Posted by Zoom! on November 26, 2010, at 12:32 pm |
Blah. I’m still sick. The animals are all wondering why I don’t talk to them anymore. It’s because I lost my voice. First it got husky and sexy, and then it turned squeaky with missing parts, and then it disappeared altogether. I think it’s from all the coughing.
I think I’m on the mend though, because I’m not wearing my pajamas anymore. That’s a very good sign. And I’m not drinking out of my sick mug anymore.
Big news in the career department!
Oboe (the littlest lovebird) and I are going into showbiz! I’ve started teaching him tricks, and we’re going to develop a routine and I’m going to get him a little top hat and a cane and then we’re heading out into the world in search of fame and fortune. We’ve talked about it a lot, and we know we’ll have to start at the bottom, probably doing kids’ birthday parties and so on. But eventually we’ll get our big break (I have connections) and then the rest, as they say, will be history.
Here are the tricks Oboe has mastered so far:
1. Coming when he’s called (if he feels like it)
2. Kissing me when I say “kiss me.”
Posted by Zoom! on November 24, 2010, at 1:02 pm |
Re-reading my last post, I was reminded of that blogging book, Nobody Cares What You Had for Lunch. Do you think I should write a book entitled Nobody Cares What Your Bird Had for Breakfast?
Posted by Zoom! on November 24, 2010, at 11:57 am |
First I was sick for a couple of days, then GC got sick, then I got sick again. Right now we’re both sick.
Because I’m sick, I’ve been laying low and not doing too much. We did go to the last Ottawa Parrot Club meeting on Sunday. They’re putting the club on ice, at least temporarily, because most of the membership is too busy to take on any work on behalf of the Club. GC and I volunteered to write/edit/produce the monthly newsletter, but they needed six volunteers in total (including roles like president and treasurer) and they only got five.
So sad that the club had to end (after 30 years of existence!) the week after we got our parrot. But we did make a few good contacts. And I got to hold a macaw named Oliver, which was fun. He’s very big and he stood on my arm with one leg while waving at his mom with the other. Apparently that wave means “Get me off of here,” so I guess he didn’t enjoy our encounter as much as I did.
We also met a really funny little Lesser-Crested Cockatoo named Ellis. He’s only allowed one-eighth of a potato chip per day, but it was a pot luck dinner and most people at our table had potato chips on their plates, so he ran all over the table begging for potato chips. It sounds obnoxious, but it was really very charming.
I’ve been cooking and baking for my birds. I made a birdie bread that has pumpkin, sunflower seeds, peanuts, cranberries, raisins, and all kinds of other yummy stuff in it. Kazoo won’t touch it, but the lovebirds love it. That’s because I gave the lovebirds lots of different kinds of food when they were babies, so they’re very open to new foods. Kazoo has always just eaten bird food pellets and peanuts, so he looks at everything else with suspicion, like he thinks I’m trying to poison him.
I’ve started bringing him into the kitchen with me when I cook, so he can be part of the process and see what I’m doing. He sits on his play stand beside me. I tell him what everything is as I prepare it. I sample bits and offer him bits, which he refuses to take.
Last night we invited him to join us at the table for dinner. He sat on his play stand. I served pizza for us, birdie pizza for the birds, and tuna fish for Duncan. Kazoo didn’t eat his pizza, but he picked a peanut off it, so that’s a good start.
This is breakfast for the birds today: snowpeas, mango, pumpkin seeds, almonds, blueberries, bird bread, broccoli, carrots and leftover pizza. I’m such a good mama bird! (But I’ve warned them not get too used to the home cooking, because it’s probably just a phase I’m going through.)
Posted by Zoom! on November 23, 2010, at 10:49 am |
A fellow traveler from the ancient past resurfaced the other day. She happened to stumble across my blog, and read a story in which she recognized herself. So she emailed me and asked who I was. We’ve been corresponding and catching up ever since.
Today she sent me a collage of photographs she took of me and my son’s father (before we even had a son) at a party on Holland Avenue about thirty years ago. You can click on the image (twice, even) to make it bigger.
I actually remember a couple of things about that party.
1) There was a wicked punch which got wickeder as the night went on and people kept pouring bottles of booze into it.
2) Someone wandered in off the street and was sniffing glue, which was widely regarded as the lowest rung of the drug-using hierarchy back then, which made us all feel relatively virtuous about our own vices.
3)John and I crashed there overnight, and when we woke up the next morning, someone was peeing in John’s shoe.
I don’t miss those days, but I have to say I looked pretty good in these pictures, all things considered.
