This weekend as Blake shed feathers I gave the occasional one to Reader--just contour feathers, and a racing stripe feather. No really good ones--crest or tail--fell out, and that's fine because I'm possessive of them. But just now as he crawled down from my shoulder across my lap to his box (next to my legs on the recliner's footrest), a feather turned in a nearly-out way from the base of his tail. On the pretext of tugging his tail in a teasing way, I have this feather now in my paw. It's from his underside, and his entire hindquarters from drumsticks to tail is meant to incubate eggs. Almost a third of this feather is fluff while the outer is contour. The fluff is so soft I cannot stand it. I should make Increase a baby blanket with cockatiel fluff, except that it doesn't keep its loft the way goosedown does. I do know I'm a little insane, but he really is irresistible.
I am home because the rain that made the drive home unpleasant that turned to snow overnight caused some sort of short, putting out Dot Org's phone lines and server connection. No phones, no email, no files. I finished my book, tidied my desk, looked at everyone else's tidied desk, discovered no photocopying jobs, and fled.
John O'Hara's book reminded me more of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street or Babbitt than it did of F. Scott Fitzgerald, to whom I had seen him compared. Better, because shorter, than Main Street. I'm glad I knew the micro-short-story (here's a version by W. Somerset Maugham), though the version I knew emphasized that the distance fled was nearly impossible to cover in one day.