Parrot update

It is with great sadness that I am reporting my favorite companion of 29 years has passed on to better places. Hopefully she is now flying (well, actually walking, she never REALLY liked to fly) all over the place and getting into all kinds of mischief. At least now she can chew to her heart's content, knowing I won't be there to take away her latest discovery.

I used to give her the run of the house when I went to work. Normally she would stay on or around her cage. If she wandered, there was very little evidence of it...until.. the time she ate a whole bag of almonds...they were in the shells, on the kitchen counter where she shouldn't have been (since she never liked to fly). She must have had a grand time munching away on about 4-5 pounds of those almonds... Then there was the time she decided the bag of lemons was a great delicacy. I came home from work and found just an empty plastic bag and lots of lemon juice all over the kitchen table.

The funniest time that she got in trouble was when I came home from work and found a pile of splintered wood on the sofa table in the living room. It took me a few days to finally figure out what that pile of splintered wood was.... Apparently, I had left a wooden spoon on the sofa table (no...don't ask...) and when Zardoz was feeling a little rambunctious, she got on the table and completely destroyed the spoon. All that was left of the spoon was a pile of splinters. Never did find the rest of the spoon. It was shortly after that episode and more specifically when she ate half of my window sill that I decided giving her the run of the house was not a great thing..more for me than for her...

She loved to play with toys, she loved to fight with paper towels, and overall, she just loved to have fun. I would come home from work tired, and she would be sitting on her perch waiting for me to let her out. If she did not get out, she would hang upside down on the cage and spin her head around like she was going to spin it off... I usually laughed so hard that I had to let her out of the cage. She loved to play a lot.

She also loved her food. She was not overweight, but she LOVED carrots, so much so that one day, when I opened the refrigerator door and told her I was going for carrots, that she got so excited, she fell off the couch. Again, I couldn't stop laughing. She would do almost anything for carrots, corn, chicken (she ALWAYS KNEW when I was cooking chicken) and french fries. Well, she loved loads of other stuff too, and if what you were eating wasn't shared with her...watch out. She used to grab my juice glass from my mouth and pull it over to her so she could drink juice from my cup. She would not let you take the cup back until she had her fill, or you gave her a cup of her own juice to drink.

She was a real character, and will be missed by many. In the last 6 years she has traveled through more than 30 states in this great Union of ours, and she has entertained many people with her silly antics. She cannot be replaced, but her memory will always bring a smile.

Since I always thought she would live forever, I did not take too many pictures of her. I will continue to dig through my old photographs and periodically post the pictures I find. She enriched my life and I am glad that she is now in a more comfortable place.

Until tomorrow...