Live from Austin!

This morning I put some seed on a piece of paper so she could "forage". She seems to prefer eating that way.

I let both birds out. Today they are getting on well. They just sat together for about 10 minutes, with Chester quietly preening the new girlie. However, the only place where she felt secure enough for that was on my shoulder, snuggled against the back of my neck. Nevertheless, it seems clear to me now that they’re going to be good friends.

New girl also loves playing with my earrings. She hopped onto the side of my cereal bowl and had a taste, but wasn’t too impressed with the Shredded Wheat.

Now Chester’s over on the play gym by the window, and girlie is snuggling my neck and preening.

Whoever trimmed her flight feathers did a pretty savage job. She can’t do more than fall like a stone. Oh well, they’ll grow back, and as with Chester, we’ll let her keep them if she stays well behaved and safe.

We got a call from Gallery of Pets saying that they had taken delivery of two hand-raised budgies. We drove up yesterday evening to check them out. We came home with a new bird, a small temporary cage, some new toys, and some new veggie-enriched food.

The new bird is very young, barely fully-fledged. Her cheek patches are still stick feathers, and her vent is bare. She seems to be a climber. Because she was reared by a small breeder, she’s already hand-tame and used to finding food in a cage, which should allow us to start introducing the two birds this week rather than having to tame her first.

She’s much more active than Chester was when we first got him, less scared of her new environment.

Photos and video on Flickr!

(Note that in general, if you get a new bird you should quarantine it for 30 days in case it has any illness that can be passed on to the rest of your flock. In this case, since new ‘keet is from an independent breeder and the same store, seems good and healthy, and Chester is robustly healthy too, we’re risking early introduction.)

Just got a robocall that said "is sending you a hey cosmo blast, press 1 to hear the message". That’s right, no indication of who, it just started with the word "is".

For obvious reasons, I didn’t push 1.

Google searches suggest that the company responsible is http://www.heycosmo.com/

On the off chance someone I know tried to use that site to send me a message: it failed.

My money’s on someone trying to use it to spam, though.

A quick reminder of my media empire (as Ed put it):

• This is the personal web site, for writing about politics, parakeets, back trouble, weird dreams, and the like.
• Over at lpar.ATH0.com is the work web site, for writing about computers, programming, IBM, and business.
• Random links are posted (with comments) to http://delicious.com/metamatic.
• The day-to-day trivia of random thoughts and info about what I’m doing get posted to Twitter.
• Blog postings that I read and think are worth sharing are shared via Google Reader.
• Photos are posted to Flickr.

Some or all of the above also make their way into Friendfeed and Facebook. I don’t post directly to Facebook much, because its API is horrible and bits of it are walled off.

All of the above have web feeds so you can subscribe.

Chester has continued to be well-behaved, so we’ve let him keep his flight feathers. He flies around, but he lands in places we’ve taught him are safe–windowsills, his play gym, and so on.

He now likes to come out of his cage most days. He’ll typically want to sit with me for an hour or so when I’m working.

Weekends, we’ve been sitting on our back deck with him, by taking his cage outside. Sunlight is good for parakeets: they are tetrachromat and can see ultraviolet, so it helps their mood. Also, when they preen, they spread a chemical from their preening gland on their feathers; sunlight then causes a reaction which produces vitamin D, which they then lick back up next time they preen.

As far as training goes, Chester will now fly to my arm when I call him. He’s also good about being taken back to his cage when necessary.

We’ve purchased a larger cage, a flight cage big enough for 3 budgies. We’re going to get him a budgie friend. Also, a lamp with a daylight bulb for winter, when it’s too cold to spend time outside.

The problem started on Sunday morning. My back felt a little stiff, but not unusually so given the weather. The day continued in a relaxed and pleasant way, with coffee, sunshine, and then some moderately satisfying games of Team Fortress 2.

At 7pm, I went to get up off the couch and get a drink, and realized that something was badly wrong. My back was sore and stiff. I used the heat pad for a while, took some aspirin, and had an early night.

