I have four budgie birds. The first two were given to me by my son, who obtained them from friends who no longer wanted birds. Their names at the time were Gunther and Gretchen, but I renamed them Jazz and Tango.

Then one day I came home from work and a blue bird flew through the livingroom and landed on the shelf. I thought they must have figured out how to open the cage door, and was scared that the yellow bird might have already flown out the balcony door. I quickly closed the balcony door and ran to the cage, only to discover both birds safely in their cage. I then had one of those mind-shifting moments where I wondered if I had hallucinated the bird on the shelf….maybe I was experiencing one of those acid flashbacks I had heard about. I went back to the shelf, and there he still was. Phew. Apparently he was a newcomer who had flown in through the open balcony door while I was at work. I put him in the cage and all three birds sat there nuzzling each other’s heads like they were long-lost friends. I named him Blues.

Then, this past summer, I bought a fourth bird at a garage sale. He was a beautiful fancy aqua budgie, and I named him Calypso. Four birds, it turns out, make twice as much noise and mess as two birds. Who would have thought?

So yesterday I was flipping through usedottawa.com , looking for a better sofa, and there was a fresh ad from some woman who wanted a budgie. Since I’m in downsizing mode – even though I had no idea I was prepared to get rid of any of my birds – I emailed her and by the end of the day she had two budgies and a cage and I had $50 in my pocket. I kept Blues (the one that flew in) because he’s my favourite, and Tango because he’s yellow.

Goodbye Jazz. Goodbye Calypso. I miss you guys.

I have this friend who is moving and she has this thing that was given to her as a gift by someone. She has kept the thing on display in her home for five years now. The thing is large and conspicuous, and let’s just say it’s not her taste. She likes the person who gave it to her more than she likes the thing, and wouldn’t want to hurt the gift-giver’s feelings.

Should she keep the thing?

I think fridge magnets are cool – especially magnetic poetry. Except when it’s time to pack it. It took 41 minutes to go from this:

To this:

And all the magnets fit into a single sandwich baggy:

I wonder why it has taken me all weekend to pack 7 boxes.

Things have been a bit crazy lately on all fronts.

I started working for my employer fifteen years ago today. They just announced they’ll be laying off at least a third of the staff in the next month or two. Naturally this news has thrown the entire staff into a state of upheaval and despair. We’re a non-profit organization, and the funding environment is stagnant, partly as a consequence of two consecutive minority governments. It doesn’t help that our area of interest is not one likely to be shared by the incoming Conservative government.

I’ve convinced myself my dog is dying of cancer, even though our vet appointment isn’t until Monday. He is 13 and a half years old, and was always surprisingly youthful and spritely up until the past year. During this past year, he has gone deaf, gone grey, developed arthritis, grown some kind of tumour on his leg that is so hideous I won’t even post a picture of it, and suddenly perfected the fine art of insomnia. Whereas as recently as a week ago he would sleep peacefully beside my bed all night, now it’s almost like having a colicky baby. Some nights are worse than others. I think he’s either suffering from dementia or cancer, and I’m suffering from sleep deprivation and worry.

I think I’m suddenly and unexpectedly moving in the next few weeks, after seven years in my current apartment. Admittedly, this chaos is of my own making. I was helping a friend apartment-hunt on Saturday and we went to see the apartment next door to me. She chose one of the other places we saw. But I – who wasn’t even apartment hunting – decided I liked that apartment much better than mine and needed to move into it. It’s got a huge west-facing balcony, windows on all four sides, two bedrooms, lots of storage, and it’s clean and freshly painted. And it doesn’t have any of those aggravating baseboard heaters that line almost all of my current walls and limit my furniture-placement options. As an added bonus, the roof doesn’t leak, and as far as I can tell there are no mice, squirrels or amorous racoons living in the walls or ceilings. The rents are approximately equal – I pay $920 (heat included), and the new place is $845 (plus heat). The laundry facilities are better in my current building though…well, actually they’re the same, since the building next door uses this building’s basement laundry room. But I’d have to put my boots on and come over here to do laundry after I move.

I still haven’t got final confirmation from my landlord that I can transfer to that apartment, but it looks likely. So…even though this is good news, it will mean a lot of extra work and expense over the next few weeks. I may have to drop out of the knitting olympics, since they run from February 10th to the 26th.

So that’s what’s going on in my life. In between panic attacks I’m knitting. Maybe I’m projecting my own anxiety onto my knitting, but don’t you think my knitting projects look a little more chaotic than usual? So many works in progress, and nothing finished.

Here’s a sock that I’m knitting on 3.75mm needles, at the suggestion of the knitting store lady, despite the fact that the yarn called for 3.5mm needles. This sock feels like it’s going to be too loose. Maybe I should add a couple of kilometres to my runs so I can build some bigger calf muscles to hold my socks up. Either than or some friend with bigger calves than mine is going to end up with some wild and crazy socks. Or I could be really brave and wash them in hot water and dry them in the dryer…and then if they don’t fit, I can give them to some little girl – for her doll to wear.

