(an "upskirt" photo of Elvis,  taken with my cell phone.  The yellow striped tailfeathers are how you tell she's a female standard gray.  A male standard gray has plain gray tailfeathers.)

I'll admit it:  I'm not a very good mother hen to my screwed-up birds.  Both parakeets and cockatiels are flock animals with highly sophisticated  behaviors and communication skills, and I took them away from their own kind to be raised and socialized by yours truly, my idiot boyfriend, and 90s sci-fi shows.  I take full responsibility for their vocabulary of four-letter words and their inability to figure out who is and who isn't an appropriate mate.  I'm a bad role model when it comes to matters psychosexual. 

However, no matter how lonely my nights have sometimes gotten, I've never once humped an oscillating fan.  Not once.

No, that one's all Elvis.

Elvis was bought to be a mate for my male cockatiel, Jerry.  Jerry, on the other hand, thought I was his mate, and it took months before he would even acknowledge her existence, preferring instead to sing to me and to attempt to groom me and to get me to scratch the pinfeathers coming in on his head and to masturbate on a knot of rawhide on the top of the cage a dozen times a day. 

Elvis finally wore him down by, among other things, preening the itchy pinfeathers on his head while he was humping away on the knot and then feeding him partially-digested sunflower seeds immediately afterwards, and only then getting him to half-heartedly preen HER pinfeathers.  (I think this is the birdie equivalent of giving someone a blow job while he watches porn and then bringing him a beer and a sandwich, and then suggesting that maybe sorta some turnabout is only fair play.  Elvis is not exactly a liberated bird.) 

But lately, for reasons I don't entirely understand, Jerry has in recent weeks taken up with Jane the parakeet.  I'm not entirely sure what set this affair off.  I think it must be that she clucks over him after I force him to do something he considers totally beneath his dignity (go to the vet, bathe) and constantly feeds his ego by chirping how big and manly he is.  She also likes to panic him by leaving the cage in the middle of the night in the middle of thunderstorms to go sit on the windowsill.  She's a calculating little thing who, no matter how much bird-proofing I do, figures out how to get in and out of my bookcases and closets in order to lay and abandon eggs, so I wouldn't put some soap-opera level plotting past her.

(Jane comforts a very distraught Jerry after a forced scrub-down.  He'd landed on my plate when I was trying to eat some fish sticks, coated six inches of his tail in tartar sauce, and turned himself into The Flying Mayonnaise Bomb.  Thus, despite his protests, he had to take a bath before he got any more grease spots on my 12-foot-high walls or went rancid and began to smell.) 

Elvis, in turn, decided that the best course of action was to take matters into her own talons by taking up with small appliances.   Now, I must explain some backstory.  I live on the top floor of an old, poorly-insulated whorehouse in New Orleans, and heat rises.  It's fucking HOT in New Orleans.  Air-conditioning is fucking EXPENSIVE.  And I'm fucking POOR.  Thus, my windows are open (with screens!) and my fans are running on high pretty much continuously for nine months of the year.  (I grew up without air-conditioning in southern Indiana, which gets just as hot and humid as New Orleans, only for a much shorter period of time, so acclimating to the climate was not the problem it could have been.) 

In six years of living here, I've gone through three cheap plastic fans.  So last August, I took the bus down to the Wal-Mart and bought an all-metal oscillating desk fan.  It cost me $29.99, twice as much as the plastic version, but it seemed a hell of a lot sturdier.

I brought it home and plugged it in.  That sucker could move some serious air, and it was LOUD, loud enough to cover up the sound of the garbage trucks coming by at quarter to five every morning.  So I considered it money well spent, and was happy with the fan.

And Elvis liked it too.  I mean, really liked it.  Liked it well enough to literally sing its praises.  Liked it well enought to protest when I turned it down from "high" to "medium."  Liked it well enough to bite my hand when I forcibly removed her from it in order to put her back in her cage for the night.   

And then, five days ago, the fan started making a weird grinding, squeaking noise when it started up.  On Sunday, I turned it off for a minute, then turned it back on, and the blades refused to turn.  So I unplugged it, got out my screwdriver and WD-40, put the birds back in the cage (see "The Flying Mayonnaise Bomb" for why you should not mix birds and oily things), and set to work.

Three hours later, I've taken the fan completely apart, oiled all the moving parts, and reassembled it TWICE, and I still couldn't get the blades to do more than spin at a crawl.  So, amid much cursing, it was off to buy a new fan.

At Walgreens, the only oscillating fans available were cheapie plastic things, or else the giant "tower" fans that cost $60 and won't fit atop my DVD player nor make enough noise to drown out the garbage trucks.  I found an all-metal "air mover" one for $20, but it did not oscillate.  I brought it home and set it up, and Elvis spent fifteen minutes trying out different positions vis-a-vis the new fan before giving up, flying across the room, landing on top of my head, and pecking at my scalp.  I got the point.

And truthfully, I wasn't a big fan of the "air mover" fan either.  I disliked having a tornado in one part of the room and no breeze in the other.  It was also extremely quiet.  So yesterday morning I headed back to Wal-Mart, where I found the exact same all-metal oscillating fan I had before, still priced at $29.99.  The only one they had in stock was the display model.  I bought it, and upon getting it home, discovered that said fan had a one-year warranty and money-back guarantee.  (The old one did too, but I never bothered to fill out the paperwork.) 

So the old fan is going back in the box the new one came in and going back to Wal-Mart.  (Hey, I DID have it less than a year, and I DID pay full price for the display model, which had been running for God knows how long already and had been incorrectly put together by the Wal-Mart lackeys, so I don't feel TOO guilty about this bit of deception.)    After taking the new one apart and putting it back together correctly (supplying some of the necessary screws myself from my own toolbox), I plugged it in.  Moves the air nicely, makes plenty of noise, and seems to vibrate even more than the old one did.

So here ya go, Elvy.  Don't squawk I never did nothing for ya.