Birds of Paradise. Not here. No sir. The birds here like to play mind games with me.

They chirp. They chirp, chirp, chirp right outside my window. Then when they know I’m coming they hide in the grass. They do this so they don’t get their little chirping beaks kicked in. They camoflage themselves from meanies like me.

As soon as I shut the curtains and try to go back to studying, which by the way, often requires silence - they chirp some more. I get up and go back to the window to scare them away. Now they stand on the sidewalk across the grass chirping right in front of me. Laughing at me and my annoyed, frustrations.

I knock on the glass slider to scare them a bit. I mean business little bird. Silence. I go back to my books and re-read the same paragraph for the third time. Now it will sink in because it’s quiet. Then it happens…. CHIRP!!!!!!!!! I run to the sliding glass door and fling it open. This bird has seen it’s last day! It doesn’t move. Instead, it stands on the sidewalk staring directly at me, like a old cowboy in a western movie waiting for the quick draw. Cue the tumbleweeds and the whistling western music from the Good, the Bad and the Ugly - tweedle tweedle dee, bum bum bum…. Being that I am a kind person, I hold back from charging the bird. (Okay, also because I don’t want my neighbors to think I’ve finally lost my mind.) But I give the camoflaged, cowboy, chirping bird a look to let it know I’ve had enough. It holds it’s ground, let’s out another high pitched chirp and calmly flies away.

Zoom in on this picture if you don’t believe me….

Who ever thought of any name along the lines of “birds of paradise” clearly had lost their minds from the chirping. Frank recently said he wanted to get a bird feeder. Yeah, that’s not gonna happen….