Jim Smith at Unfreezing has asked for more Lucy stories.

She's at my left hand now, drying after her bath. She is standing on a small perch in front of her personal fan heater. She has a bath three times a week under the sprayer in the kitchen sink. Lucy looks like this after a bath. Eclectus are not as dusty as some parrots. Regular baths are recommended to hydrate their feathers, though. Her natural habitat is the rain forest.

She spent a long time this afternoon chattering away. Her vocabulary is not expanding very fast, but she has one new thing -- she imitates the ring of the telephone, then answers it, "Harro?" Very disconcerting to son Michael when he stays over.

Lyman tells me she was a good girl while I was away, but by Sunday she began to think that I wasn't coming home and started to pine. She wouldn't eat, and moved listlessly around her cage area all day. Now she'll be accompanying us on our trips to Dallas.

Ah, there goes one of those big loud yawns. Never thought about birds yawning before Lucy. Certainly never thought of them making noise when they did so. All that chattering must have tired her.

After she dries, she'll get a treat of seeds, then we'll put her to bed about 9:30. She'll sleep the night through, and wake around 8:30 in the morning.