Happy Hatchdays

The always good and always sweet Starlinka turned 11 years old in June!

Stella turned 21 in April but unlike Adele, she's not going to make anyone cry about it.

And then there were the twins....the terrible, terrible, no longer teenager twins.

Michael Ray and Cathy Jean may have turned 20 years old last month but they certainly didn't get any more mature.

Nonetheless, everyone had a happy hatchday...some just involved more cleanup afterwards than others. :-/

Birdhousing perils

I put up this little birdhouse a year ago...

And when I opened it up to clean it a couple weeks ago, I discovered paper wasps had built a nest in it.

Luckily, paper wasps are not supposed to be aggressive and the queen should be hibernating somewhere else anyway...and the rest of the wasps should have expired by now...but I'm just going to wait for a really, really cold day to remove the nest because I don't want to risk getting stung. Paper wasps are not supposed to return to a used nest the following year so hopefully this spring, once that nest is removed, baby birds will be raised in that house, not baby wasps.

When I was building this particular birdhouse, I had a feeling that that vine running across the roof might be poison ivy so I just carefully worked around it, being very careful not to touch it.

I was hoping it was Virginia creeper but just in case it wasn't, there was no way I was going to touch it. Birds are completely fine rubbing themselves all over every part of the poison ivy plant without any of its effects. They are the ones that eat and disperse the berries (and they find them delicious). The urushiol oil in poison ivy only affects humans. Leaving the vine on the birdhouse would not be a problem for the birds....but it would for me if I touched it.

See this? Those are poison ivy berries. I'm getting pretty good at identifying the stuff since I blistered up so many times last year.

And see this? The red spot on my cheek that Starlinka is checking out (there's also a rash starting on the side of my face....and on my scalp!!!)? Oh, that's poison ivy that has made contact with me somehow. But how when I was so darn careful when I was building that birdhouse?

Well, that was an easy one to figure out...

Who else but Stella Rubella Fullahella, the bird who was into something she shouldn't and she wasn't going to tella.

I had stored the birdhouse in the back room thinking it was out of the way of anybody getting near it but just a couple of unsupervised minutes and Stella had managed to get into the back room to do her house inspection. How else can you explain the weird patches on my cheek, the side of my face, the top of my scalp? Those are all the places that that bird tends to be near when she sits on my shoulder. Oh.....Stella. So many levels of bad with that bird, such talent when it comes to evil.

Well, I got that birdhouse out of my house as soon as I could so I wouldn't continuously get reexposed to the poison ivy oil. Who knows where else Stella had been in those unsupervised few minutes...and what else she had rubbed that urushiol oil off onto...hopefully not absolutely everything. She does get around.

I hung the birdhouse near the road that lines my land in Kansas. If anyone sees the birdhouse and tries to take it down....well, they are in for a surprise because that urushiol oil stays active for at least 3 years. Good for some moral payback if the birdhouse disappears (although I really don't expect that kind of thing to happen) but bad for me because that oil should be all over my house if I know Stella. And it kind of was. I kept breaking out for weeks but eventually whatever Stella smeared around the house dissipated.

You would think that would be it for me and poison ivy for the year but the same thing almost happened again when I put up another birdhouse a week ago.

There were two vines climbing up that tree and without the leaves.....I didn't know if they were grape vines or poison ivy vines or what so I avoided getting near them. I didn't think that much about them until Mary got hold of them and started swinging away like Tarzan. If I didn't get a big case of poison ivy, there still was the possibility of me leaping off the ladder to avoid her and then falling into the creek below.

Surprisingly, we all survived getting that birdhouse up with no mishaps. Whew. I kept Mary and her possibly poisoned mouth away from me on the walk back, got in the car, locked the doors and took off....and so far, I have not broken out in any blisters or rashes.

That sky was beautiful but as I left, what with all my exposure to poison ivy and chiggers and ticks this past summer, I thought it also looked like a big collection of medical cotton balls and swabs.

But still, spectacularly beautiful.

