Jack's House

I have yet to find a pair of dog boots that Fritz can actually walk in... I have about five sets of them sitting around unused.

I inherited Birdie in November 2017, and Mom had him for at least a year before that so he was over eight years old depending upon how old he was before we got him... I believe that is about the normal lifespan for a budgie in captivity...

Thanks for all the good wishes...

A KLM flight (KL 685) from Amsterdam to Mexico City was diverted to Bermuda on Sunday because of an obnoxious odour from the cargo compartment which rendered flying conditions in the cockpit rather difficult... the cause was found to be a cargo of 100 pigs that had been loaded by some nimrod of a load master into a passenger plane instead of a cargo plane.



Another animal related incident occurred on TAP flight TP 1865 from Lisbon to Ponta Delgada on November 17; this time the flight was not diverted as the problem was not discovered until after a normal landing. A cage full of hamsters in transit to a pet store broke open in flight and all the critters escaped. The plane had to be grounded until all the hamsters were rounded up; hamsters are, of course, rodents and the situation was actually serious... the creatures may well have decided to gnaw upon the aeroplane's wiring and as a result it had to be carefully inspected for any damage. I have not seen the follow up so I don't know when or if the plane returned to service.

Lately I have been amassing a collection of die cast aeroplanes, to encompass all the planes I have flown on over the years. I have a long way to go since they are expensive and I am buying them at a rate of about one a month: I have six now and I'm not even halfway there yet.

I expected that the Trans Canada Airlines Lockheed Super Constellation I flew on in 1956 as a baby would be considered historical but I was somewhat taken aback when the Airbus A320 that just arrived for this month was in a box clearly marked "Historical Aircraft Collection" . I suppose it's because it is in the old red and white livery but I remember flying in one right after they joined the Air Canada fleet sometime around 1990.

The same goes for the Boeing 767  that I flew in 1984... this plane had been involved in a famous incident in July 1983 and was known as the Gimli Glider... the plane that ran out of fuel due to a metric miscalculation and had to land on a dragstrip in Gimli, Manitoba. This is the only one of the models which I can definitely say was  the actual plane I flew... the others are all just the same model and livery as I  remember.

Sorry for rambling on about nothing... I know I'm a terrible bore and all...

Senior's Day at Pet Valu: How much did you say they cost now?

I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas

Most people give up on hippopotamuses when they find out that they spray their feces over a very large area by using their tails as a fan...