Can't believe I haven't logged on in so long.

Most of the reason is Bandit's intermittent breathlessness. Twice now he has recovered from it, only to be stricken again in about a week. The second time we thought it might be the dust from the drywall compound being used upstairs. One night it was so bad James turned on the attic fan. But the last bout was truly scary. I was trying to keep Bandit on my finger and he simply flew up to my head. This caused him to gasp so hard he nearly collapsed off my hand.

We went away the weekend of March 16-17 to see a play in New York and while Bandit was vetted he had some x-rays. Apparently something--and birds are so compact inside they can't tell what--is enlarged. It could be his liver, a result of never being able to break him of eating seed (too fattening for caged birds), or it could be a tumor. A more conclusive test would involve force-feeding him a little barium and then taking x-rays every so many minutes to follow the progression of food. It sounds like a terribly stressful test for such a little guy, and if it is a tumor, there's not much we could do.

So needless to say I've been preoccupied.

There is good news: "the nice fellow" has finished our bathroom. The total: he not only fixed the dryway, but he replaced all the drywall tape edging the whole bathroom, put a new valve on our toilet, prepped the wall, primed the wall, and put two coats of semi-gloss "Wedgewood blue" on it. He also hung up a mirror over our fireplace, as I mentioned, put in a ground-fault interrupter plug and a sliding dimmer switch in the bathroom, and mounted our new medicine cabinet, the one we bought over eighteen months ago at the Yellow Daisy Festival. A prodigious amount of work and beautifully done. Once I do a few more bits of work (painting some small shelving, putting up decorative "Wallies," frosting the window with glass paints), we can buy a new shower curtain and start showering in there again, instead of in the hall bath, for the first time since 1997.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:43:00 PM

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