Category: Piper

It’s hard to leave Piper when I travel, even though I have a handful of exemplary sitters who take great care of him. No matter where I may be, the photos they send me of my little green guy each day help with the missing him.  My husband and I…

It’s a Tuesday morning, I’m working at the dining room table. Piper is playing in the adjacent living room, my keystrokes mingle with the sound of his toys hitting the floor after he pushes them off the coffee table. It becomes quiet; Piper preens himself for a bit before getting…

Piper will carry part of his afternoon snack, Nutri-berries, up to the top of his mansion (we never call it a cage), the area known as the penthouse. This is a relatively new behavior in the last year. To see him carry a snack in his mouth almost the size…

“You’ve got a Piper poop on your shoulder,” I tell my husband. He was wearing a dark blue shirt so I could see the light spot. “It’s not a poop, it’s a hole,” he informed me. There is a current, popular expression: This is why we can’t have nice things….

When looking for someone to share your life with, I think one of the major draws is imagining that over time, you will know as much as you possibly can about the person, settling into a comfortable companionship where calm is not a bad thing. The drama that can come…

Piper has a toy that is filled with popsicle sticks and one of his favorite things to do, all day, every day, is to remove the wooden strips from the hanging block before flinging them to the ground. Sometimes you hear the ping of the stick hitting the wood floor,…

I have had an Instagram account since early 2018, but I never posted until I relaunched Sister Rain in 2024. Now every day I share a teaser for the story I have published only moments before on SisterRain.net. I don’t follow a lot of people on Instagram who, like me,…

As I edited stories, Piper sat on my left shoulder. I use a large spiral-bound notebook and a Sharpie (click here for And Then I Had An Inkling) to write down my changes and had picked the book up to bring it close to my face to see something I…

We turn on an audio birdy monitor every night before we go upstairs to bed so that we can hear Piper should he need us during the night. Our previous bird, Cato, a Lutino cockatiel, was prone to nightfrights, startling and thrashing around in the dark. We have never had…

Sunday mornings is when we give Piper’s mansion (we never call it a cage) a deep clean, as well as the living room where he spends most of his time. On this particular day, we had finished, setting Piper up for the day. I was working at the dining room…