The Knitting Revolutionary

Galahs

In the sudden, brief and intense downpour we just experienced here in Canberra, the local birds went crazy with noise and action. I watched in delight from my office window as the galahs and maggies screeched joyfully, flying around, hopping about on the ground, roiling drunkenly as they tilted their wings back and forth to catch the bright sparkling raindrops as they hissed all around. I'm certain that, in the ensuing silence and sunshine, that they are all contentedly preening the water back through their feathers, just as Phoenix always does after a good dunking.

Redonkulously cute

Me and Phoebs had a photo shoot yesterday. She was in fine form and looking particularly cute after falling asleep right near my hand on the computer desk. Hope you all had as lovely a weekend as me!

If you just can't get enough of the birdy goodness, there are more photos on my flickr account (user name is monnsqueak), but these are my favs :D

Eggies!

Phoenix laid her first egg of the season last night!

Now, since they're not fertilised, I don't like her sitting on the eggies constantly like she did last spring. She's a pet birdy, not a breeder, and although she does tend to sit on her eggs, she sooks and sulks and is generally miserable about it. I've gotten around this by giving her an open box to lay in rather than a closed nesting box.

What this does is encourages her to come out of the box and hang out with us a bit more - so she's not stuck in a dark box all day and all night, coming out only to poo and eat. Not much fun.

Hence the open box. There are very clear rules about the box - D and I both avoid putting our hands in the cage or going too close to the nesting box while there are eggs in there, and Phoebs seems to trust us both with that, so she seems content to lay her eggs in there and just wander back to them intermittently.

She seems quite happy with the arrangement, and although she does sleep on them at night, she spends the day running around with us and playing and cuddling and chirping - so, business as usual, except that there are several cute little ovoid thingies that she occasionally waddles back to, rolls around with her beak, but mostly forgets about.

Awwww, so cute!

Quiet days...

...in which I play a bit of WoW, play with my birdy, cook stuff, and generally enjoy my time being broke with lots of time on my hands. Being broke is the sucky bit, but the rest of it's pretty nice. Seriously, can you imagine a better way to spend a lazy Saturday afternoon? The bikkies were great, white chocolate and raspberries. *purr* The baking dish with the millet it in was less about feeding Phoenix, and more about keeping her out of the cookie dough LOL... how cute can one little birdy get? 

And yes... you must have a glass of wine on hand when you're hanging out and baking, and I've also finished beading up the cute little shrinky dink charms I made. I'll make some more sooner or later, but they're seriously fiddly and time-consuming, so I'll save those for the next dinner party we have. Utterly necessary if you don't want to end up drinking everyone else's spitty bits hehe. How cute is the purple sheep? I was trying to run with a bit of a knitting theme with these ones, so a punk knitter and a sheep was about as far as I got before I started doing little celtic knots and things. :D

Meanwhile, I'm still procrastinating with the finishing on my purple cardi, I have about 7 more beads to sew on, but they take a couple of minutes each and every time I think about it I just cringe. Ah well. *grin* I'll probably frantically sew them on half an hour before I decide I simply must wear it to such-and-such a place/event. Nothing much changes.

And finally, my big exciting news is... I've bought a car! Yay! It's time to finally say goodbye to Frankie, Canberra's Ugliest Motorcycle. Poor little Frankenbike. I hope he gets reincarnated as a nice Ducati or something.

Podcasts and happy days

I've recently discovered the world of podcasting.

Well, not discovered as such, because of course it wasn't like an Antarctic bay waiting for someone to come along and poing excitedly and say "in honour of cockatiels everywhere I name this place Squeak Bay!"...

...and not even discovered as in I had no idea that it existed until now. Because I did know, but just never really looked into it. Firstly, I knew about podcasts, but because they were called *POD*casts, I originally thought (ok this musta been 2 years ago now) that you needed an iPod to play them, before I realised that they were just regular old sound files and they should be called mp3casts or something like that, so that idiots like myself... ok I'm just gonna stop there. *whew, that was close*

...and finally, there was no motivation to actually look into podcasts and to see if they were worth listening to. And then, I got a very cool and thoughtful birthday present from the lovely Emma... the whole first season of Cast-On, burned onto a CD. Coooool. So I started listening. I've listened to quite a few audio books over the years, and like the listening-while-knitting-or-spinning thing, but this was something new.

So, there's a new one. A local knitter (well, Sydney) called David, putting his voice and his heart on the line to talk about what he likes doing.

