An update

It continues to be weird here.  This past Monday one of a pair of cockatiels we have had for....awhile keeled over & was dead before he hit the bottom of the cage.  I cannot say how old he was (I think he was a he although we named him Miss Moneypenny; his mate -also almost certainly male- is called Bond, James Bond). 

The boys came to us together with some rather peculiar ways.  While not exactly neglected, they would cower when anything was rearranged in their cage & refused to eat anything they had not always eaten even if it was more tempting.  Birds are omnivores & a lack of variety in their diet is almost worse than just about any single thing they might eat.  By contrast, my mother had a bird (a parakeet I think) that developed a taste for mashed potatoes & butter; it turns out too much of that is also not good for a bird.

Anyway, I buried Miss Moneypenny in our pet cemetery, which is nothing like Stephen King's.  Ours is peaceful, a little bit overgrown & we hardly go there except to bury a pet.  Okay, maybe it is a lot like Stephen King's but nothing comes back, I promise.

On a lighter death note, I need to buy a new going-to-funerals dress.  As it happens I have more than one going to funerals dress, but this one was my favorite.  It was wrap-around, made of jersey, black with white scrolling lines randomly scattered.  I know it doesn't sound like much but I could roll that thing into a ball & jam it in the bottom of my purse, get where I was going, shake it out & wear it.  A dress like this is worth more than it's weight in just about anything.

That dress hid every food stain of every paper plate that ever folded at shivah, it was wrinkle PROOF never mind wrinkle resistant.  I need to stop talking about it in the past tense because that dress is not dead, it has just gone to live with another person.  The thing is V** was at the house & she needed a dress to wear to a casino night type event at her boss's church.  It was just supposed to be a one-time thing but she went on to win $400 wearing that dress.  It would be wrong to take it back.  Besides you cannot take luck back, just away.  Just like you cannot make luck for yourself you can only give it to someone else (two little known scientific facts).  Also, how tacky would it be to wear a money-winning dress to a funeral?  It sends the wrong message.

So, that's where we are.  No more funerals until I get a new dress.  Except Miss Moneypenny's.  Please let hers be the last.