Published Nov 19, 2006
My dad’s screwing up my habits. I like sitting on my tree, grooming myself, then climb down to sit down on his lap while he sits on the couch. For two years, I’ve been able to cilmb to the low branch on my tree, tell him what a pretty bird I am, and get armpit scratchies from my dad, then climb down onto the couch and my dad’s lap and get kisses and scratches on the top of my wing. That’s just how I like it. But lately, he’s been sitting on the chair on the other side of my tree, and I don’t know how to get scratchies from him there!
When I’m a good bird and I talk nice, saying things like “pretty bird!” and “hello!” and “how are you?” my dad will take me out into the living room. This is what the living room looks like:
See, that’s my tree in the middle. I can sit on the top and groom myself and just hang out while my dad sits on the brown couch, which is what he always used to do. Then, I could climb down to see him:
Look at that — there’s the low branch on the tree, the one I can climb on to so that dad can easily reach me to scratch me, the one that’s even low enough that I can climb from it onto the arm of the couch. I love that branch, it’s even low enough that if I say “gimme a kiss!” dad will lean over and kiss me.
The branch on the other side of the tree, however, is not as perfect. It’s too high, I can’t get all the way over to dad and he can’t reach up to scratch me there:
See, that’s just hard to get to. Plus, that was the branch I always went to when I wanted to be alone! You know, in the same room but alone. Maybe with the occasional “hello!” or a big stretch to say I was happy and comfy there, but didn’t need to cuddle. But now dad’s over on that side, in the chair, and it’s all wrong. I wish my dad would just go and sit in the couch again, but it seems like he’s a lot more comfortable on the chair with his computer on his lap; and since he’s been working on this blog and his other blog and that Ruby on Rails thing he keeps on talking about so much, it seems like the chair is the best place for him.
So I guess that means I’d better either get used to going over to the other side of the tree, or dad has to move it. I hope he moves it! Maybe he could turn the tree around and put the low branch on the other side so that it’s easy to get to the chair? Of course then I’d have to figure out what to do about the couch, but, frankly, dad would probably be happy since I wouldn’t be able to climb down onto the couch and sneak up behind all the friends he brings home and climb onto their shoulders. Maybe he’ll read this blog entry and decide to try it!
Junior,
I would like to commend you on three things:
1) You were able to explain the couch-tree-chair conundrum with much greater clarity than your dad. Well done!
2) Your solution to the perch problem is brilliant simplicity. You are a good bird, but I bet some of your dad?s friends would not like to be surprised by you climbing on their shoulders. And I?ll even bet some of his friends are physically reactive people. A sneaky, pretty bird like you coupled with one of the afore mentioned humans seems like a potentially volatile combination. So why not avoid sneak attacks when possible?!
3) Even though you type with your beak (at least I assume you do), you did better on typos than your dad usually does. Stand tall!
- C