Birdhousing

A year or so ago I started making birdhouses. I still have no idea where or what or when exactly I'm going to build my house on Aussie's Acers (how they spell "acre" on signs in the country) but in the meantime, I've been busy creating my future avian subdivision.

Once a house is built, it has to stay outside (or hidden somewhere indoors) until it moves to its final spot because Stella gets a little too dedicated and critical with her house inspection.

"I think that door needs to be a little wider..."

Here's an example of what results when the housing inspector starts remodeling...

Anyway, the first birdhouse went up about a year ago...

And when I went to check on it last week...

I found out that Stella was right.

That door apparently did need to be widened.

So ugly he's cute, so cute she's...well, you'll find out

Last night I was bringing Violet in the for the night when I saw something move very slowly along the deck railing, almost obscured by the shadow. Creep........creep.......creep.

I watched while he made his way forward and kept watching while he tentatively made an upward turn. I kind of knew what he was but was curious as to why he was moving sooooooooo slow. When his head finally appeared over the rail, he stopped moving and gave me a good long staredown. I was probably the first living thing he had ever seen in his newly hatched life and I know that little baby face of his was hiding true panic. What to do? What to do? He couldn't fly yet because he was still fresh from climbing out of his shell.

So what did he end up doing? He decided to stay put. What did I do? I ran in the house and got the camera. That little bug (for being so ugly) was too cute not to photograph.

And besides, he reminded me of somebody.......

Stella, the bird who apparently is part cicada.

Badness and forgiveness.

Years ago when Wendie's Hammy was a little puppy, Hammy got a nice new bed. Hammy (unknown to Wendie at the time) completely shredded the new bed and then was so tired he had to go take a nap on his..........old bed.

My sister was unimpressed. She said anyone who has lived with a puppy has the exact same photo...

When puppies do something really, really bad, they're still pretty darn cute so you have to forgive them. But when it comes to Stella...

Let's just say I'm not feeling too guilty about her incarceration. Forgiveness for what she did to the tansu is not going to be an instant thing...even when she puts on her cute "I'm semi-sorry" puppy face.

Bad bird. Bad bad baaaaaad bird.

I've talked about how bad Stella can be before (she even has her own page on Wikipedia). That Stella, she is a bad one. What she did this morning was so bad I had to leave the house and drive to Urban to get some yarn therapy. Baaaad.

When I was up there I stopped to watch some geese swimming in the pond.

What good birds. Their thoughts were not about chewing wood or destroying anything.

And when they saw me, they stopped what they were doing and got the heck out.

But that would not be the behavior of Stella. I forgot she was out of her cage this morning (I let her sleep in the medicine cabinet on weekends because she enjoys it so much). The bathroom door was closed to prevent her escape but at some silent point in time, she jimmied the door open. When I heard her giggle, I knew she was proud of something, she was not in the bathroom, and I knew whatever she had done was going to be bad. Stella makes that giggle sound only when she knows she's making good headway in taking something down. I walked into the bedroom to find this (and she was not easily convinced to stop her project!)...

It just made me sick. She knows the bedroom is off limits....I'm taking a breath now because this whole thing still has me sick and stunned...okay, it's not as if the tansu chest is an antique, it's only 90 years old... I did get there in time before the entire thing was taken down...there are such places as furniture restorers and at least I have most of the tansu left to restore...

Oh Stella...I knew when I picked her name I needed something that sounded good when it was yelled because I knew parrots could be very, very bad. And Stella grew into her name very, very fast. I guess you can say she was just hatched baaaad. If I ever live with another parrot, I'm going to consider the name very carefully...something along the lines of "Sweetness N. Light Scaredawood."

Bad.

Bad.

Baaaaaaaaad.

Sometimes when it's just too darn cold...

...flannel sheets are the answer.

"Close the door! You're letting in a draft!"

Brrrrrr...

It's so cold, even nightlights seem warm.

If Stella was a painter and lived in 17th century Italy and painted a self portrait, she could sign it Stella Caravaggia. Ha ha ha.