Posted by Zoom! on November 22, 2010, at 9:40 am |
You know what I’m not good at? Exercising authority. For example, when GC and I are volunteering in the art program with the kids, I can’t tell a kid to stop jabbing his buddy with his pencil and focus on his work. I can only suggest it. I can give him reasons why jabbing isn’t good and focusing is. But I can’t bring myself to actually tell him what to do.
It was the same thing with my own son when I was raising him. I rarely ordered him to do anything. I suggested, and he negotiated. Fortunately for me, he was a pretty easy-going kid who didn’t take outrageous advantage of me. But I remember a birthday party where the kids were bouncing off the walls, all fired up on cake and icing, and I was gently suggesting that they not jump on the couch and not climb on top of the fridge. It turned out they weren’t nearly as suggestible as my son. They didn’t get off the fridge until they either felt like it or their mothers arrived and physically dragged them off.
I see the same pattern emerging with Kazoo, the double yellow-headed Amazon parrot. All the books – and even some readers of this blog – have said it’s very important in the early days to establish my dominance, so that both Kazoo and I understand that I’m the boss. So far (we’re still in the so-called honeymoon period, so this could change) Kazoo seems like a remarkably mellow and laid-back bird. So it should be easy to assert my dominance over him, right?
For birds, dominance is closely related to height, so I have the advantage there – I’m quite a bit taller than him. But he spends most of his time on top of his cage, which makes him quite a bit taller than me. I tried putting his perch on the coffee table, but he kept flying back to the top of his cage. So I ended up (after a brief and half-hearted power struggle) deciding that if it was that important to him, he could stay on top of his cage. After all, he feels safer there, and he needs to be a lot higher than Duncan.
(Speaking of flying, it looks like a major effort lifting that big body into the air and flapping those wings, so he doesn’t do a whole lot of it.)
The only other arena where we struggle for dominance is the top of the bookcase. He likes it. It’s about two feet from the top of his cage, so he flies there about twenty times a day. I don’t want him there, because he eats the bookcase and poops on it. He also nibbles on the birdhouse that contains my grandfather’s ashes, and shows some interest in eating that Dwarf. So I remove him from the top of the bookcase about twenty times a day. It will be interesting to see which of us gives in first. And it’ll be interesting to see what happens when his true colours emerge, after the honeymoon period ends.
I just hope that when he seizes the reins of power, he doesn’t boot me and Duncan out onto the streets.
Posted by Zoom! on November 18, 2010, at 9:00 am |
Yesterday I was sick. It hit me very suddenly at 10:30 in the morning. I spent the day in my pajamas on the couch, trying not to throw up. I feel marginally better today.
In the afternoon I got an email from that job I’ve been after – the one where I’ve been taking all those tests on writing and situational judgment and so on – with an attachment named failure.doc. I failed one of the last three tests I wrote. I got 72.5% on writing promotional materials, 91% on editing, and 57% on Planning, Organizing and Monitoring Results. A pass is 70%. I was pretty miserable for awhile after that. I’ve been in the process of trying to get that job since the springtime. I’m starting to wonder if I’m unemployable. I wish I could afford to retire.
On the bright side, I cranked out the last of my 50,000 words last night and hit my National Novel Writing Month target on November 17th, one day ahead of last year. I’m going to keep writing for the rest of the month.
In other news, remember last week I blogged about one-room schoolhouses? Well the editor of the book Perseverance, Pranks and Pride – Tales of the One-Room Schoolhouse, left a comment on that post, along with a link to the book’s website. So Deb, Bonnie, Grace, Mudmama and Techwood, and anybody else with an interest in the Ottawa Valley’s schoolhouses, check it out. (You can see a picture of the schoolhouse my family moved into when I was 10 years old here. We’re S.S. #5 Fitzroy.)
What else? The new parrot likes GC better than he likes me. But Sweet Little Oboe still loves me best. You can see little animated hearts bursting out of his chest when I walk into the room. Also, I’ve discovered that all the birds love pomegranate seeds, but somehow they get the juice on everything, including the walls. And it stains.
Posted by Zoom! on November 17, 2010, at 10:06 am |
Did you read this appalling story in today’s Citizen? It’s about a young woman named Stacy Bonds who was taken into police custody for no good reason, while walking home one night in 2008. She was essentially seized off the streets of Ottawa while doing nothing wrong. While in police custody, she was physically assaulted (violently kneed in the back, hair pulled, and knocked to the ground with a riot shield) while a male police officer cut off her shirt and bra for no apparent reason, in the presence of several other male officers. She was left in a cell, topless, shoeless, and in soiled pants, for hours.
There’s video evidence showing what they did to her, and showing that she was peaceful, cooperative and sober. There doesn’t appear to be another side to this. It’s just police brutality, plain and simple. It’s an absolutely disgraceful abuse of power and a flagrant violation of a young black woman’s human rights.