Interested? http://www.sticksandstring.com.au/ Go suss him out. I'm in the process of downloading, and will be taking my little mp3 player outside to weed the gardens once it's done.

Oh, and the obligatory birty photo. I have no idea how she got to be this cute. I guess it's just a talent of hers.

update: omg! he's (sticksandstrings) an astrophysicist! I can just imagine it... yeah whaddayoudo? I'm an astrophysicist. No, really. I promise! Look, here, I have a little card wot says so... *pulls little gold-deckled card from back pocket*... yeah. So, am I hawt, or wawt? (sheesh, I think, another scientist called David... I could start a collection! Woot!)

It's sort of like having a kid, but so much easier

...except for when it's 9pm and you're covering the birdcage and you think, hey she doesn't look quite right, and you pick her up and her tiny abdomen is so swollen that her feathers aren't even hiding the skin any more, and you sorta panic a bit. Hm.

That's what I did a couple of nights ago. David was awesome, going outside to get the travel cage while I called the vet without me even asking him to, and coming with us to sit anxiously after the vet did rather nasty things to my little egg-bound hen. We didn't get home until after midnight, all pretty exhausted but very relieved, as egg-binding can be really dangerous, and literally kill a birty overnight. It wasn't cheap, but very worth it for a little creature who I love unreservedly, and who's stolen the heart of my boyfriend as well *grin*... I'm getting to the point where I think she prefers him to me, but that's what happens when I'm the one who has to shove antibiotics down her throat and towel her so I can clip her nails LOL

She turned out to be fine, of course, and is sitting happily on her partially pilfered egg collection right next to me now. She's got 5 there, but taking into account the two I've stolen and the broken one that she passed after the vet massaged it into submission, she's laid a total of 8 eggs this season.

Now, 7 eggs, which is what she was sitting on last week, is a big ask to fit under a tiny little 100g cockatiel. She was sort of like a loony toons character for a while there, she'd fluff herself out and roll the eggs with her beak and poke them under herself, and one would poke out the other side. So she'd roll that one underneath, and another would pop out the other side. This could go on for a good ten minutes, with me staring and giggling in disbelief and amusement. I finally took pity on her and stole one while she wasn't looking, and again later the same day. Hehe! Good thing birdies can't count.

And life... well, life goes on. I've handpainted some merino roving to send to my swap partner, and it's all packaged up and ready to go. And I drink my coffee, and start another essay. *sigh*... 29 days to go!

plugging away

I'm plugging away on the thesis this morning, our stats class having been cancelled. Yuck. I really need those classes, but the upside is the extra 2 hours I have to play with the intro today. Phoebs is being her usual helpful self...

Meanwhile I read, read, read, and prepare the house for interstate visitors. We'll have kidlings in the house this weekend! Batten the hatches! Lock up the spinning wheels!!!

...word count: 1301

...days to go: 77

Theses and faeces

...it can't be a co-incidence that they rhyme.

So I'm sitting here at the computer last night with an article in front of me, and Phoenix begging for scratches and being cute. I scratch her head, she hangs out for a while, and as birdies inevitably do, she delicately deposits a poo right in the middle of my article.

"When I print out my thesis", I say to her, "I might get you to do a nice big shit on it too, huh?"

David looks up from his computer next to me. "Isn't that your supervisor's job?" he asks innocently.

Just one more reason to love him lots. Hehe!

Caps and Birties

... I've just spent the last few hours getting my "questions" in for Monday morning (a regular assignment for uni, and one which has already had me in tears this semester) and reviewing my focus groups video for my thesis, and I'm feeling rather chuffed. And on a roll!

I'm nearing the end of the revolting SUMS cap. The thing has been driving me crazy, I have no idea what possessed me to agree to knit something so huge in STOCKING STITCH; not just that, it isn't for me, and I don't even rehearse any more, so I don't have a regular 3-hour stint in which to amuse myself with boring knitting like I used to while I sang with SUMS. But... since I'm all fired up and going like a mad thing, I might as well do a few rows. Like my degree, the end of it is in sight. Yay!

Phoenix thinks it's all dreadfully boring, and would rather sleep. Oh, so cute! She's starting to moult, so she had her first shower in ages today, we hopped in, and squeaked happily in the shower amidst much fluffing of feathers. I do so love having birdy company! I initiated the shower after she tried to bathe in her drinking water the other day and ended up in a shallow bowl, but couldn't get her wings wet. Have you ever seen a more adorable birty???

...word count: 616

...days to go: 81