She loves her home, but… She lives with Charlie, her African Grey parrot, on the top floor of a shortish condo building in south Florida. Normally, it’s a nice, quiet (well, quiet except for Charlie’s monologues), clean (except for the occasional seed Charlie rejects and tosses out of his cage and onto the floor in disgust), dry place with a nice view of a slice of the Atlantic Ocean. Lately, it has been none of those.
For quite some time, she’s found a puddle on the floor just inside the slider to her little deck every time it rains. And this is south Florida, people; it rains a lot. So she called the Maintenance Guy (one of the perks of living in a condo; you get Guys to deal with this and that), and he called somebody else who called somebody else. And after much examination and rumination, it was determined that her slider wall was leaking. No shit, Sherlock. She could have told them that.
Repairs are underway, repairs that will take about a month, they tell her. Wonderful. Seems that rain has gone not only all over her floor, it has also gone all over the inside of her wall. They have to remove the slider, remove a good portion of the wall, and start all over again (more effectively this time, she hopes).
And so now, what once was quiet is now noisy as hell, what with the repair crew banging and sawing and yelling back and forth from 8:30AM-4:30PM. It could be worse, she supposed, but they take an hour for lunch, and the condo rules make them leave at 4:30PM.
What once was clean is now not clean. Now it’s all sawdust and dirt and…
And what once was dry has turned out to be not so dry. To make matters worse, as they work on the “not dry” problem, that wall is pretty much open to the weather, covered only by one of those attractive blue tarp things. If it rains before they close up the wall again… A month? It will rain.
What once was a nice view of a slice of the Atlantic Ocean is now a view of, well, the aforementioned attractive blue tarp.
So right now, she’s not loving her home so much. There’s only one positive thing that’s come from this whole adventure. The bird has learned to swear in several languages.
Swearing in multiple languages is a rite of passage for bird, beast and baronness alike!
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry that your sanctuary is not peaceful or properly your own- that is a violation of personal space, in my book.
May the time fly by on falcon wings and quiet and inspiration replace the sound of construction, soon- fiction or not.
Somehow, a bird that can swear in several languages has a certain ... appeal. I hope all that is fixed soon. At least before the new vocabulary pushes out all the old vocabulary.
ReplyDeleteTi and Lou: I have to admit that both the bird (and its vocabulary, which may well be larger than mine, and I can't do sound effects either!), and the repair work belong to a friend. But I've gotta tell you, this is one cool bird. It's very disconcerting to sit in one room having a conversation, and hearing yourself in another room having a lengthy phone conversation.
ReplyDeleteGotta love those African Greys...when I worked at the vet's office years back, one clients Grey would come in and waddle back and forth across the top of my desk and say..."O, my liver!! O,my liver..." and then pretend to faint. It was hysterical...
ReplyDeleteI hate these kind of repair jobs....
I think I could fancy a bird like that to liven up the days. But I'll pass on the blue tarp, thanks! May the weather gods be kind to you while you wait...
ReplyDeleteAkannie: I laughed along with you. How funny!
ReplyDeleteJinksy: The good news is, the tarp is not mine. The bad news is, neither is the bird.