Memorial Weekend

This past weekend I spent a couple days at my mother's house. The plan was only to spend Sunday night with her and then go to work from there and then stay Monday night too. However, I found out ELVIS COSTELLO was going to be in Dallas playing with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Now I understand that not everyone in the world is as much of a FREAK for ELVIS COSTELLO as I am but you would think if I offer to pay for the tickets, people would want to go. No one. Seriously people? Free concert (to you anyway!). I finally convinced my mother to go by promising to come Saturday afternoon and staying the weekend. It turned out to be a wonderful plan!

I wish, wish, wish I had at least one picture of the concert but, alas, I do not. My mom was freak out about someone seeing me and us getting kicked out. Then, at the end she said, "You should have taken a picture at the very end like those other people did."
"But, mom, when I said I was going to, you about tackled me in order to make sure I didn't."

I paid $200 for the tickets. That is the price I didn't pay last time he came, because he came with the Police and I swore I was not going to pay those outrageous prices just because some 80s band got back together. Yes, I like their music too, but COME ON people. I guess things are different when I'm thinking about where I'm going to sit and the fact that my entire two hours will be staring at ELVIS COSTELLO! I love him.

I could have paid for a seat in the chorus loft. If you've never been to the Symphony, then you should know that is the place behind the orchestra. If I was going to the listen to a symphony that'd be great. Cheap seats right behind the orchestra are pretty good, even if you can hear too much of the percussion. Besides, I've always liked the drummers (hehehe). But for the guy I love more than all other singers in the world EVER...it's not good enough. I want to be looking in his face. I couldn't get seats on the floor at all but I could get box seats practically over top his head. So I did, and stared at ELVIS COSTELLO all night! It was grand. My mom was a little unnerved by the fact that we could drop to our deaths if we moved wrong, but I figure it's all in the price of seeing ELVIS COSTELLO.

Now before my grand adventure seeing my music idol, I had to bring all the animals to my mom's house. Poor Lucina. I knew she wouldn't be getting much out time there since my mom also has two dogs and they're not used to being around a bird, so I made sure she got to spend the whole morning having momma time without the dogs. They got to be locked up for awhile.

She loves to cuddle up to my chin while I scratch her neck. One of these days I'm going to get video of her bumping my chin with her beak. This is how she asks for me to scratch her neck. BTW, she doesn't have "red eye" from the flash, she really does have red eyes. The flash freaked her out and she flew away before the next shot:

A few years ago I bought her a wonderful cage, which you can partly see in these pictures. All the bird experts say you have to get your bird acclimated to the new cage, that they'll freak out if you just stick them in before the used to it. So I brought it home and placed it beside the old and let her out to explore on her own just as they say. She went right to it and sat on top and never went back to the old one. So much for experts. To be fair, the old one was TINY. When I saw them side by side, I felt so bad for making her stay in there for so long!

Poor Lucina! Her old cage is at my mom's house so I don't have to lug that huge thing around when we go to visit. This is right after we got there on Saturday afternoon.

She looks so sad!

"Won't you let me out?"

Later the dogs got to go out. If you missed the story I told about Loki and the mouse in the house (my old house, thank goodness), then you just won't get how crazy he is for other other creatures. I'm not sure if the breed or simply because he practically lived on his own for the first two years of his life. Aurora's not like that. In any case, my mom's neighbor is the cat lady. Not only does she have an absurd number of cats, but none of them are fixed so of course she gets a new one every day. Loki HATES cats. He spends the entire day staring at the breaks in the fence waiting for a cat to bark at.

At some point on Sunday afternoon, everyone was outside and a squirrel was in the yard. All the other dogs went nuts barking at the squirrel, trying to get it. Loki was doing this:

And he stayed there.