Blake is eating carrot.
Every batch of buddy chow includes one bag of Bird's Eye Mixed Vegetables (corn, peas, string beans, carrots). He regularly hurls from his dish the stupid beans--although he likes fresh beans from the garden. The carrots, being smaller, he usually eats around without hurling. I know he likes carrots, occasionally raw ones because of their gnawability, absolutely carrot tops when they are available (for the same reason he likes peacock feathers), but I've never seen him eat a piece so meditatively and thoroughly. He usually gets his beta carotene from yam.
I don't suppose I saw a lot of photographs of other black Labs during my dogs' lives, before the web. Photographs of Labs in books are of show dogs who don't wear collars so much that they don't have impressions in the fur around their necks, of posed show dogs, full face or perfect profile, very few snapshots. Of course I easily can distinguish Belle from Sagi from Shadow, not only because of my age and other time clues in the photographs but also because they were so different in body--puppy vs. lean adult vs. chunky all her life and eventually old enough to bearded.
No Lab I've seen on the web has looked like my dogs. I tell personality from movement, and even without that, only in still photographs, no smily, portly Lab bears more than general resemblance to my beloved Shadow. I suppose the fact that she was too chubby to sit straight and instead would sit on one leg (which must have exacerbated her hip problems) is a major clue in any photograph. I miss my dog.
Either I have been better trained to distinguish among dogs than among cockatiels, or cockatiels all look alike (at least all normal gray males). Lots of the photographs I see of other people's cockatiels look a lot like Blake. So seeing my little buddy eat carrot made me wonder if he had been swapped.
Nah. They don't all look alike. This one's ear patches are smaller than Blake's. This bird was supposed to be a cock but it turns out to be a hen. Her yellow is about as bright as it should be but the arrangement of her feathers makes her obviously not Blake, and I link to the photograph instead of the whole page because another photograph on the page is of a bappie with a...ruptured air sac. Simon is 20 and looks a lot like Blake, and though Bo on the same page doesn't look like a hen, she doesn't have enough yellow on her head (especially behind her ear patches) to look like Blake. Blue looks like Blake, but who would allow a parrot to perch on a fan that could cut its toes? though Izzie, on the same page, has more black in his beak. Now, Ivan looks like Blake, including the goofy smile. Oh, I can't continue to go through those pages--so many have such tragic stories of human stupidity, boiling water and Teflon fumes and open doors and careless treading. And several Google searches for permutations of normal gray cockatiel male turn up "lost" advertisements which is enough for me today.
It bears repeating that no matter their color, all cockatiels--all the healthy ones, I suppose, anyway--smell really good, which dogs don't; and naturally Blake smells the best. This I affirm being intimately acquainted only with Percy otherwise. When we adopted Blake one of the first things I did was sniff him, and the scent almost made me cry. It had been less than a month since Percy died, and I painfully missed that smell.
Lastly, you can tell I'm a sicko because I think these little dudes are cute.
(It helps to know that we emptied the kitchen the last weekend in February: appliances, counters, cabinets, all out. The room was empty for a day, and is now full of ladder and shop vac and various tools and bits of lumber.)
I emptied the two kitchen closets, bringing some stuff, like trail mix and the popcorn popper, downstairs to the temporary batterie de cuisine, and stacking most things in the sunroom to keep the dishwasher company. We need to get acrylic sealer for the shelves, which are removable for only one closet. The other will be a cramped job.
RDC cracked the window removing it from its frame Saturday, so today I brought it and another window, broken in other circumstances, to the...window fixing place. He will finish replacing the window framing on Wednesday.
This is a large-item pick-up week, so I brought out the countertops, but ony the countertops. RDC has to cut down the old cupboards with the Sawzall to make the debris more compact for either large-item or regular trash pick-up. And I still haven't called the city about the appliances, and when we're done with this we'll probably have enough paint cans to warrant a hazardous materials pick-up as well. The environment lurvs us.
The cabinet people say that the cabinets can be hung over the holes, since they are nibbles mostly, rather than canyons, so we can perhaps begin to paint this weekend. Or at least prime, if we can patch the hole from the fan in the ceiling and spackle the usual dents. And we have an installation date for the cabinets, yippee!