When I was up in Chicago about 10 days ago, there was a Caravaggio exhibit (the artist known for chiaroscuro, paintings focused on light and shadow). One of the guards on the main floor told me I was not to miss it but when I finally found the gallery, it was the same stuff I had seen when I was a little girl (and I think in the same room!). The guard in that gallery admitted that there was one new painting and pointed to it on the far wall. Well....sometimes you're in the mood and some days you're looking for things that surprise and delight. If I had stopped to read the description of Caravaggio though, he was definitely full of the personality. He would spend a couple weeks on a somber religious painting and then go out and look for a fight. He sure had a lot of Irish in him for being an Italian. The painting on loan was something that I most probably won't see again in my lifetime so I really should have stopped for a full scrutiny...but I was driven to look at other things and besides, I didn't have all day, just part of a day.

Down the hall from the Caravaggio, a dark hall, were 36 of these small busts made by Honore Daumier. Oh my oh my oh my. When I first saw them I thought, who were these guys and what did Daumier have against them???? Surely he wasn't friends with any of them. I learned later that he created these busts as models for political caricatures. The originals he used were modeled in clay but the ones in this glass case were cast in bronze posthumously.

Those faces!

All smug and nasty (I'm curious about the bump on the head of this one).

Looking like characters from a Dickens novel...the evil characters.

I was drawn to one in particular and apparently at least one of these characters did turn out to be someone that Daumier liked, well, I'm assuming he did because the two worked together. This is his friend Charles Philipon, the editor of La Caricature, a French satirical political journal and also the less politically extreme Le Charivari (which was the model for England's Punch magazine). It was hard to take a picture through glass in a very dark hall with no flash....but try to imagine a face with a pleasant expression with a very long and upturned nose. His personality was actually very charming in contrast to everyone else in the case.

In some sort of an odd way, he reminds me of my friend Ken. This little bronze just has that stance of Ken, always looking up. I remember one time attending midnight mass with him at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco one Christmas Eve. That was quite the blend of people in attendance. There were the wealthy, wealthy people and then there were the kids just off the street playing air guitar, the drag queens and of course the full-on Christmas procession pageantry with the dousing of everyone in the aisles with incense (cough cough cough). When mass was over we ran across the street to L'Etoile and drank single-malt scotch to celebrate ourselves and Christmas.

Ken and I met when we worked in a publishing company a long time ago. I was always late, really late getting to work each morning because...I just don't like getting out of bed. Thirty years later it's still an issue. Ha ha ha. However, Ken would do his best to get me to work sort of on time by calling me when he got to work and then asking me if I was awake. I would lie and say yes (I can have lucid telephone conversations when I'm half asleep or even a higher percentage than that). Ken would ask if my eyes were open. I would lie and say yes. He would then ask me what the weather was like. I'd lie and say the sun was out. He would ask if I could go to the window and tell him exactly what I saw. I'd lie and make up something. Then he'd get serious and would ask me a complicated math problem. He would ask something like what 47 times 16 was and then...I'd damn him because those math problems wake you up!

Ken grew up in the south and had a strong Atlanta accent. He studied music at Yale (which is in Connecticut) and is probably the smartest person I have known. Ken's accent however, made it hard for some people to understand him at times. One of my favorite stories was when he had to go get ice for a party when he was at Yale. When he was at the convenience store, he asked for some "ahse." The cashier did not know what he was talking about. I think she answered with an "excuse me?" He repeated his request for some "ahse." I think she replied with another "excuse me" but probably this time with a more frustrated face. Ken repeated his request. She still did not know what he was talking about. I think they volleyed one question followed by the other's question for such a long time that when it was Ken's turn to ask his question again, Ken got so frustrated he just yelled out "AHSE! FROZEN WATER, COMES IN CUBES!"

Ken was a beautifully expressive writer even when it came to professional correspondence. I remember he was having a hard time with a difficult customer and things got so bad that when he sent his final letter, he ended it with "Madam, I refrain from a complimentary closing." Ha ha ha.

He also had a beautiful voice and when I needed to say no to someone at work, I'd borrow him to deliver a baritone "NO."

