Maeterlinck, the older of our two parakeets, died last Friday, probably sometime during the night. I was heading out the door to work in the morning, and Dave was following me out, and he looked in the cage as he walked by and saw him on the floor of the cage.

We buried Maeterlinck in the yard on Saturday, and Sunday after brunch with Terry the three of us went to Lucky Dog on San Pablo Avenue to look for a new mate for Rossetti, our other ‘keet. We came home, though, with two, a light blue male and a green and yellow female. Rossetti (after Christina, not Gabriel) is a female. (Do you know how to tell a parakeet’s sex? Look at the little area right above its beak, around the nostrils. On males this is blue and on females this is pink. No, seriously.) We wanted to avoid getting two males out of the vague notion that the two males might quarrel for dominance and poor Rossetti would get the worst of it.

But we’ve been glad to see that so far the three of them have been getting along very contentedly. No sign of friction as yet, just a lot of friendly behavior.