I killed my bird today

I woke up this morning to my bird frantically scrambling around the back of the cage trying to get my attention.  As I tried to will myself into consciousness, I idly wondered if I had given Franny and Zooey water yesterday. Yesterday had been a lost day for me.  My hip had been hurting and it had been a rainy day so I had lolled in bed for most of the day dozing and watching "Bones" and "Bar Rescue." During the day Missy Lu and Moonbeam had snuggled with me in the damp cold. I remember laughing at the birds jumping up and over their top perch over and over, chirping all the while. I should have gotten up at that point to water and feed them but I just burrowed deeper into the pillows and closed my eyes to better listen to them sing. 

Sometime around 5 I pulled myself out of bed to prepare for the coop monthly board meeting and to feed the animals.  The problem was I forgot to water and feed the birds. I got home from my meeting after 10 exhausted and went right back to bed.  Being the terrible parent I am, I again forgot to feed my birds or turn on their heating lamp.  I did watch the recording of "Dancing with the Stars" and "Bletchley Park." During "Bletchley Park" I kept hearing birds singing when people were inside.  I have this new Bose sound system and I thought,  "Wow, this is really good. They captured bird sounds from the grounds." Now I know it was the death song of my poor Zooey. All I had to do was get up off that bed and go look and I might have saved him.

This morning when I did finally get out of the bed and walk across those few feet to the desperate fluttering of Franny, I found a dry water dish, no food, no warming light and Zooey curled up on his side on the bottom of the cage in a nest of grass.  He was still warm when I picked him up. His eyes were opaque and his beak tightly shut so even as I tried to give him water and stoke him back to life he was too far gone to receive help.

 I had filled the water and seed cups before trying to revive Zooey so all the time I was working on him, Franny was devouring food and drinking silently. In fact, even now, hours later, she has not made a sound. She just sits there looking at me accusingly. I can't stand it. She is sitting up there under his body in its shroud rocking back and forth wondering what to do.  I am going to have to find her a mate to help her....

It is now hours later and I have found a bronze wing mannikin song site and played them for her. She really responded to two of them.  I am now going to try to link to the two she liked.

http://www.xeno-canto.org/species/Lonchura-cucullata?&view=3

XC120623

XC116734

She responded to the first with answers and movement and the second by going down and drinking and eating.  Maybe if I can't find her another mate I can play the songs to remind her to eat and drink.  Franny has never been the smartest bulb in the chandelier.  It once took us 8 hours to get her back in the cage because she couldn't figure how to fly back in even though Zooey was coaching her the whole time. 

What is a Bronze Winged Mannikin (Lonchura cucullata) you might ask?  It is a small finch found in the middle to the southern African continent. I bought them because they were the cheapest birds at Petsmart.  It seems as though they are now very rare and extremely difficult to breed in captivity.  Today after much research, I have found only a handful of breeders in the US. No chain pet stores carry them as far as I can tell. So much for finding Franny a companion. They look like this:

The little blackish spot at the top of the wing looks iridescent green in real life, hence the name Bronze Winged Mannikin. The body color looks more grey than brown as well. On my computer screen, the picture is nearly life sized at 3 1/2 inches. They are tiny, tiny birds. I have called all over asking about them and no one has any.  It is like they wee the flavor of the month and then they disappeared.  What am I to do with my little solitary Franny? Let her die of a broken heart?

So I have continued to search as I have been writing this piece in hopes I would have a happy ending but life isn't like that is it? Life is life and some days are just dark and dreary and never get any better. The management never got back to me about what to do with his remains so I think we will bury him in the big flower pot with the hibiscus in the corner of the patio. He will go back to nature soon enough and nothing will be able to get up here to dig him up. I can't leave him on top of the cage much longer and I don't want to put him in the fridge.  I am just so sad because I know this is just the first of so many losses that are so sure to quickly come. Moonbeam is not well. Parents of us all are precarious. Friends, lovers,and even ourselves are at that precipice of death.  Death happens in the blink of an eye when the choice to roll over or get up could make all the difference in the world.

