I went to see my sister in Lancaster, PA one weekend and when I returned I heard rustling in bags that had food in them. This is when I found out I had mice and a lot of them. I ad mice too when I lived in Chestnut Hill, PA but not this bad. The mice would come in anyway they could find in the Fall in order to be warm and survive till Spring. Even if I removed all possible food sources I still had Tammie, my pet cockatiel. The mice would live off of her seed as they had done in the Chestnut Hill apartment. There I took away her food at night and laid out mouse traps, but the mice kept coming.

At DeSoto Road in Baltimore City I decided to use rat poison. I really didn't think this through properly. Tammie was only 15 years old and cockatiels are known for living 20 to 25 years as domestic pets. It's possible Tammie died of some other gastro-intestinal problem, but I know for a fact it was a gastro-intestinal problem. Tammie was double breasted because she just loved to eat. She did not eat for the two and a half weeks she tried to hang on. I don't even know if she was drinking water but she must have been because she would have never lived two and a half weeks suffering as she was. I tried feeding her with an eyedropper as I did when she was a baby, but she refused to eat. The problem was probably not with eating but with pooping.

What I had not thought about was the mice would walk through and eat the rat poison. This means that the mice would be carrying the rat poison on their paws and because there was nothing to eat, they would be sneaking into Tammie's food dish when I was at class or at work tracking the poison into her food. My thought was Tammie got a small dose of the poison and this is why it took so long to kill her. The vet couldn't do anything for her. My poor Tammie withered away to the point to where I could see the rib cage of this formally healthy fat bird. She also had difficulty breathing and the misery just went on day after day. Tow hours before my Accounting Final exam she died. The bitch with this exam was no one was permitted re-scheduling unless they had proof as to why they couldn't take the exam. The rules were ridiculously stringent to the point of having to show identification for entrance in the exam and being spread out in a lecture hall with many proctors scouting for cheating.

Needless to say I failed the exam because I was not ih the right frame of mind to be struggling with an all inclusive final exam. After the fact, I thought about it and I should have just played my "dead parrot" card: walked into the exam with Tammie in a box, tell them my story, and point to the dead parrot in the box.

Instead I just took it on the chin and re-took the class during the first summer session and low and behold, we didn't have to go through the exam bullshit I went through. Live and learn. Not surprisingly, this was one of those course REQUIRED by the IFSM department in order to get my degree and I never used a single thing I learned in Accounting I or II yet, 12 years later.

The use of Tammie saying, "I'm dead, I'd dead, I'm dead, I'm dead... I'm dead" is a re-contextualization of the lyrics of Bela Lugosi is Dead by Bauhaus, which may be heard by clicking here. It's really just more of my bad sense of humor. It's really not funny because almost 15 years later, it still hurts to think of my poor baby bird's demise. Yes, I got her as a fledgling of 6 weeks old and I had to feed her baby food twice a day for two weeks. The connection between a baby bird is completely different than when they are older.