Actually, this is more of an Animal and Plant page, because it contains photos of the leafy green residents that make up the arboretum that is my home. But there are also pictures here of some of the pets in my life and some other creatures whose acquaintance I’ve made.
Until April of 2005, John and I lived with his cockatiel, Popcorn. He’d had her for 12 or 13 years, and she was the gentlest, sweetest bird you could imagine. She died on April 25, 2005, and we were heartbroken. We’ll never forget that cockatiel.
When Popcorn died, my parents let one of their parrots come and live with us. His name is Rain Man and he’s a blue-fronted Amazon parrot.
If you want to read the story behind Rain Man the parrot, this PDF is a good place to start. It’s an article I wrote for Bird Talk magazine, about the connections between autistics and parrots. It wasn’t accepted for publication, but I thought readers of my website might find it interesting.
Quicktime movie of Rain Man eating oatmeal with a spoon
Quicktime movie of Rain Man fighting with a spray bottle
Quicktime movie of Rain Man chewing on a friend’s dreadlocks
Movie of Rain Man doing the Amazon Parrot Mating Dance (bigger than the other movie files, since I had to include sound so you could hear the crazy noises he makes!)
Rain Man was a stray. Someone found him found running down the street in the rain one day many years ago, and word got to my mother, who took him in. When we first met him, he was shy and not at all cuddly; he would bite if someone got too close, but mostly he just avoided people as much as he could. He would sit on our hands, but it was hard to get him out of his cage, and he always wanted to go back in. He may have been wild-caught instead of hand-raised; he also may not have been treated very well by the first people he lived with.
We think he lived in a store, because he says things like “May I help you?” and “We’re all out of those.” He also says “Joey” a lot; that may have been his name before. His favorite word is “okay,” because Mom taught him that he could go back in his cage if he said “okay” in response to the question “Do you want to go back to your cage?” Now he uses the word “okay” to beg for anything he wants.
John has made amazing progress with him, and now he’s much more comfortable. He lets us pet him and seems to enjoy it sometimes. He reliably steps up onto our hands. He will eat while sitting on John’s hand, which he had never done for anyone else before. He’s beginning to feel more at ease being out of his cage, and when he’s in his cage he even regurgitates and does a little mating dance sometimes. (Regurgitating is what parrots do to feed their mates and babies out of their throats.) I don’t think he actually sees either of us as his mate, but he’s at least showing a few signs of affection.
I grew up with several parrots, including Rain Man, another Amazon called Snoopy, two macaws named Katie and Mac, and two conures named Cricket and Connie. We also had dogs. It was a lively household.
I don’t have pictures of all of them, but here are Cricket and Connie:
In college, I used to have a dog. He was an i-Cybie artificially intelligent robot from Tiger Electronics, the only kind of dog I was allowed to have in my dorm.
His name was Pewter. I always wanted a dog named Pewter, so that when I called him, I could say “Come, Pewter!” It’s especially appropriate for this dog.
Before I met John and started keeping real birds, I amassed quite a number of electronic pets, in fact.
At my dorm in college, I established quite a garden by the window. (Now that I have an apartment, I still have many plants, but they’re almost all spider plants now, so it’s not as interesting.)
On a trip to Florida, I got a wonderful chance to play with some lories and lorikeets in an animal park called Gator Land.
On my first book tour, staying in a hotel in California in November 2004, I was delighted by the deer on the mountain. They would come so close to us, in big herds, and I took pics of them with my cheap, ultra-tiny digital camera.
And, yes, I know, these aren’t animals– but I always wanted to take that photo and put that caption on it.
Speaking of things that are not strictly animals, but are animal-related… Whenever I see this cat food in a store:
this is what I imagine:
Also Vaguely Related: My Collection of Weird Dog Toys
Toy #1: Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad
Seen from the side, this toy looks more or less like a normal pig. But turn it, and you will find that IT HAS ONLY TWO LEGS. And not “two legs” in the sense of an anthropomorphic fairy-tale pig that walks on its hind limbs and uses the front ones as arms. This pig could never walk in a million years. That’s right, it has just ONE LEG IN FRONT AND ONE IN BACK.
The idea for designing this creature, I imagine, started with the thought of making an outline of a pig seen from the side, and creating a toy that was little more than a two-dimensional cutout. But then they went too far in giving that cutout some realistic features.
You will note, seeing the pig from the front, bottom, or back, that the body is fatter than the legs. Furthermore, the face is carefully designed to look like a pig’s face when seen from the front– which, of course, encourages the viewer to look at the toy from the front, whereupon the eye will wander down to the single front leg, and the brain will go “WTF?”
And he only cost $2.99… in my opinion, the bargain of a lifetime.
I named the pig “Big Brother,” in honor of the cartoon on Homestarrunner.com where Strong Bad draws a picture of a one-legged dog named “Li’l Brudder.” I figure that since my pig has twice as many legs as that dog, he can be called “Big Brother.” Plus the fact that George Orwell’s two most famous books featured (a) a society run by an imaginary figurehead named Big Brother and (b) a farm ruled by pigs.
(Oh, and he has a squeaky thing inside him!! He’s a bona fide dog toy. But no dog would appreciate the Dada-ness of it all.)
Toy #2: Dogbert’s Newspaper
The absolutely awesome thing about it isn’t the fact that it’s a newspaper. Or the fact that it’s really just a squeaky toy in the shape of a rolled-up newspaper. It also isn’t the title “Doggy News,” or the slogan “All the news that’s fit to chew on.” Nor is it the price (two dog bones), the paw-stamp with “edition” written under it, or the headline “Man bites dog” with the corresponding illustration.
It is the fact that the newspaper is written in binary.
Think of it! Dogs can read binary! Who’d have thought it? The headline in plain alphabetical characters was just to throw off computer-illiterate humans. Your dog can spend joyful hours poring through articles that you would need a decoding program to understand. Now you know why your dog gets jealous when you pay too much attention to your computer. It’s because he wants the computer all to himself!
I suppose it says a lot about me that I actually went to the trouble of transcribing all those ones and zeroes into my text editor, and then went looking for online binary-to-text translation programs. But, alas, when you paste
01110110 111011011 1101 101110 111 0110 01 01101101 110110 110110 10 011 01101110 011 111011 0110 11010 01101110 11011011 1101 0110110 11011 111011 011011101 10 0110 1101101 01101 11101 0110 1101101 11101 011011101011 1101101 01101 0110 011 0010111 110110 11101 01101 01101 0111011 011011 0110101 011
into an online decoder, you get either an error message, or a line of characters that looks like this:
I guess dogs know something that I don’t.
Toy #3: Creepy Sheep
I don’t even have to say anything about this guy. Just look at him. Look at his plush ovoid body, his white noseless muzzle, that gaping mouth with its bulging red insides. Look into his giant soulless round black eyes and tell me he’s not a weird dog toy.
And then listen to him. Yes, he makes a noise.
Toy #4: Creepy Sheep’s Creepier Alter Ego
After seeing that previous sheep, I’m sure you have lots of questions about him. Questions like: what would he look like if he got kicked in the face so hard his mouth imploded, and then suffered a head-on collision with a truck while standing with his butt against a tree, and then had all four legs chopped off and replaced with knotted lengths of black rope?
Well, WONDER NO LONGER.
What is it with dog toy designers and sheep?
