If you live with a cat, “played with” means “gone forever.” As in, “Where is my pen?” “It fell on the floor and got played with.” If you live with a bird, however, “played with” means, roughly, “torn into little shreds to the point of no longer being recognizable.”
In other news, I’m on chapter five of Iorich (or Your Itch, if you prefer). So far, it’s opening up in front of me in interesting ways. I’m sure I’ll come to hate it later.
Pippin (our Quaker) will seemingly sit quietly on your shoulder and it will only be too late that you notice she has shredded your collar beyond any hope of repair. Of course, right now all the house birds are busy screaming at the outdoor feeder birds. I suspect this is because they discovered I was planning a short nap.
(Happy writing,btw..looking forward to Iorich when it is finished!)
Depends on the bird, and how solid the item is. It might mean “covered in regurgitated bird seed”.
So, so, so very true. Our little Senegal will rip and shred anything we let him near enough for long enough. I adore him so much, but I do have to watch my leather jacket around him. And I lost several small electrical toys to cats ‘playing’ with stuff.
Heh, I’ve got an Umbrella Cockatoo and a Blue Front Amazon, and I’m certain the umbrella once ate a the spare tire from my wife’s car.
Oh, and gratz on the progress. I’m still looking forward to Jhegaaaaaaaaaaala. Do we have an ETA on that one? Maybe I missed the announcement.
I must be one of the luckiest bird owners in the world, as my Amazon eats/destroys something he shouldn’t about once every six months , but outside of a favorite Hello Kitty pen and a stylus for my Wacom, it’s never been a big issue. Both my Amazon and Grey play with their own toys over anything else–they’re favorite destructible toys I make out of old buisness cards (you punch a whole through a stack of them and then run string through them). I’m lucky in that neither are screamers except for occasional early morning hello-fests when they want a bit of attention.
wow…I just babbled a lot. terribly sorry. I blame the coffee.
I really cannot do enough to recommend the business card toy idea: it’s free (if you have friends/relations with old cards) and a wonderful diversion for the curious beaks.
Oh wow… business cards, that’s awesome!
And I do not wish to disparage Syn. He is very good about toys first and preferentially. It is when there are no close toys and the humans aren’t paying attention that jackets become a toy…
I’ve also given him the screw off tops from soda bottles which he’ll happily play with even though he can’t really shred effectively.
If you live with a dog then “played with” can mean a variety of things:
– its in the back yard, soggy and dirty;
– it comes out the other end of said dog a day later;
– its buried; or
– worse, you retrieve it from said dog via a friggin expensive vet bill.
Bruce@4: According to the cover of the Advance Reader Copy in our living room/Steve’s office, you can get your greedy little paws on the next Vlad book in July.
My cat has another definition of play — tear into shreds with teeth and/or do the patented Cat Backpaw Disembowling move. Occasionally to my hand.
A very astute observation. I’ve two cats, and that certainly explains the need to buy half a dozen mice ever year. They tend to mysteriously vanish a day or so out of the package.
My cockatiel likes your books as much as I do! She’s proven this by puncturing the covers and pages of several of them. I really should stop leaving books on the table when she’s out. =)
Someone once told me that skzb’s autographs are equally destructive.
Schwmarf – or you ask dog to give it over and she drops a dead, shapeless, moist thing that used to be a vole… (My mom did that, I swear you could hear her scream a county over, I was in a closed house with the A/C on and I heard her clearly. I went to her rescue, we’d just moved out the the country and she really had a hard time coping with that kind of thing.)
I solved the destructive bird problem by acquiring a Quaker that had had its upper beak removed by an Ecclectus. Enough beak grew back to allow eating but he really cannot bite at all, great for handling and saving our stuff. The high pitched screaming is another matter…..
With hardwood floors, “played with by cat” is roughly equivalent to constant echolocation, particularly in the middle of the night.
The important question is, once you’ve come to hate it, cut, padded, rearranged and put in all the bits you were sure were already there, will you come to like it reasonably well again?
Watching a cat do corners and/or stop when running on hardwood floors is sooo funny.
I’m looking straight at an eviscerated catnip mousey right now. It’s a most superior kind of mouse, highly scented, with a fluffy tail with a bell on it. I should really throw it away and put paid to the catnip scatter on the carpet but what would my poor cat play with then? I couldn’t even say she’d brought it on herself as I suspect that she has not, after ten years, taken to rending and tearing her own mice but that it is the work of a cat door raider, probably the so charming fluffy tailed half grown black tom called Blue who has been playing in our garden of late. Perhaps I should buy two more mice and present one to Blue’s owner — but he’ll only come back for ours once he’s had the guts out of his own.
Never mind, not long til butterfly season brings out my Cami Cat’s real favourite toys, plenty of them for everyone.
You call that avian destruction. Try this:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/florida/sfl-flfvultures0306sbmar06,0,7518593.story
MattM: Our Quaker is the only bird that currently has free run of the house. She choose to never leave the kitchen or one of her perches, or play areas, but who can blame her? In any event, she is a good screamer although if you ignore the screaming she will switch over to screaming words, most often a very demanding “PEEK-A-BOO!”, when that fails she will ramp up the vocals and start stringing together random words. She’s affectionate though and I have lived with the various sounds of birds for too many years to mind or even notice most of the time.
Our two cats, Flitwick and Albus (a Bengal and a Savannah, respectively), usually play with one another, but they both have a thing for plastic drinking straws. Any cup with a straw sticking out is fair game, and with three small kids…
Great to hear about Your Itch! Keep scratching, we’ll keep reading! (Gives new meaning to the writing itch…)
I have ten cats. My house is filled with mice (some of them are just plastic already), colored feathers, key holders in the shape of headless owls, balls and strings. Door holders are hard to find here and our first cat managed to destroy everything fragile before we got the second one. One of the cats has a thing for plastic bags and we have a hard time separating him from them. We lose our calories by fighting for our food and practice constant vigilance by trying to stay away from the cat who likes using our back as a ladder down from the kitchen cupboards.
I just checked amazon and I found out that Gigolo is coming out July 8. The cover is amazing. I can’t wait to read it.
Lewis Himelhoch: Thanks for the link. I have to present a “bird” news story for my ornithology class. This one is perfect!