The officer who cut off her shirt and bra, Steve Desjourdy, has a history. Days before this incident took place, he kicked and tasered another female prisoner in the cell block. He pleaded guilty and was demoted for three months.
Demoted for three months?? Why didn’t they fire the creep?
To Chief Vern White’s credit, he doesn’t turn a blind eye; he launches an investigation. But then what? The investigative process seems to greatly favour the officer over the victim, and even if the officer is found guilty, the punishment is usually just a symbolic slap on the wrist, like a temporary demotion. They’re almost never fired.
Being a police officer comes with a lot of power. If you discover you’ve entrusted that power to the wrong kind of person, you have to take it back – the gun, the badge, the uniform, and especially the right to seize people off the streets, hold them captive, strip them naked and assault them.
Every time I hear another one of these accounts of violent, abusive, misogynist creeps on the Ottawa police force, my skin crawls. I’m so tired of hearing that each one is just a bad apple. If you find a bad apple, you throw it out – you don’t put it aside for a few months and then throw it back in with the others.
Posted by Zoom! on November 16, 2010, at 11:19 am |
Some of the things I’ve been doing lately:
Bus Stop, by Claudia Urbach
1) Timeraisers on Saturday night. I wasn’t permitted to bid, since I won art last year (seen here, entitled Bus Stop, by Claudia Urbach). GC bid on four pieces but didn’t win any. We were disappointed but we cheered ourselves up by reminding ourselves that we’ve actually never won, but we’ve always ended up with art anyway. That’s because a winner doesn’t follow through on their volunteer commitment, so we get called later in the year and offered the chance to take their place. It was an all-round good evening and we found out about some interesting organizations to volunteer for, including a hospice care organization and a stay-in-school initiative.
2) We continue to volunteer for Christie Lake Kids on Monday evenings. CLK provides recreational programming for at-risk kids. We work in the art program with the teenagers. It’s interesting how contagious their moods can be. Sometimes they’re all focused and productive, other times they’re bouncing off the walls and pushing each others buttons. Last night – and I’m putting this diplomatically – was not one of the better nights. We had four adults for eight kids, and it still didn’t seem like enough. I found myself watching the clock and fantasizing about the bottle of wine waiting at home for us. On the bright side, the more I get to know these kids, the more I like them, even when they’re being cranky and uncooperative or downright obnoxious. This surprises me.
3) Yesterday was the half-way point in National Novel-Writing Month. I’m going to hit the target – 50,000 words – today or tomorrow. I think I’ll keep going to the end of the month. It may not be good, but at least it’ll be long.
4) Eating butterscotch pudding.
5) Reading that crazy book about the crazy man-hunting Siberian tiger.
6) Trying to teach Kazoo how to say peek-a-boo. I stand in front of him and cover my face and then uncover it and shout Peek-a-boo, over and over and over again, while he looks at me like I’m mildly retarded.
7) Aly won the fruit contest!
That’s about it. I hope life is good for you too! I’m going to step outside now and enjoy the last sunny day for awhile.
Posted by Zoom! on November 13, 2010, at 6:24 pm |
Here’s Kazoo! I haven’t been able to get any good pictures of him yet because he’s still a little shy, and he hangs out way up there near the ceiling. (He’s on a perch on top of his cage.)
His cage is huge. I remembered it was big, but holy guacamole! It looks a lot more massive in my little living room than it did in their gigantic kitchen. He also came with a parrot stand and a box of toys and food, and an even bigger outdoor cage that they’ll deliver in the Spring. He’s got more stuff than a baby!
So about Kazoo. He arrived in a cat carrier, squawking up a storm. After his people left, he continued to talk for awhile. Mostly he said “Allo Coco!” in a hundred different ways. High-pitched, low-pitched, evil, sexy, etc. I think he might have said some other stuff in French that I couldn’t quite make out. Or maybe he’s got his own language – he mutters to himself quite a bit.
When Duncan made an appearance, Kazoo mostly stopped talking and the two of them stared at each other. Kazoo’s pupils were flashing big and small, big and small, big and small (it’s called pinning, and I read that it can indicate aggression, excitement, or great interest). Duncan’s pupils got big and round and stayed that way.
Duncan can tell that Kazoo is not a stalkable bird. He knows he’s out of his league. So Duncan’s curled up with me on the couch right now and not paying much attention to Kazoo. Kazoo, on the other hand, looks like he’s trying to sleep with one eye open. I don’t know if he knows anything about cats. He lived with a dog before.
Anyway. This is a lot of bird. Right now I feel a bit sorry for him because I think he’s starting to realize that he’s not in Kansas anymore. He might be feeling homesick. He’s being very, very quiet. (And even when he’s very, very quiet, he still dominates the room.)
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