Personal trainer

Thomas has a painful condition that necessitates that he workout every day to help ease the pain. When he's able to rise early, he does this in the morning when the parrots are sleeping. However, he's been pushing the snooze button on his alarm clock, which means the workouts are moved to after work.

This makes the parrots (well, Rocky and Max) happy as they love the basement. I don't know why they like it down there so much. They're not allowed to eat and nothing particularly special happens. However, if Max sees me heading towards the basement stairs, she immediately flies over, and has managed to squeeze her body through the closing door.

Rocky has a perch right next to the elliptical machine.

Max doesn't have a perch and she's only allowed down there when I'm visiting him because we don't want her flying off and getting into trouble (our basement is not parrot-proofed!) She loves hanging out on our equipment, whether it's in use or not. When she flies here, we joke that she's his personal trainer.

I have mentioned in previous posts that I will launch my flying parrots and tell them to go somewhere, but I've never shown what I meant. "Launch" can be a word with somewhat negative connotations, and that's not the case here. Plus, if I try to make them go somewhere they don't want to go, they just do a U-turn and return to me.

This is a short video of me launching Max to one of her favorite places -- my treadmill.

Back upstairs, Rocky is back in nesting mode. The entire living room had been swept and new newspaper set out the night before. All of this destruction happened in about two hours (and was cleaned up again shortly after this video was taken). We're fine with it since he just destroys toys, wood pieces, and newspaper, but I've had to drastically increase my sweeping duties!