My mother-in-law, DMB, is moving house. Her husband has an African Gray parrot who lets no one but the husband touch him. Taz's cage is enormous and apparently they don't have a travel cage for him, so this morning, DMB used a perch to step him up and bring him out to the car. His flight feathers haven't been trimmed in a long time, and Taz usually doesn't go outside farther than the screened-in porch (this is Florida), so I guess he thought, Hey, freedom! and he flew. Not very far, just across the street (eek!) and over the pond (double eek!) whereupon he got tired and landed (unspeakable eek).
Parrots can't swim.
But this one could flap long enough for neighbors to emerge at DMB's screaming (she can't swim (!!!) and is afraid of water, especially since these artificial lakes in Florida can contain alligators and water moccasins) including the neighbor's guest, who flung off his clothes, dove into the pond, swam out to the bird, and swam back holding him over his head.
Back on shore, Taz announced to his rescuer, "Good job!"
Later, DMB shook her finger at Taz and said, "Just you wait until I tell your daddy what you did!" and Taz whispered, "Uh-oh."
I don't know whether Taz has ever said "good job" before. I know he knew "uh-oh." I love that he can remember and utter contextually correct phrases.
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Blake does not like being got up in the morning. The usual thing is for us to remove his covers, open his door, and say good morning. Occasionally he's ready to come out and will sashay a little out from his sleepy spot to be stepped up. Most often he stays in his sleepy spot having a little morning groom and stretch. While he does this, we get his breakfast--fresh seed and pellet mix, fresh water, heated up buddy chow.
This morning I was downstairs watching the news (an easy habit to have fallen back into with the kitchen in the basement for three months) with my cereal. RDC uncovered Blake, gave him his breakfast, and then came down the back stairs to make coffee. When he went back up with his coffee, he called to me asking if I had the buddy. I leapt up the front stairs and found Blake pacing the landing.
He is probably physically capable of hopping down each step, though the full flight at once might be more exertion than he is used to; but he has never done and might think he can't. (It took him a long time to realize he could hop up and down between the den floor and my study floor.) He is used to yelling when something is Wrong, like being Alone, as here. He usually yells before fluttering down from his cage. He usually yells before coming to the front door to look out at us, if we have been in the front garden too long, or pacing the back landing if we've been in the yard. Maybe this morning the stealth jump was deliberately sneaking because he knows we don't like him wandering and grazing unsupervised. But I prefer to think he was lonely and getting as close to us as he could.
One of the news blurbs was on the national geography bee held yesterday. The final question was "Peshawar, a city in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, has had strategic importance for centuries because of its location near what historic pass?"
I'm quite sure I would have known that even if I hadn't just read The Kite Runner, because the country's been in this little skirmish over there...? So I suppose it was random and earlier questions were harder. What grieved me is that the CNN morning newscaster thought her co-newscaster was ohsointelligent for knowing it was Khyber Pass. She decided to ask him, after he said he sucked at U.S. geography, which five of the state capitals were in cities that begin with A.
This is Dot Org basics and therefore easy: Atlanta, GA (he worked for CNN and didn't get that!); Augusta, ME; Annapolis, MD; Albany, NY; and Austin, TX. After a commercial break a viewer and maybe their own graphics team had noticed that the map in their reveal placed Atlanta in Alabama. But no one seemed to mind that their flag would have had only 48 stars, that the map excluded Alaska and Hawai'i. That's a common thing we have to deal with in our 50-state maps, that the outlying states don't like being shoved into the Gulf of Mexico or wherever is convenient, and maybe it's bad that they're not to scale either.
The new software trainer at Dot Org is a big improvement. He devised a map-generating tool that I guess is handy for people who don't know what state is where. I still think my method is easier and results in better maps, but I have demonstrated it to enough people, even here, who confuse Mississippi and Alabama or New Hampshire and Vermont--though not quite North Dakota and South Dakota--that his text-based rather than my map-based tool is the better choice for them.
I read somewhere sometime about an experiment that concluded that cats really are physically capable of seeing color but that it's an extraneous skill that they have to be trained to. I don't know whether that's true, but I remember the analogy in the report: that humans can learn to knit with their feet, but what's the point?
Today I came into work wearing a violet knit dress and Intern, who is severely color blind, asked what color it was, guessing blue. I compared my skirt to two different books, one navy, one purple, and he guessed that the purple was the darkest when really it was the brightest (to me). I told him about the cat thing, suggesting that when someone razzes him about being color blind he can tell them they're knitting with their feet.
