In other news, the pair of Canada geese that hang out at the office have a gosling. Just one, which makes me think something bad happened to others. Geese usually have more than one offspring. Anyway, the office parking lot is a terrible place to try to raise a family: even more so if you are a bird. No one is watching out for something as small as a gosling, let alone an egg. It made me sad to see a lone gosling, even with its two vigilant parents.

At home, I got the pair-a-tweeters a parakeet piñata. They had them at Petco. I had learned about them through Theresa, who sent me an e-mail about them. Basically, a parakeet piñata is a toy made out of multicolored woven grass that the birds can hop on and shred......

So far it’s been the most well received toy I’ve put in the cage for them. I’d gotten them something that many of the parakeets in Petco just loved – a brightly colored starburst of stretchy rubber ribbon with little calcium enriched “shells” and bells on the ends. The parakeets in the store were climbing up inside it, ringing the bells, swinging on it, etc. But both Blondie and Dagwood ignored it when I put it in the cage. So much for that.

It just goes to show that even little birds have distinct personalities. Blondie likes to nibble the hanging, shreddy bits as if savoring the texture of the grass in her beak. Meanwhile Dagwood attacks the thing, pulling it this way and that, banging it into the seed dish and tearing it apart with gleeful abandon. They both like it so much that they squabble over it a little bit.

I’m glad to see him get some exercise. He doesn’t like to fly. In fact he’s bad at it. Well, I take that back. He’s bad at landing. He almost never winds up in the spot he’s aiming for, then winds up having to send up a distress call from the floor or the basement stairs.

The buyer for the house on Main finally initialed all the parts of the agreement, so we’re a go for settlement on 5/31. We won’t wind up with as much money as we hoped for out of the deal, though, certainly it’ll be more than we had before.

Heck. I can probably afford another parakeet piñata.