Wife Lila’s best friend is a gal I’ve nicknamed Crazy Nancy. They’re a great pair. I love to listen to them laugh and cut up when they’re together.
She knows every dirty joke ever written, recorded, told, drawn or mimed and uses them in her job as a massage therapist. She delivers the punchline at the same time that she dives into a tight muscle with talons of steel, rips it out of your body, raps it against the wall two or three times, then manages to reinsert it into your body.
Crazy Nancy thought I should have a mascot to ride along on my bicycle, so she got me Hula Cat to ride on my handlebars back in ’06. Hula Cat had an upper torso joined to her feet of clay by a set of springs that caused her to bob and gyrate. Too much, in fact, to stay in one piece on my bike.
Medically unsanctioned joint repair
I performed an impromptu and medically unsanctioned joint repair, but it was obvious that she wasn’t going to be able to withstand the rigors of bicycle touring.
Crazy Nancy replaced Hula Cat with Hula Parrot. Rather than subjecting her to the same dismemberment suffered by Hula Cat, I retired her to my book shelf at Palm Beach Newspapers. Feeling guilty that she wouldn’t be able to see the world from my bike, I thought I should at least give her a 51-minute tour of her new home. Being the telecommunications manager, I had access to many areas off-limits to the public and most employees, so you, like her, get to see what’s behind the curtain of my old employer.
Hula Parrot’s tour of Palm Beach Newspapers
Hula Parrot got to visit the roof, systems rooms, the telephone switch room, my office, the food editor’s office (that’s the one with junk stacked to the ceiling), the ice machine, a waste dumpster, the cafeteria, a time clock and some other out-of-the-way places. They were shot with an inexpensive point-and-shoot camera on a lark, so don’t look for great technical quality or artistic import.
My theory is that everybody is too busy celebrating or recovering from the holidays to spend much time reading my blog, so I’m going to post these photos to fill in the time and space until things get back to normal. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.
I shall never doubt your ability to come up with seductively mindless trivia to captivate the idle human mind! Your parrot reminds me of the world tours performed by certain kidnapped yard ornaments, such as gnomes!
This is the most hilarious thing I have seen. I forget the exact details, but vaguely remember my brother had a plastic flamingo that was kept secret from one of the favorite office workers. Other office members would travel with it for photos and then send her the anonymous vacation updates from the flamingo in whatever locale they visited. This went on for ages. great fun.
Ken, technically you gave the electrons a very interesting life by nudging them onward to create the unique images yu present here.
Electrons only die when they undergo unbelievebly high levels of stress that can only be generated with unbelieveably high levels of electrical current and similar levels of magnetic fields that can only be generated by super-conductors.
Just the geek in me coming to the surface again…
Keith, You don’t know how stressful it is for electrons to get together and compare notes?
What were you used for? “I was part of a CT Scan that saved a 4-year-old’s life.” “I was part of the pixel in the upper left corner of a Pulitzer-prize winning photo taken under fire in Iraq.”
“I was part of a guitar-picking toy parrot in a picture snapped in a random corner of a shrinking newspaper.”
You think an admission like that wouldn’t make you want to die of shame?
you really don’t have enough to do, go for a ride and then take one of those famous power naps, and leave the poor chicken alone…….
Doesn’t any one recogized the true victim in all this? Poor Hula Parrot – oh the shame!
Ken, you need to get the Travelocity gnome to travel with the Hula Parrot.
Ken,
One of my new year’s resolutions was to enjoy the time in my less busy schedule to become more fluent on my computer and enjoy catching up on all the info on friends and family in your blog. All these years and I never knew the Hula Parrot! Oh! What I have missed?!?
The armadillo is beginning to show up in SE Missouri, but I think you’re going to be safe from Hula Parrots for a few more years.