Parrot Nation

I like a clean environment. I just hate what I have to do to maintain that clean environment. Keerist, what a pain when you have three Greys and a dog.

This is what my dining area looked like when I just had Parker. It doesn’t look like that any more.

And just to set the record straight, I don’t clean because “it’s good for the birds,” although I suppose it is. I do it because I just can’t stand it when my home goes all to hell. I have pretty good standards, although those do tend to change depending on my workload and how much time I have available to keep things up. Today was a day when I sort of had the time to do a pretty thorough job in my Living room/dining room/ bird room/office (LDDRBRO).

Floor soaking to get the poop softened to scrub up.

I’m pretty lucky in that when I absolutely had to replace the grody carpet  in my “LDDRBRO,” which I suppose is pronounced “lidderbro” I went all out and got slate tile. This stuff will last until the next millennium. The damned place could burn down and the floor would be fine. It’s sturdy as hell and cleans up with little more than hot water. If I want to get cute, I throw just a dash of pine cleaner in to make the place smell like it’s been chewing on a pine cone, but that’s just to flavor things up a bit. I could use lemon extract for that tropical feel, or I could get cute with a bit of Old Spice, but the ounce of pine cleaner in a gallon of water is fine with me.

I am also happy to report that it does a bang-up job camouflaging parrot poop, flung vegetables, chunks of wood and African Grey dander. I vacuum and sweep a lot and then I pull out the big guns once a week or so and haul the cages and play gyms around in order to clean up underneath.

Before…. (Save the Feathers!)

Again, I do this for me and not the three complete slobs that created the mess. And I’m not looking for perfection either. I’m looking at, “Can I walk from the couch to the kitchen without wading through “Chop” tossed on the floor?” and “If those people from Hoarders ever came over to evaluate my place, would they laugh at me and tell me I was wasting their time?” So for me, keeping the floor reasonably clear of poop, feathers, dander, and wood chips is what I’m after.  So I’m not totally freaky about it but then again, I don’t let it get so bad I’m getting business cards from cleaning services and professional organizers stuck in my mailbox either.

After…

I used to be really clean. I mean, I remember researching the best way to fold a T-shirt. And of course I found it:

I haven’t yet found a video that explains how to fold parrot toys for storage yet, but as soon as I do, I’ll keep you posted. The way I look at it, those little hellions are going to jazz up my work in about three hours anyway, so why bother. Why bother? BECAUSE I JUST CAN’T STAND IT! That’s why. The place goes to hell and then I’m depressed because the place looks like hell. So in order for it to not look like hell, I have to clean it up.

So I do. I’m telling you, there’s a reason why my byline at times is “I write, I fly, I clean up parrot poop.”  It’s because it seems that the majority of my time is spent doing just those very things. An why? Because 10 minutes after I cleaned my tile and did an absolutely beautiful job, Nyla did this:

Here’s a closeup just in case you didn’t see it:

But I feel good about what I accomplished today. Because this is the amount of crap I got up off the floor, from the play gyms and the trays under the cage grates:

I tried the “Think of all the parrots starving in China.” line on them, but as you can see, it didn’t work. But as the poltergeist hunter said in the movie: