We are all Irish today

We have green eggs (but no ham).

We have green food for parrots.

 Green treats for everybody.

I refuse to turn my whole wheat Irish soda bread green; it wouldn't match the plate.

And we don't need to wear green hats or scarves because we are growing moss.

This morning's comment from the bird room

BAD DAWG! NO! Ah ha ha ha ha!

Verbless Vendsday

Words: 10 cents per dozen.

Neighborhood farmers' market

That's about what I get per day from the everbearing strawberry plants in my front garden. The peas are not ready, everything being late this year due to the cold weather, so a trip to the neighborhood farmers' market was in order.

 I bought some:

and shared them with

They didn't like the camera.

I shared some:

with:

Food critic.

Food as entertainment

Wild parrots like to descend on a tree full of ripe fruit, take one bite from a piece and hop to the next piece of fruit, like those cartoons you see of ladies taking one bite from each chocolate in a large box, never eating a whole candy but ruining the box for everyone else. At home, there's nothing Peaches and Pita like more than to take one bite out of a chunk of apple and fling the rest to the floor.

But super-brain here (moi) can outsmart them by impaling an apple on a hanging rod and spicing it up with dabs of peanut butter inserted in holes carved out with the tip of a vegetable peeler. Work for your food, birdies!

Hang the apple in the cage and here's the result. Yes, half the apple fell to the bottom of the cage but the birds had a good, messy time.

Talk Like a Pirate Day

Peaches the Greencheek Amazon talks about TLP Day with the help of  Pita (inside the cage).

It's also a good day to click a "Like" at the Pedigree site on Facebook.* The notice says: January 1, 2010 through December 31, 2010, for every Fan or Like of The PEDIGREE® Adoption Drive at facebook.com, PEDIGREE® Brand will donate 8 oz. of PEDIGREE® Brand Dry Food for Dogs to animal shelters selected by PEDIGREE® Brand, up to a total of 2 million lbs. of food, the equivalent of one bowl of food for each of the estimated four million dogs that wind up in shelters and breed rescue organizations each year. Facebook is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc.

*The one thing I didn't do was click the "Get Started" bar which would allow Pedigree to access all my Facebook information and contacts.

From farm house to screaming madhouse

I don’t spend the day waiting by the front door with leash, clicker and treats in case someone stops by so that the dogs and I can practice greeting visitors calmly. When I know someone is coming, rarely am I organized enough to get one dog confined and the other at the door. Then there’s the hard part—training the visitor to ignore the dog and wait for me to finish clicking and treating, all of which has to be explained in the space of a nano-second over the din of one dog setting off the other, even if the other is outside, which sets off the parrots screaming like six teenagers being tortured by having their iphones snatched away.

It just doesn’t work very well.

Alanis is the culprit who starts barking and won’t stop. Miró will bark a couple of times but he prefers to stand up on his back legs and give big aire-waves. If you happen to be within reach of the paws, so much the better. It is not easy to practice “sit” when you have to shout over the noise of barking and parrot-screaming, especially when your goal is to sound calm.

Being a dutiful student, I try. Today my son came home with two friends. Naturally they headed for the kitchen where treats and clicker happened to be still on the counter after the morning’s class, along with objects too numerous to name. I hustled Alanis outside and attempted to capture Miró’s attention.

Trainers tell you that you have to be more interesting than whatever else the dog is looking at. I am not very interesting, even with cheese in my hand. In the midst of screaming chaos and three young men investigating a food cupboard, I sustained new scratches on my arms and Miró managed one sit and one bow. Is that success or what?
If you turn the volume to max, you'll get the merest glimmer of the real noise.

the night after the crawling under the house incident

A few minutes ago, the Amazons were swearing at full volume, then yelling, “Quiet! Stop it!” equally loudly. The cockatiels were whistling, dogs barking. And one banty chicken was going wraaaak—ha-ha-ha.