Running for BOD and Southwest Modernism

Ok, we are 4 days into the campaign and things are getting NASTY!  The old man (CF) has decided he doesn't have to follow the rules set down by election committee because I think he can't remember them.  So far he has published a campaign flyer with the logo of Harbour Square in a prominent position and posted on the community bulletin board.  He has also publicly admonished me for "electioneering" at the gatehouse...which is not against the rules.

The election committee has been decimated because the only non-board member has resigned saying that her job finished after the candidates' forum.  The candidates forum went fairly well.  Although there were 10 candidates, everyone got their say.  The moderator kept statements to 3 minutes and questions and answers were kept to one minute each. Most questions were for all the panelists so there was a pass the microphone down the line kind of procedure   There was also a groundswell of hope for community involvement and openness of governance that were 2 of my main planks.  The 3 standing board members had their feet held to the fire more than once.  Only once was really wrong information given to the public by a panel member. He was corrected in due course by both audience and other panelists. (Guess who?)

Tonight we have our informal "meet and greet" where alcohol meets politics   I hate this part.  Although I probably do better at this kind of thing where I can respond to inquiries instead of get up and sell myself, the personal interaction is painful for me.  I always feel so awkward and silly looking.  What do I do with my hands? Should I drink beer or wine?  Will my blood sugar plummet and make me stupid? What if no one wants to talk to me? My back is hurting and I have to stand all night, will I be able to keep a smile on my face? How do I correct the other guy's lies without making him look like a fool?

I just want to make this a better place to live  I want to make sure that the management is doing its job.  I want to make sure that the board is organized and professional and responsive to the community. I want to give everyone who wants to volunteer a chance to contribute. Is that naive?

Harbour Square was granted Historic Status today by the DC Historic Preservation Review Board.  In their comments, they stated they would like to establish Southwest Modernist District. After hearing a lecture on Tuesday evening by speakers Richard Longstreth, of George Washington University, and Todd Ray, of Studio Twenty Seven Architecture, I feel the significance of our neighborhood deserves that designation.
Did you know this was the first planned integrated housing in the United States? Beyond that the areas of openness combined with mixed high-rise and low-rise buildings make it unique. It was a major laboratory of modern architecture and landscape design in the 1960's.  According to Longstreth Southwest is the "fullest and richest manifestation of modernist design in the world." The only other intact area left is Lafayette Park in Detroit. Unfortunately, not everyone at Harbour Square agrees and that is going to be the next big fight.....Sigh.

I forgot to talk about one aspect of the run for the Board of Directors that I am not looking forward to one bit.  On 23 August of 2010, I wrote a long blog about about a cranky old man who was giving me grief about my roof garden. Guess who is running for the Board? Thought you might want to check him out.  He hasn't improved with the years but he has managed to get quite a following by quoting lots of figures and folder-all from his time as an Army Missile contractor. Now I would call him the "Crazy F*^k".

Oh, and my garden on the west end?  VP, the Queen Bee, of the Board, another candidate, had it hauled off as being an obstruction in the dead of night and wouldn't allow the management to tell me where it was for 2 months.  All the apple trees and blueberries died and I have never gotten my trellises back.  She used the removal of that garden as an excuse to dismantle a lovely garden that had been assembled on the empty roof of the 510 Building and now the only people farming on the roof are the Queen Bee and "CF"

To see the original posting go back to the date above or copy and paste the address below.  Someday I will figure out how to do a link. maybe I did!

.http://didoesdc.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-stupid-fk.html

Now I really have to do my flyers for tomorrow

Why I Run...How to Campaign

It is that time of year again.  Harbour Square Elections are just around the corner.  I have decided to run for the Board of Directors for the 3rd time since I moved in in the fall of 2008. Why do I continue to expose myself to this kind of exquisite abuse? I have been asking myself this question all week.  I need to come up with my campaign slogan and get my letter written to the membership this weekend if I stand any kind of chance and yet my thoughts are still so muddled and confused.

