In Which Everything Is Fine, I Swear

Everything is fine!

Connor had no seizures yesterday-- looks like the medication is doing its job!  He's completely back to his usual happy-go-lucky self, which I am very happy about.  So he wasn't the reason you didn't get a blog yesterday.

No, the reason you didn't get a blog was because I was helping a friend move and didn't get back to the house until almost three in the morning.  And while I love all of you very dearly, any blog that I would have produced at that hour would probably be totally incoherant.  So now that I'm awake (Jeremy let me sleep in because he is wonderful like that), you get a blog.  Sorry about that.

At least an hour and a half of yesterday, by the way, was spent in transit to my friend's new house.  I mention this because my copilot in the car was a parrot named Jasmine.  I don't remember what type of parrot Jasmine was-- one of the medium sized green varieties-- but her main distinguishing characteristic in the car was that she was loud.  Yes, Jasmine was gifted with the ability to create sounds at volumes that rightfully should have been impossible given her lung capacity, and she delighted in making them directly in my ear.  I'm not sure I would have survived the car trip with my hearing intact if not for two things.  The first was that Jasmine apparently has an ear for Irish fiddle music.  I'll say one thing-- the bird has good taste.  When in desperation I switched my CD player on, she climbed over to the side of the cage near the radio and listened intently.  She had a tendency to try and join in on the chorus, but otherwise it cut down on the shrieking considerably. 

The second thing was that I stopped and ordered some chicken fingers at a drivethrough.  Apparently she took this as an implicit threat, because I didn't hear a peep out of her the rest of the trip.

At any rate, Jasmine and I got along much better after that, and the move was completed without further incident.  Really she was a very nice bird, and once she got over the excitement of being in the car she was a sweetheart.  I have the feeling that in other circumstances we would have gotten along very well.  But if our daughter Ellen ever decides she wants a parrot we'll either be getting her a quiet variety (and I'm relatively sure given my experience of parrots that such a bird does not exist) or seriously beefing up the sound insulation in her room. 

Or better yet, sticking to gerbils-- however unappreciative of my music choices they may be! 

~Jess