Parrot encounter Mar 14, 2007
While in Hawaii, Wendy and I were walking down the street in the little town of Kona, and we stopped at the entrance to a store because a beautiful red parrot was perched on a female shopper's shoulder.  Her husband was taking her picture, so I stopped and took a picture too (of the winged bird, not the other bird [attempt at British humor ... moving on]). 



As I was taking the picture, the bird bit the woman's earring off and held it in its mouth (notice her ear without the earring).  We alerted the store owner, but he said the bird would eventually spit it out.  I watched as the bird destroyed the little piece of metal like it was as soft as a marshmallow.  Concerned for the safety of the bird (again, the winged one), I held out my hand in hopes that the mangled earring would plop out of the bird's mouth.  Instead, the parrot decided to climb up my arm and onto my shoulder. 

It turns out that I'm already used to animals climbing on my shoulder, seeing that my cat Dilbert climbs on me all the time.  He's about 10 or 11 pounds, so this 2- or 3-pound parrot felt like nothing at all.  Plus, it didn't dig it's gigantic claws into me like Dilbert does.  I gave Wendy my camera and she was about to take my picture.  The camera was set on video mode, so she took a 3 second video at first.  When she changed it to camera mode, that's when she took the following picture.  Everything was all fun and games as I had a tropical bird perched on my shoulders and it was sniffing around my head and neck presumably looking for things to lightly gnaw on. 



And that's when it clamped down on my ear.  And twisted.  And clamped down harder.  In a good amount of pain, I carefully reached my hand up to my ear to coax the parrot into releasing its death grip.  Instead, it clamped down on my finger.  But fingers and hands can handle pain pretty well, so I simply moved my hand back down to my side.  So the parrot clamped back down on my ear.  I reached my hand up to my head and covered up both ears as the parrot looked for more things on my head to chew on.  It settled on the little plastic button on the top of my hat.  If you have a hat, go get it and try to pull the button off.  It's impossible.  This parrot tore it off like it wasn't even attached.  And then it chewed the hell out of it.  Thankfully, the guy who had originally been taking a picture of his wife jumped in and persuaded the parrot to get back on its perch (Wendy was off to the side, laughing at me).  I took a few steps back to distance myself from the evil bird and realized that my hat's button was a total loss.  This normally wouldn't be a big deal, but I had just bought the hat 10 minutes earlier because I got bad sunburn on my head the day before.  So it made the parrot attack that much worse. 

So that's the story of my parrot encounter.  In case the picture isn't clear, that wasn't my original pose.  I had been smiling like a child because a parrot was perched on my shoulder.  I was still in mid-smile as the parrot bit my ear and Wendy took the picture.  Ah, Hawaii, home to wild pigs, roaming chickens, and angry parrots. #nature
Digital driver Mar 14, 2007
One of my co-workers referred to another co-worker as a "digital driver".  I'd never heard the term, so I asked him what it meant.  He said it meant the guy drove with either a foot on the gas or a foot on the break.  There was no coasting or in-between.  He was always either speeding up or slowing down.  I've driven behind people like that.  It makes me wish my car had a rocket launcher. 

[For the non-geek, "digital" refers to machines and devices that use binary code (0's and 1's) to operate.  There's no in-between and no other options.  It's either a 0 or a 1.] #travel