being hopped up on the Gambler’ll make you do?

But it was too late, the moment had passed and all that was left was the awkwardness.

It immediately made me think of the Kathy & Mo show from a decade ago & a skit called “Kenny and the Prostitute.” I searched everywhere but just couldn’t find it online anywhere. I remembered that I had the dvd and did the po’ man’s copy- set my sad and newly injured camera to tape it while it played on the computer. It’s no longer focusing correctly, thanks to Pratchett’s job, but it’s the audio that’s the important bit anyway:
(youTube Link here)

I laughed my ass off when I first saw this, because it touched such a nerve. (Particularly the look she gives at the 4:30 mark, where it’s especially clear that if she actually had to live with Kenny, one of them would have to die.)

You see, I know all too well the pain of growing up in a Kenny Rogers affected household. My mother wasn’t a big music fan- she only had a handful of cassettes, all greatest hits collections: Kenny Rogers, obviously. Anne Murray. Neil Diamond. Barry Manilow. And yes, even Helen Reddy.

Bizarrely sappy, every one- particularly strange since my mother was neither a romantic nor an idealist. In retrospect, her musical tastes were so out of character that I wonder if it wasn’t a cry for help that I was too young to understand. Honestly, my siblings and I wondered if we weren’t a product of immaculate conception, because we’d never seen anyone so seemingly disinterested in the opposite sex- although her uber-nasty divorce might’ve been the very thing that made her decide that fantasy Kenny was the only kind of guy she could be bothered with, and since his songs are about as realistic as the Tooth Fairy, the odds of his doppelganger coming along and sweeping her off her feet were slim.

But in the end I can hardly be blamed for that metalhead phase in high school, can I? And the fact that I’m lactose intolerant after all being force-fed all that cheeze can hardly be a surprise…

So now we’ve come full circle, and Kenny’s claimed a new victim. Of all the things you thought could never happen to one of your own…

Through Best in Flock,I learned that Irene Pepperberg’s Alex Foundation has been tapped for a matching gift offer- any donation of $50 or more will be generously matched by Andy Sterner.

Back when I was doing research into whether or not to become a parrotperson I’d learned about Dr. Pepperberg’s amazing work with Alex, and now Griffin and Wort. After Alex’s death in 2007, I was shocked to learn (through her book Alex & Me) that despite being a world renowned researcher, she still has to scrape and beg for money.

Partially, that’s because there’s never enough money to go around, but it’s also because many scientists don’t consider her work important enough to be taken seriously, which makes me a little insane, honestly. How many millions of hours have been spent trying to understand how animals’ brains work, and here we have one that can actually communicate and because it’s in a form they’re not accoustomed to (ie, not a primate) it doesn’t count? Talk about hubris.

Anyway, end editorial. If you don’t know about Alex, check it out. I think you’ll be surprised.

Exerpt from Pepperberg’s book here.

Donate to the Foundation here.

And another great, but unembedable video here.