All except the dogs and myself are in the mud room. Years ago I swore I’d never keep a chicken in the house. But extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary solutions. It’s risky putting an outdoor chicken in a room with parrots but they have no contact, not even from my touching one cage then another without washing my hands. That’s the best I can do right now. And Edsel is really, really cute with her big eyes. I’ve been picking her up so many times to move her from place to place that she’s getting used to being handled.

The circumstances are actually very ordinary. The Polish hens are picking intensely and viciously on Edsel because she is so tiny. They do the ordinary “get outta my way and off my perch” pecking at placid Muffin but she is large enough to sort things out.

Later in the evening I’ll try again to put Edsel in the coop and see if they can stand it. But I think I need two banty Moderns, because Edsel needs back-up.

greatest accomplishment of 2008

We’re talking only one day so far. No big deal, you might say; but I’ve spent the weekend finishing up procrastinated projects, including clipping and bathing one of the dogs without setting up the grooming table, moving the last ten or twelve boxes of books from the garage to the downstairs, and today trimming Peaches’ beak which is the most disliked of many dreary tasks.

Most parrots keep their beaks trimmed by chewing on toys, scraping on perches provided for the purpose, and eating. In the past few years, none of that has worked for Peaches the Amazon. I wrap him in a towel and he swears, struggles, and bites at the towel while I try to maneuver various clipping instruments to take off just the tip. When he needs a major trim, I take him to a vet. Last summer I saw a vet use a cuticle clipper to trim and shape his beak perfectly, so that’s what I tried this time. Because the blade is small and curved, you can clip off bits on each side of the beak’s tip, keeping it pointed and symmetrical. A major load of guilt is now gone, with the trimming followed by major cleaning of cages.


But that is not the big accomplishment. Even the fancy new chicken house (stay tuned for that) is not the big accomplishment.

The big accomplishment is rearranging the garage and putting my car inside. Other than a few weeks in Portland when I put my car in the garage before using it for storage, I have never used a garage for storing a car. In some houses, this was because the birds lived in the garage and in some there was simply no room. In this house, however, the birds live in the mud/laundry room, much to the dogs’ delight because they can nose around for dropped food every time they go in and out of the house. With the books out of the garage and many of the packing boxes flattened and put away, I drove my car inside and pressed the button for the door to roll shut. So now there’s a dark red Saturn LW2 taking up what was this nice, big empty space.

I don’t know if I like having a car in the garage; it makes the garage smell like car. This does not seem healthy for the food, artwork, wrapping paper, portfolios, camping equipment, tools, gardening equipment, extra table linens, and many other items stored there. Will they all wind up smelling like car exhaust?

Moving day(s)

There's no such thing as moving day. It's moving weeks, the weeks of packing and increasing aches and mental confusion while you forget what day it is. If it means one day, is it moving out day or moving in day?

This is moving out day after weeks of packing days. The only good thing about packing is that you have to finish off all the ice cream and the only good thing about unpacking is that you find the liquor bottles (unless you finished them off while packing in the interest of streamlining the operation).

Dogs hate packing, all that running around the house and swearing. They try to follow the people--by walking in front and glancing back, of course--and just get yelled at. Their bed--yours--gets heaped with boxes and the floor beds they normally disdain get moved so they never know where they'll sleep next. Then this crowd of men comes to the house and takes away all the boxes and the dogs have to spend the day in their crates instead of being able to lead the running back and forth. My dogs should be expert movers by now, considering this is the fourth--I think it's the fourth--time in seven years.

The cockatiels' cage is now sitting on the floor of the bird room because I took away their cage stand, which was a large box. Imagine my joy when I discovered another box inside that one. If you haven't moved lately, you might not be able to imagine it. Soon the two Amazon parrots will be cowed and grumpy because they'll be inside their carriers. Even Matilda the snake is probably as grumpy as a snake can feel because she's inside a small carrier. Or maybe she finds it cozy?

You can be damn sure I'm grumpy. Soon I'll lose my internet connection and will be without it for at least 36 hours. Some people rely on cell phones to keep in contact; I could happily do without a phone for days. But going without email makes me shudder.