The Periphery of the Mind

So....

Tuesday afternoon I came home and checked on the canaries. They all looked fine, except Esmerelda. She was puffed up, breathing heavy, and looking stressed. And one of her eyes were swollen shut and she had some reddish gunk on her beak. It was really rather scary. Looking back though it's rather amusing that it took two adults to force medicine down a little bird's beak, but it did. She's doing better now, and her eye seems to be almost back to normal; I'm certain she can see out of it at least. Every time we pulled her from her cage, Casanova (who's in the cage next to her) got very upset and vocal about it. And every time we returned her, he would sing and sing. If nothing else, she seems to be warming up to him, and he seems to have stopped fixating on Juliet.

Speaking of which, Juliet laid another egg. Possibly a late fourth for her last clutch. The Professor's trying to return the first three eggs back to the nest, and Juliet seems to be accepting the one added today. Assuming they hatch, and we can get some other clutches this year, we could be making a nice profit by spring of '10 and pure profit from then on. So hopefully that will pan out.

A big stumbling block to all this though is that the Professor and I are hoping to list our house for sale by the first of June, or maybe even sooner. And we hope it'll move quick. Which could be good for us, but bad for breeding little birds. If nothing else, paint fumes and the like will be a major consideration. Tonight we're meeting with the realtors for dinner and then they're going to tell us all the things we need to fix, and all the things we can let slide. You actually want to leave some things alone, so that the potential buyers can dicker with you and feel like they've gotten a deal when they ask for repairs (or more accurately repair money). Major stuff will be fixed of course, but there's not too much of that on the house left. We've already replaced the furnace and the water line, and the gutter will be replaced by this weekend.

On a related note, I'm selling my old crap. I'm not making a profit (the stuff I could sell at a profit I'm keeping), but I'm still doing better than if I tried to sell it in a yard sale. To a large extent I look at it as reducing clutter and stuff to move as being worth something too, so I don't mind so much.

Labels: birds, moving