Peanut had a very hard day yesterday. And so did I. We're doing a bit better today, though.

The worry grew on Monday, when he expressed no interest in Lunch, that Food, Glorious Food Time Of Day. You remember Lunch, right? The meal that has steadily Progressed (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six — and frankly, there's more that I haven't written about) until this small, green bird owns it? He didn't want any. And this, even with Bruce home to join in.

Shocking!

So we went back to the vet's office yesterday. A new clue was a change in the texture of Peanut's beak, and changes in beak tissue are always ominous. So we decided to do some blood work, and see if that would reveal anything. Of course, the vet knew she couldn't get enough blood for everything, so she decided to test for the liver first, and maybe check the kidneys if we were lucky. It might take two blood samples to do both tests (with a week or two between samples). And if those two came back negative, then we'd call Peanut's low activity patterns behavioral, and I'd start growing a beard to try to make up for all of Bruce's traveling.

But that blood test really did Peanut in. He hardly ate anything yesterday, but he drank a lot of water. As a result, by early evening he wasn't pooping, he was just squirting water — and the water wasn't clear, it was tan. I tried very hard to convince myself it wasn't blood, and made a frantic call to the vet. Luckily he ate a sunflower seed while we were on the phone, so we decided it was stress, and that I should give him extra Warm Toasties.

So after a little bit of dinner, and as many sunflower seeds as I could get him to eat (not as many as you'd expect), we settled in for early Warm Toasties.

By the end of the night, he'd stopped squirting so much (ew), and his last poop before bedtime was practically normal. This morning he ate a big breakfast, and even flew around a bit. He still slept much of the day, but his poops have been fine.

Plus, the vet's office called to say that while there wasn't enough blood to do the kidney test, his liver is normal.

Let's hear it for normal.

I'll talk to the vet in the next day or two to figure out what to do next.