I did choose my business card logo. I have been introducing myself and handing them out at the gatehouse in the evenings this week.  I have 3 owls on a branch.  I guess because I will always be watching and thinking. But that is as far as I have gotten.  Maybe if I think out loud I can make some sense of why I want to do this thing.

I know what I do NOT want.  I do not want more of what we have had for the last 2 years.  We have had a board of directors that has thrived in secrecy and absolute power.  They have abolished all volunteer committees and taken over all functions of our once thriving and cooperative cooperative.  No longer is there a feeling of consensus building and community.  All we have is fear and mistrust.  We live in a prison like atmosphere where a few, very few, rule the roost like a fox guarding the hen house. The management has driven off any kind or well meaning employee and all the rest must report any exchange with a resident to the management or be reprimanded.

Even though we are located in the District of Columbia, we were incorporated in Delaware  so our Board insists we don't need to follow the laws of either State or District.  They are a rouge entity unto themselves. They hold executive sessions where no minutes are kept and important decisions are made that will affect our coop for years to come. For instance they voted to back the waterfront development in a secret meeting   They also negotiated the contract with the management company in secret with the terms and prices kept secret from the board who was asked to vote on the contract with out the terms being know to all but the President. No copies of the contract were available for review by anyone.  The board also regularly has sessions that constitute a quorum where business is conducted that are not announced and business is conducted that have no minutes kept even though both Delaware and DC law say this is not right.

What I do want to have is a cooperative that is based on open meetings that adhere to the letter of the law. I want to have a board that welcomes input from the owners and incorporates that input into every decision. I want to be a member of the board that does my research to be knowledgeable about every issue that the board is confronted with. I would hope that instead of getting the board books on Friday before a meeting, we would get an informational book at the Tuesday working session the week before the board meeting. I would like to see more owners attend the working sessions and have break out groups where group participation could take advantage of the great wealth of knowledge we have here at Harbour Square. It could be known as brainstorming night where  no idea would be too off the wall to be considered. If it is good enough for the Army, surely it will work for us.

I am a member of CAI (Community Associations Institute), I have worked as a facilitator for the Army Family Team Building Program, I have written constitutions and bylaws for organizations ranging from Officers' Wives' groups to bringing churches current with state law, I have read and understand the DC and Delaware laws governing the common interests and ownership of real estate.

Basically, we all just want to live our lives and be left alone. Too many rules can bankrupt a community.  Look at the case in Fairfax's Olde Bellehaven community.

Feud over sign could force Fairfax's Olde Belhaven to sell square 

 All that happened over 2 inches on a sign.  I don't want that to happen to Harbour Square. With some of the shenanigans that our current and past 2 year's board have pulled, there have been distinct opportunities for exactly this kind of action to have happened here. With 6 openings on the board due to resignations and departures, Harbour Square has a  unique opportunity to go a different direction. We have got to go forward into the future.  Our best assets are our grounds, our roof, and our people. Although the new landscape master plan is a beginning, in past years we have neglected our grounds, squandered our roof , and lost a bunch of people. Let's not continue.

Snow

There is a little snow fluttering down this afternoon. Not enough to disrupt anything and not enough for my tastes. I love the snow. I love the way it blanks out all the evil and ugly things in life. Eva Cassidy is playing on the radio. "The balm that heals the sin sick soul."  That is how I feel about snow.  It covers the earth with its healing cover and all looks whole and bright again. Anything is possible on a snowy night. There is a luminosity of light captured that emanates from fresh fallen snow.  Is it hope? Is it peace? 