I think about Ken every Christmas and on the 28th of December because today is Ken's birthday. He would have been...57 I think. Ken passed away three years ago from cancer. We had grown apart for at least five years before his passing because it was so hard to get past his significant other. When I would call, that awful man would answer the phone and try to make me go away by saying that they were preparing dinner, eating dinner, or cleaning up after dinner. There was always an excuse of something being a before, during or after. After a while I just gave up.

I flew out for Ken's memorial in San Francisco and made Michael (who also worked with us) go with me. Michael was not happy about that, mainly because he couldn't stand Ken's partner either. We were the first ones to arrive at the church and positioned ourselves at the very back because we did not want that awful man to see us. When we saw that that awful man had entered the church and was walking up the aisle, Michael and I both (at the exact same time) slid down in the pew and put the programs over our faces. In San Francisco the sun just about never comes out but it did that day and when the light burst through the stained glass windows on that awful man and Michael and me, I knew that was Ken laughing at the three of us.

We found out later that that awful man had another one of his outbursts when Ken's choir had gathered to sing under his window at the hospice. The awful man had gone to Cala to get some groceries and when he came back to find the choir under the window, took out the canned goods and threw them at the choir members until they ran away. I'm sure if I looked for that awful man in that Daumier case, I would find him, front and center.

Ken always made me laugh and was amused and bemused by so many things. I am always drawn to people who can do that and I miss him. People come and go in your life but if you have some good stories, you can introduce your friend to other people even if that friend isn't around anymore. So today I think of Ken, and laugh about the stories of him and his music friends (his friend Harry performed the Nutcracker on STILTS on Japanese TV!) and wish Ken a happy birthday...and I know he hears me because the sun is gloriously bright today. :-)

Stella made her request to Santa...

And just to be sure Santa would know how really bad she was this year, Stella took a big bite out of the linen closet shelf yesterday. Baaaaaad. I'm sure she'll get just what she's worked so hard for... lots and lots of sticks to shred and chew.

It's getting cold...

...so Stella has started to spend some time on her heat seat (I just got a new car, those heat seats are nnnnnnnice).

Once again. Stella's behavior was really, really bad...

...so I had to put a cork in it.

It only slowed things down for a couple minutes.

And then it was back to trying to throw every accessible ceramic and/or glassware piece off the kitchen shelf.

Try saying no to this...

And she's the cuddly bird in the family!

Stella, 1 part sugar, 2 parts vinegar

One of Stella's favorite things is to go outside (but in her cage!) and show off to her imagined audience of the entire outdoor world that she has a cork, or a plum slice, or a strawberry or a piece of cheese... just that she has something and everyone else does not. It's also an important thing to announce to everyone in the imagined audience that my neighbor is pacing up and down his driveway again while he spends an hour or two making his phone calls. I am not sure why he has to spend so much time on that driveway getting mad at people but he is undeterred by Stella's very loud admonishments (I'm secretly proud of her participation in his phone calls). Anyway, yesterday was a nice day for Stella and me. I don't know what my neighbor's thoughts were about it though. >:-)

When I was out in the garden, I felt something was watching me. I think I'm really good at figuring out when that happens but for all I know there are 100s of pairs of eyes staring at me and I can only find one. Here is the little head I saw watching me transplant the pineapple lily seedlings.

I got a sinking feeling when I saw his entire body because up to now, I have not seen any grasshoppers and I want to keep it that way. I do not want to repeat last year's summer experience of getting stared at by stoned out grasshoppers.

Apparently this little guy is a meadow katydid. Whew. I'm okay with katydids, just not grasshoppers, even though the two of them are probably well related. For some reason this little katydid had only one antenna (looks like the other one broke off at some point) and this one long antenna kept rapidly circling around. You can almost see the motion marks.

Well, you could probably see those motion marks a little clearer if somebody didn't have such a fit when she was getting her picture taken. Take a look at this...

Oh she's a bad one. And I think somebody did something with the focusing ability of my camera. Errrrrgh.

But that face. I forgive her every time. She can't help that her little face is attached to a body that is too small to contain all that chutzpah.