i love halloween

i love seeing how many people downtown will actually have the balls to indicate in ANY way that today is a holiday. not too many this year sadly... but i will strut around in my devil ears and all the stuffy accountants at PwC can talk to my 50 pull up/7 rope climb biceps if they have anything to say about it.

in the words of the AMD, "LA LA!"

The continuing saga of serafina pekkala...

This morning serafina pekkala got entangled in a stray piece of birdie toy. It was rather upsetting.

While packing my bag for the day, I heard a ruckus by cage #2, and looked up to see what looked like a run-of-the-mill spat between serafina and terfle. It was a little more flappy flap flap than usual, but not a big deal, so I continued my packing. Suddenly, I heard intense weird spastic wing flapping and looked up in time to see serafina freaking out on the top of the cage. She tried to launch up into the air and seemed to be somehow fiercely returned to the cage – like a smackdown. I put my bag down to investigate when suddenly she lurched off the side of the cage and fell straight down like a bungee jumper, flapping her wings and squawking the whole time. I, of course, was cool as a cucumber and screamed, “Serafina, No!!!!!” and tried to grab her. By now I had realized that there seemed to be some strange blue string that had somehow gotten unraveled from a birdie toy and wrapped around her… and through the wing flapping and general freaking out, it looked like it was possibly around her foot. Ok. “Breathe Arwen, breathe.” I knew that I had to get a hold of her, because every time she freaked out and flapped, she seemed to be pulling the blue string tighter. Through all of the, “it’s okay serafina, it’s okay, calm down, etcs”, I managed to yell, “Mr. Tart, help!”, which I’m sure freaked the shit out of him as he had JUST gotten out of the shower. He yelled, “What?!?!?!?” I yelled, “Help! Serafina!” And he came running. So by now, I have a hold of the poor little birdie, but I don’t have a free hand to sever the blue string so that I can at least walk away from the cage. Dave comes sprinting into the living room buck naked and takes in the situation quickly by, well, just looking at it, as well as through my helpful gasps of “serafina…caught…holding…ow…string…break…”. Ok. So Mr. Tart breaks the blue string about 4 inches from her body and I’m able to sit down on the couch with her for a bit just holding her with my hands and shielding her head. (When birdies have a fright or are sick or stressed, you are often told to put them in a darkened room.) We sat there on the couch together quietly…. breathing in unison. She had been so scared that she was still letting me hold her without a fight. And it struck me. It struck me so intensely. How can anyone think that these creatures do not have any capacity for feeling? Specifically – fear. Watching serafina freak out, desperately trying to get away from this thing that she did not understand… this thing that had captured her… and then feeling her go into a state of shock… and then waiting with her while her elevated heartbeat had a chance to go down a bit… well – it was all very traumatic because it was traumatic for her. Just as traumatic as if something similar had happened to me or you or a small child. Just as traumatic as it must be for a possum caught in a steel trap or a dolphin caught in fishing net or a monkey trapped in a tiny cage. Perhaps it makes me sound like a leftist west coast tree-hugging loony, but I was there and I felt it.

Anyway. Once dave got some pants on, he came back and we were able to assess the situation. The string was not around her foot. It was looking like maybe it was the wing, so we passed her between us as we tried to figure out a way to open her wing, while holding her. Then Dave was able to get a good grip on her while I got hold of the string and realized, holy crap, it had been around her little birdie neck! I pulled the string off gently and we got her back in the cage where she immediately started huffing and preening intensely. Within 5 minutes, she was still preening, but also seemed to be animatedly recounting her story to the other birdies.

Poor serafina – she’s already been through so much. Hopefully, she is fine. It’s always hard to tell with the birdies; it’s their natural instinct to hide illness. But at the end of the day it could have been a lot worse. Thank god I was in the room when it happened and thank god Dave was not feeling modest.

stupidly hard and overwhelming...

...was the choosing of new headshots. since i asked for opinions, i got them. and they were ALL different. ALL over the place. but sarita pointed out to me recently that i neglected to actually share the outcome with anyone. so here goes....

I think it will be this one and in color:



I also got this one as a second choice (or as dave and i like to call it, the 'thank you so much for purchasing my brilliant first novel' headshot):



and finally, I decided to fork over the bucks and buy a third image (there were two included with the shoot) and go with this one in case I ever record my own album. dave and i think that it's a pretty good album cover shot. i think it makes me look a bit old. but perhaps it's time to get over that. it also perhaps looks a bit more like the person who writes all these weird songs about childhood friends being abducted into the woods and old crotchety men who throw themselves down wells and little girls who unknowingly drown puppies:




my photographer was stephanie at: www.creativeportraiture.com

Yosemite speaks for itself...

50 pulls of pain

OMIGOODNESS. Today in my Aerial Conditioning Class we did 50 pull-ups. That was basically the class: to use all of our time, if needed, to complete the assignment of 50 pull-ups.

This was partially MY fault, as last week I asked Emily (our teacher) how best to get over my 5 pull-up hump. I got from 1 pull-up to 5 pull-ups in a few months and have been stuck there ever since. I cannot seem to push out a 6th no matter what the circumstances. She said that when she got to that point, she started to do 50 a day, up until she could do 10 in a row easily. She had been told by a circus person that an aerialist should have 3 sets of 10 pull-ups. period. she took this seriously at the time. since then, she has decided that it is really just a silly thing, but that having a set of 10 IS important. and 50 a day will help with that. So…fast forward to this week. none of the intense stretching, rope climbing, trapeze or rack exercises. oh no. pull-ups upon pull-ups upon pull-ups.

i fared pretty well. was the second in the class to finish (one girl stayed two ahead of me the whole time). did 10 in the first set (first five alone, second five slightly assisted is how that works). 8 in the second. 6 in the third. (here is where she stopped helping us.) 5 in the fourth. 5 in the fifth. 5 in the sixth (this was where it started to get REALLY bad - as is 'holy shit, where are my arms i cannot feel them?!?!? kind of bad....'). 5 in the seventh. 3 in the eighth and 3 in the final. I didn't really know where to pull from by the time I hit fifty and think I was actually pulling myself up with my abs and my ass at that point.

The bonus for the two of us who finished ahead of everyone was to do these awful leg lifts against mats whilst everyone else took their sweet time finishing their 50 pull-ups. That was almost as bad as the pull-ups. Whew.

I cannot imagine what this will feel like tomorrow.