Eva Cassidy is one of my favorite artists. She was born here in Washington, DC in 1963 and passed from this life in Bowie, Md in 1996, the year I moved back to DC. . Yesterday would have been her 50th birthday.  She had a lovely voice.  Her recordings continue to be released. You can find out more about her at her webpage: http://evacassidy.org/eva/.  As is usual with many artists, Eva was revered in the UK and Australia.  This web site in England is also a wonderful tribute. www.oaksite.co.uk/bioblue.html 

OK, I think I successfully added a song by Eva to the blog as well. I'm learning.  I meant to do it after this posting but it may appear before.  I'm learning.

Eva Cassidy - What a Wonderful World

Field Mouse on the 8th Floor?

Yesterday I was reading my email when a little brown something caught my eye. I looked over to the pillows by my air vent and saw a field mouse moving with purpose toward the water container I had placed there to try and get some moisture in the air. I saw Miss Mouse ( I always anthropomorphize animals I see) just as she saw me.  Our eyes locked and she scurried back around the leg of the coffee table, under the writing desk, behind The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and disappeared behind my Grandmother's shapely divan. I got up to look for her but she had vanished as quickly as she had appeared. 

Where had she come from? Where had she gone? Had she come in the day before when I had left the patio door in the next room open for some time while I was watering the plants? But if she had, how would she have gotten to the eighth floor?  Had she been living all this time in my Christmas tree? It is now that I must confess that I have not yet taken down my gorgeous tree. It has petrified in place with it's all red decorations that are entirely appropriate for view until Valentine's Day. 

Then I got this horrible thought; she was living in the bottom drawer of the linen chest.  She was living in the drawer that I hadn't been able to open since I moved into the apartment over 4 years ago. She probably had a lovely nest with her babies and had lived there for years and for some reason she had just come out yesterday because it was such a dismal dark day that she had been confused into thinking it was night. She must be subsisting on the bird food that is thrown out by Franny and Zooey, the birds, with their messy habits. If I were to keep the bird detritus clean, I would have to be on 24 hour duty. As it is, I am doing good to sweep up once a day. I bet Miss Mouse has a deal with Missy Lu and Moonbeam that she won't bother them if they don't bother her. After I saw her, I took Moonbeam, the cat over to where she had run. Moonbeam just sniffed and looked at me like,"So what do you want me to do?" Missy Lu, the dog, was laying on the divan watching the whole thing take place. She never moved a muscle.

Anyway, I immediately called the Harbour Square Management office and reported my sighting.  They promised to get right back to me. This being Harbour Square and the fact that our Maintenance scheduling has been taken over by a machine, I was given an appointment for resolution of a week from yesterday ( 6 February).  I guess mice in the building are no big deal to HS Management. I found out about my scheduling from a form email I received late in the afternoon.  I wish that Dolores, the wonderful lady who used to handle maintenance issues, was still here. I guess I will have to handle this problem myself. A good night's sleep always clarifies issues. So this morning I decided I would have to get the bottom drawer out of the linen chest. 

The linen chest had originally been the changing table for my son, Luciano. I found it in a second hand store in  Lawton, Oklahoma in the spring of 1982. It came covered in multiple layers of ugly paint but it was just the right height to change diapers and had 2 wide drawers and 2 small drawers at the top. I got it cheap, cheap, cheap. I used Formby's Paint and Poly Remover to get the paint off because it was supposed to be all natural and gentle for a pregnant person to use.  It turned out to be the best thing I could have done.  It turned out to have been a early American Cherry piece with inlay of a lighter wood and is probably one of my most important pieces. I always thought if Antiques Road show came here, I would take it to be appraised. But time has not been kind to the changing (linen) chest on four spindly legs. It got worm wood when we took it to Germany.  One of it's legs got broken on the move from Kansas to Oklahoma. The final indignity came on the 18th  and final move from 2038 Pierce Mill Rd NW, DC to here.  The bottom drawer got jammed in so tight  that I couldn't get it out.