Around 2 or 3 in the morning, I woke up. I needed the bathroom. I remember when I was younger, I had a camel-like ability to drink lots, then go for a long time without using the bathroom. These days, I can’t seem to sleep unless my bladder is completely empty.

I swung my legs out of the bed, and searing pain shot through my body. I tried to stand, and it got worse. I decided that standing erect was overrated, and affected a homo habilis stagger for my trip to the bathroom.

As I engaged in joyless micturition, a diffuse pain spread up and down my back. I leaned forward, gasping slightly, and put some of my weight on the cabinet above the lavatory. Finally, the deed was done, and it was time to make my way back to bed. I turned, clenched my jaw against the stabbing pain, and began the journey.

The bathroom seemed to have become rather larger than I remembered it, and was gently spinning around me. As I reached the doorway, pain shot through me and I collapsed to my knees with a gasp. Everything seemed to be turning pale white, and it felt as though I was packed in cotton wool. I could hear movement from the bedroom, but it was a long way away and very muffled. I began to hear a ringing noise in my ears.

I realized I was moments away from unconsciousness, and wondered why. I tried breathing deeply, in case that would help get more oxygen to the brain. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly. Someone was grasping my shoulder and one of my arms. I felt a wave of nausea, and then my skin prickled and gained what felt like a coating of sweat for no readily apparent reason.

I felt like I was dying. The breathing didn’t seem to be helping, and it felt like I had been doing it for a good part of a minute now. I couldn’t hear anything but the ringing noise; no heartbeat, no pounding of blood, no breathing.

There was no pain, either, just the feeling of cold bathroom floor tiles against my skin. It was quite relaxing. I remembered a similar feeling from my kidney stone experiences, and the time I passed out in the office restrooms. I brought my mind back to the present. I was tempted to lie down and enjoy the cool tiles on my face, but then I remembered where I was. If I was about to die–and it definitely felt like a possibility–I was damned if I was going to do it on the bathroom floor.

I think I said the word "no", and the word "bed". There may have been some other words, but I couldn’t hear what I was saying. The hands helped me up, and I threw everything I had into a last ditch attempt to propel myself across the impossibly large bedroom.

I found the bed, and with a last lightning-bolt of pain I pushed and dragged myself onto it. I lay there, panting. The whining noise faded away, and my skin suddenly felt cold in the night air.

Later that morning, brief experiments demonstrated that I was unable to sit or stand. Or at least, not without levels of pain that I expected would lead to a return to cotton wool world. I could crawl, but there wasn’t really anywhere worth crawling to that didn’t require sitting or standing.

Past episodes of back pain have been ameliorated by acupuncture. By coincidence, on Saturday we’d had dinner with an acupuncturist friend from Dallas. I had sent a message Sunday evening, but by then she had returned home.

It turned out, however, that another friend is an acupuncturist. She was able to make a house call. Afterwards, I was able to stand up and walk downstairs. I had some lunch and showed off my new bipedal abilities. Then it was time for the prescribed heat-and-cold therapy.

Heat therapy is something I’ve always found extremely helpful. My body likes heat. Cold is a different kettle of frozen fish. I ran a bath, trying to get the water temperature as close to the prescribed 68F as was possible, given that the only thermometer we had that had an appropriate scale was designed for steaming milk. The water felt tepid but not cold, at least until I got into it, at which point I remembered how much I hate getting into swimming pools.

I made sure that at least my back was submerged, and started the timer on my watch. About 15 minutes later, I noticed my teeth were chattering, and I still had 5 minutes to go. I told myself that it was this or more agonizing pain, and stuck it out. Then I dried off, got into bed, and turned on the heat pad.

It took a good deal longer than 20 minutes for me to stop shivering, and longer still before I felt able to contemplate more cold. The second time around, I opted to use a cold pack, so the rest of me could stay warm. That worked.

So that’s been my day, alternate heat and cold on my back, trying to read a book or watch TV to take my mind off of it. It’s time for sleep now, and I can still sit and stand, though going from one to the other is tricky. I’ll probably need a followup with my usual acupuncturist.