Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

I had a pretty good day today: brought back some DVDs to the library, picked up a few used books at their mini-book-sale (including Anne Rice's "Queen of the Damned", just days after folks were discussing it in the carpe_ho_ras chat room). Also went to Blockbuster for the first time in months and rented a few more DVDs (first two disks of the first season on both "LOST" and "The Tudors").

But I was tooling around FaceBook just now when an ad for a game called Birdland caught my eye, and for some reason, the blurb and the adorable little cartoon parakeet that accompanied it just brought back to mind that it was a year ago this week that our little wonder-bird Merry passed away after a brief illness. I just lost it and I cannot stop crying, thinking about our little birdie buddy. Flurry, our little yellow parakeet, whom we adopted a few days later, has blossomed into a shy little sweetheart, who delights us with his soft little chatter and his acrobatics, but I just miss our little blue mischief maker.

Inventory last night: They did this differently than they have in previous years. Instead of having all of us gather in the back room and get our assigned aisle there, we had our assignments listed on a sheet near the time clock and when we punched in, we had to head right to our assigned aisles. Except I somehow wasn't on the list, so I had to consult "Joe the Angel" (ie. the assistant store manager) and get an assignment from him: I ended up in the cereal aisle counting organic/gluten-free oatmeal and such.

Today: Because of the snowstorm we had the past two days, people weren't in out shopping. Today they were. I'm in a bit of a cranky mood right now, but it's nothing that can't be cured by some random absurdness. Like people's LJ icons, and my mother asking me if we had any "tacky tacks" when she was looking for some thumbtacks. To which I replied, "Tacky tacks?! Are you implying that our tacks are cheap and ugly-looking and likely to come apart randomly?!" said mischievously.

Typing up an "A.I." fic, which is also the last of the requests/prompts, which will likely go live later tonight (read: "Just after midnight"). I'm undecided about cutting the second Evangelion fic from the 12 Days of Fanfic list: I'll probably type it/post it if I have time, and since I have tomorrow and Wednesday off, I may be able to squeeze it in. Wednesday is likely to be a bit of a fic-dump day, so brace yourselves (especially since I have at least two in mind that day).

Flurry the budgie is continuing to become more personable; he's making up his own sentences now: we definitely heard him say "You're a good parakeet" the other night. My mom says "You're a good bird" to him when he does something cute, but he somehow swapped out "bird" for "parakeet". The look on his face as we praised him for saying his first sentence was comical, as if he were thinking, "Huh? Why are people squeeing over me?" He's a very shy and modest little bird.

Doing a bit of "something old, something new" this week in terms of fannish stuff. The something new: I just started reading "Deathwish", the fourth of the Cal Leandros books by Rob Thurman; I keep chuckling over how much the series reminds me of what you'd get if you crossed "Supernatural" with the Dresden Files and threw it into a setting very like White Wolf's World of Darkness. The something old: I've also started rewatching Cowboy Bebop. Hey It's That Voice moments galore, including the voice of Aramaki from GitS:AC as a random old guy in a market; also had a moment where I jokingly said, "Hey, I know who Faye Valentine is: she's Haruhi Suzimiya, all grown up. Guess her hair and eye color changed because of the cryostorage." (Ie. Wendee Lee voiced both characters).

Our Hallowe'en Spook-tacular Spooktacular is officially under way! I spent much of the afternoon (after I came home from work) helping bring boxes of plastic jack o'lanterns (the kind that look real when viewed from about ten feet) downstairs while my dad ran extension cords for them all. We now have what amounts to a wall of jack o'lanterns across our front yard. People at work had been asking me when we were going to get cracking with our yard haunt: some unknown person even tossed a fake pumpkin (no face carved into it) onto our lawn a couple nights ago. My dad took this as a sign that he needed to get started -- and he even cut a face into the fake pumpkin!

Also: we're starting to tame Flurry the jittery budgie; I finally got him to sit on my finger for a minute or two. He's less skittish about hands being in his cage, but he still gets a bit "Hey, beat it: this my territory" about visiting digits. We also think he's trying to talk: both my mom and dad heard him say "baby" earlier this evening.

Just back from the local pet shop (where we'd gotten Merry), and we have adopted (or maybe been adopted by) a teeny little yellow parakeet with a smidge of green near his tail. We're still working on choosing a name for him (current candidates are "Frodo" [again from Lord of the Rings: Hobbit names make good budgie names, in my opinion] and "Teeny" [my dad's choice]), but so far he seems like a cheerful little guy. He started twittering and tweedling as the water was running in the washing machine and he was watching my mother as she swept the dining room floor. He's still a little shell-shocked from being brought home, but I think he'll settle in soon.

Unfortunately -- but not unexpectedly -- Oskar the cockatiel isn't too thrilled to see the table across the room from his cage now has a new tenant. He's acting rather like the older kid when the new baby comes home from the hospital.