paint the sky with stars

I just found out that my bird Iris died last night. We'd had her since I was in elementary school. No idea quite how old she was, at least 15 years though. She was quite the character. My mom called her a Lab in the form of a bird: always hungry, always wanting to be on someone's shoulder. She could be rather loud at times and really was ridiculous (she used to walk around on the ground, go up to Shadow, our Lab in teh form of a Lab, and hiss at him, even though she was the only who went over to him...she would also go over to the brick fireplace and eat it...and we discovered that birds must be able to see colour, because she only ate the red power button the VCR remote...she also did quite the number on the cord for the powerpack of my old school, original Gameboy).

For a good number of years she had a companion, Woody...but he died some time ago. It was really sad afterwards though, because they would often call to each other from different rooms and now Iris would still call to him but obviously he couldn't answer.

So yeah...pretty down about this, even though she had a good life, decently-long for a cockatiel (I've seen a few different age expectancies, generally anywhere from 15-25 years, and she was definitely somewhere in there). Much longer than the other birds we had (don't know how Woody was and my first bird, Chris, died when he was only one from illness). She actually had gone blind in one eye, which made flying a bit difficult...she flew into a few walls and other things that I noticed, so generally was staying in her cage a lot more.

RIP Iris.