This morning, I determined that I had to get that drawer out so I could see if Miss Mouse was nested there.  First, I had to remove the top two smaller drawers. That was simple.  I placed them on the Chinese bed in the next room.  Then I got the middle wide drawer out and put it in the other room. The middle drawer is the same size as the bottom drawer. It is 37 3/8" across and 15" wide and 5" deep. Full of table cloths it was no mean feat to pull it out of the case. I accomplished it with some exertion   There would be no way I would be able to get the bottom drawer out with the linens in place. Fortunately., the divider was partially gone. I could  remove the remaining piece and see that Miss Mouse had not built a nest in the bottom drawer.  In a way, I was kind of disappointed. I remember as a kid finding a mouse nest in the kitchen drawer at the farm and how upset my mother was.  Would I have been as upset to find Miss Mouse this morning? Now my job became just another menial housekeeping job.

Later this afternoon, the Orkin guy came and decided that the mouse came from the air vents in the building and that mice are probably all over the place. Great...now I am breathing mouse and will probably get Hanta virus.  And I thought my biggest problem was learning how to upload pictures to my blog.

New Year, New Inauguration, New Feeling

I was waiting for the new year to really get started in my new discipline of writing every day.  I have been doing very well with the twitter regimen.  I tired to write something relevant about my southwest DC community everyday last year.  Even though I wasn't always all that relevant, I did manage to put down a thought or two in 140 characters or less every day.  But Twitter is really a mind killer for writers.  Distilling thoughts to such a fine point, makes the creative juices just dry up after that 140 characters.  My mind is now reduced to the 140 character sound bite. I no longer seem capable of thinking past a certain number of letters to expand on my thought in any relevant way.  Even as I type this I am unconsciously counting the characters.

The other thing that has really bummed me out about my blog is the fact that everyone now has darling pictures and/or sketches to illustrate what they are writing about.  No longer can a person just bare their soul with the written word.  Now we must entertain with cute illustrations and pictures of our surroundings.  I still am having trouble learning how to text pictures I take on my phone.  How can I be expected to upload pictures to a blog or make drawings that I then scan into the computer and upload?

I must say I was totally relieved when President Obama was re-elected in November.  I was one of the few in my family who was happy about the outcome of the elections but I know he is what is best for the country at this time.  I am not naive enough to think that the President is the one who really runs the country.  He is just the one who stands at the head of the country. People look to him for leadership. I personally like his calm manner and steady deliberate way.  He will have to contend with a Congress that was elected from a Gerry-rigged country that sent a majority Republican Congress to Washington from the same counties that sent the President here.  It is a real recipe for disaster, unless....those representatives represent the wishes of the people and not the rhetoric of their party. I think the chances they will do that is slim.

The Inauguration is always a new beginning and I volunteered to work this time as I did in 2009. I was just as excited as I had been when I stood on the Mall in 2009 from 4am until after noon and heard President Barack Hussein  Obama take the oath of office for the first time.  This year I was assigned the Commander in Chief's Inaugural Ball.  I was to be on Access Control and make sure only the right people went the right places.  To get the gig, I had to fill out a long detailed questionnaire online.  I also had to attend a training and walk-through at the convention center where the ball was to take place.  I had to report several hours before the ball began to receive my credentials and final assignment  Everything was very secret and last minute supposedly for security reasons. There is one reason I think it is because they didn't know what the heck they were doing.  At no time during any training, check-in, or before credentialing, did anyone ask for identification, ask me any identifying questions, or in any other was identify that I was the person who had applied for the job or taken the training. I COULD HAVE BEEN ANY JOE BLOW TERRORIST ROAMING FREE IN THE CONVENTION CENTER WITH FREE ACCESS TO THE PRESIDENT AND VICE-PRESIDENT. Fortunately, I wasn't and neither were any of the other 10,000 or so volunteers who the Presidential Inauguration Committee let loose on the public on Monday.....but it does give one pause. Thank God for the Secret Service.

                                                            The view from my balcony

So, I would like to be more active in 2013. I would like to bring a few illustrations to the table. I would like to finally settle my personal conundrum. I hope I can help my community.