Real friends show up at a charity auction dressed in strange bird outfits and work their butts off all night to help make money for a cause they know is important to you. Real friends spend hours making a quilt to be auctioned off at the affair because they know it’s important to you. And real friends drag their kids to the event to be free labor for the evening because everything we get for free leaves that much more for the birds. Thank you Carol and Barbara, Kate and Elaine and Page and Lelani and Nick.
A very brave parrot
For anyone who wonders why I love my birds, let me tell you this story.
I put Abdul, my African Gray Parrot, on my counter while I cut up a pineapple. I took the top of the pineapple and put it on the counter where she was in case she wanted to chew on it or shred it or destroy it in some other creative way. Parrots love destroying things and this seemed like a good idea. But that pineapple top was new to her and strange and scary. In the wild, parrots are a prey animal and so they
The new Anchorage slogan simply sucks
Seriously, we actually paid someone to come up with the slogan “Big Wild Life” for Anchorage. Bring back the dancing moose!
It was all the fault of a snow storm
When my mother was alive and spoke about my birth, the one thing she remembered above all else was the snow storm that raged that day and how my poor dad had to crawl to the hospital with the car. Maybe that’s why I moved to Alaska. Snow is in my blood.
Is this really progress?
I opened the Lifestyles section of our local paper yesterday only to find a full page spread on how Nancy Pelosi is bringing pearls back into fashion. Why is it that I can’t remember one full page fashion spread on Dennis Hastert or any other male House Speaker in all my many decades of life? Why did what she wore while sitting behind Bush when he made his State of the Union address to Congress get prominent mention but no one bothered to comment on what Dick Cheney was wearing? We’ll never really be equal, will we, until the media
Feeding the eagles
It was the look on my brother Phil’s face as I invited him into the eagle mew to rake it out that told me more clearly than anything else that maybe, just maybe, not everyone voluntarily enters an eagle’s pen when the eagle is in residence. He told me he’d take my back and be ready to fling the door open if the eagle attacked but that was as close as he was getting to the whole situation.
I really couldn’t complain. After all, he’d come all the way up from Delaware to spend a week in Alaska and here
Rich Little is still alive?!!!
I can remember sitting in my childhood home with my parents watching Rich Little on Ed Sullivan. Now I find out that the Washington Press Corps has chosen him to give the speech at their annual dinner with the president. For those of you paying attention, this is the same dinner that Steven Colbert addressed so brilliantly last year while Bush sat a few feet away grimacing. Seems the only jokes he can take are the ones he perpetrates on the people of this country by calling them his policies. But even for the gutless wonders that call themselves the
I am so cool
I went to the store the other day with my usual load of cloth bags. As I checked out, the bagger wanted to put my Cornish game hens, which were already double wrapped in plastic, into a plastic bag in case some drop of moisture should escape their double wrap and touch the cloth. I explained that the bags were quite washable and that I did not want any extra plastic if I could avoid it. To which the young man checking me out replied, “You rock”. So now it’s official. I rock.
I’m the decider
I find myself wondering if Bush has little dialogs in his head with one voice saying “I’m the decider” and then another voice comes in and says, “I’m the decider”. And then another voice comes in, let’s call this voice “Reality” and says, “No, you would need a brain capable of holding two thoughts at once in order to be a decider.” And then I realize that this could never really happen because that would be three voices at once in his brain and it would probably explode from the pressure. So could someone very slowly and gently explain to
This is where I draw the line
I brought my diabetic dog to the vet this week to see if I could use my blood-testing machine to test her blood daily for better diabetic control. Right!
Actually, my blood tester would have worked except that no matter where we pricked Blue, we didn’t get enough blood. We tried her ear, her back, her belly and, when the vet started trying around her butt, I called a halt to the proceedings by announcing I was not pricking my dog’s butt on a daily basis. That, apparently, is where I draw the line.
I don’t know who was more