I’ve been looking forward to last night for about eight months. It was the night I was going to see DRACULA, a production of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Everything about it appealed to me – even the promo image was seductive. I bought tickets for several other dances at the same time, but this was THE ONE.

I don’t claim to be any kind of expert on dance. If you were to rank dance fans by their knowledge, I’d be at the low end. Still, I find that combination of athleticism and art awesome and I think I’m easily impressed. But frankly, I was disappointed by Dracula.

Not that it didn’t have its moments – there were some spectacular ones. When Dracula turned into a bat and flew across the stage, I was mesmerized. After intermission, there was an absolutely hilarious, fast-paced pantomime in dance of the whole Dracula story, and I loved that. The finale, with Dracula being impaled on a stake, was quite impressive. The gargoyles made me smile every time they came on stage. The special effects were very well done. Some things were truly masterful…but overall, the show lacked something.

I thought the choreography was somewhat pedestrian and repetitive. The dancing was competent, but lacklustre…it didn’t seem ambitious or inspired. The various acts and scenes seemed disjointed: they didn’t flow together into a cohesive whole. If I hadn’t read the production notes before the production began, I would have been lost altogether.

It had its moments, to be sure, but I didn’t get goosebumps, I wasn’t in awe, I wasn’t mesmerized, and I was glad when it was over. (They should turn down the heat in the National Arts Centre…I’m one of those people who is usually too cold, and I’m always way too hot in there. I wanted to take my shoes off.)

Now. Despite my tepid reaction, I will say that maybe on another night I would have enjoyed it more. My dog had insomnia for the two nights before the performance, and he kept me awake most of the night with his pacing and panting and staring and getting on and off the bed all night long and walking on my head. This is the first time in our 12 years together that he’s ever had insomnia, and it’s the first time he has ever gotten on the bed. By the time 8:00 Saturday night rolled around, I was having little sleep-deprivation hallucinations, and by the second act I was struggling to stay awake. I kept dozing off for a few seconds at a time during the last hour of the production. So maybe it was an absolutely rivetting production and everybody else in the audience was awestruck and mesmerized. Or at least awake.

We’re all invited to vote in the 2006 Weblog Awards. Winners get $20.06 US, a Bloggie Award and wild web traffic. That’s what they get – we get a great source of 151 links to extraordinary blogs in 30 compelling categories.

I’m too busy to write anything this morning, so I thought I’d just share my favourite photo blog – Daily Dose of Imagery – with you. Sam Javanrouh is an Iranian living in Toronto and posting a photographic slice of life each day on his blog.

This photo: Sleeping man with dog is from his archives.

Paula tagged me – I have to reveal my five quirky habits to all of you.

Here are the rules:

The first player of this ‘game’ starts with the topic ‘5 weird habits of yours’ & people who get tagged need to write a blog entry about their 5 quirky habits as well as state this rule clearly. in the end, u need to choose the next 5 people to be tagged & list their names.

It would be much easier to write about my co-workers’ weird and quirky habits, since living in cube world facilitates getting to know them much too well. I know, for example, who does crossword puzzles in the bathroom (worse, I know what time). I know who is allergic to her own perfume (even she doesn’t know that). I know who talks baby-talk to her boyfriend. I know who talks baby-talk to her plants.

But me? Weird and quirky habits? I can’t think of any. (Maybe I should ask my co-workers.)

Okay.

1. While waiting for a flight, I like to size up my fellow passengers and decide who to eat first when the plane crashes.

2. I walk everywhere, and I have a variety of things I do while walking to entertain myself. For example, I look at everybody’s license plates and unscramble the letter to make words. I scan the sidewalk constantly for change for the Dave X Change Challenge. I do math in my head. I’m always counting in the background of my brain. And there’s always a song playing in my head – if I’m lucky, it’s a song I like. (Today it’s Spanish Flea by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass).

3. I don’t get out of bed until I’ve remembered something about the day that I’m looking forward to.

4. I have trouble keeping up with my nails. They grow too fast. Every time I turn around, my toenails are slicing holes in my socks, and my fingernails are in the way when I’m trying to play guitar.

5. Whenever I get a new hobby or interest, I go way overboard buying stuff – I buy books, subscribe to magazines, and go shopping for supplies and tools of the trade and patterns and materials and how-to videos. Sometimes I’ll read the first book and decide I don’t really have much interest in that hobby after all, but I’ve just dropped $500 on it. Quite the quirky quandary.

So, yeah, I guess I do have five weird habits. Who would have thunk it?

I’m tagging these five bloggers to reveal their quirks for our general amusement:

Scrim
Vera
Emily
Marmalade
JuliaR