| From: shan lung <shanlung9@y...> Date: Sat May 10, 2003 3:53 pm Subject: Tinkerbell - Coming to terms with time and life I am happy to be back here again after too many days away from this place. Even when away from here, you folks have always been in my mind and heart. I came back to find a huge backlog of 25 digest from Bird-click and about the same from Freeflight and more from Bcplus. They will have emails directed at me, topics I like to give my 2 cents worth, soapboxes that I love to stand on to belt out even further but sober reality compels me to say I probably will not have time to do all that before the next bout of work-overload together with 'chilling out' after inexorably drag me from answering. New places in and around Chiayi begged to be checked out and enjoyed and re-relished. Even ignoring the 50++ DVDs bought and still in their wrappers and 30++ books bought and meant to be read, there is then time for Tinkerbell and time with my good and patient wife Joy and cleaning out litter of HT and Zorro that further eat into the time I have got for the list. Using my PC at home is done within 15 minutes period at most before Tink comes slamming on my shoulder telling me she got bored and she needed to chew up my keyboard more than I need it to write to you guys. If she does not come to me, I then get worried that she is up to mischief or bullying Halftail and Zorro or both and have to check on her. I can just put her back in the cage which I do from time to time but rarely will I do so if I am at home. This email is composed in the office in the bits and pieces of free time. I try to reply to all letters, but if I did not, I do hope that you guys forgive my lapse in good manners. First big interrupt was over the 1 May holiday that I added a Friday off to stretch it to the weekend. That brought me to this letter as the way ahead for Tink and me gelled after that debacle I had with that last bout of free flying. I mentioned before I love mountains. That in fact lead to my handle in email for years as Shan Lung is 'mountain' 'dragon'. I spend many wretched hours ,days, weeks and months wondering while I so stupidly trudged up and down and along side of mountains in Taiwan, Nepal, Yunnan and Tibet. The last was not that long ago in 1999 when I decided to cross overland from Yunnan into Tibet including a stay of 2 weeks in a remote village in Yunnan so the snows can melt sufficiently from the pass that I must cross over into Tibet and Lhasa. I crossed over passes of 5000 meters high and roads by truck, by tractor drawn cart and by foot through some of the wildest fabulous primordial regions. One of the most satisfying moment for me was taking a pee on a ridge knowing that eventually half of it will go down Mekong river to Bangkok and the other half will emerge via Yangtze river at Shanghai. Do not envy me on this as that included wrapping myself in tarpaulin and sleeping in -20C under a truck hoping that I wake uup the next morning with all my extremities intact while envying the Khamba tribesfolks fellow passengers in their thick sleeping bags. Woke up in the morning to find a village with inn was just 300 meters beyond except that the room cost 2 US$ a night that those fellow passengers did not care to spend but they got nice thick sleeping bags that I did not have. Since the driver also wanted to save on his 2 US$ as well and he got an itinerant Tibetan whore who paid for that part of the journey by keeping him warm (I suspect she ain't got sleeping bag ) and I did not know of the village existence until the next morning, I got to shiver the night away in the tarpaulin. That is part of the drawbacks of traveling off on your own and outside the pages of Lonely Planet guidebooks. And no, my good wife had good enough sense not to travel with me to such places. I mentioned before that Chiayi has this 4000m mountain ranges behind her. I exaggerated a wee bit. The highest is Jade mountain or Yu Shan which is 3952 meters high but there are another 100 odd peaks over 3000 meters high. Misreading the map, I thought a hot spring up that range will be only 20 km further from a point I reached before. I had to go 15 km to the foot and another 65 km up and up a winding mountain road to Ali shan mountain. (http://www.ease.com/~randyj/alishan.htm for an article on this mountain) After I gone beyond Alishan and into Yu shan, my infallible hindsight confronted me with the truth that reading a map in Chinese is fraught with danger if you cannot read Chinese very well. No maps in English cover this part just in case you are curious why I did not use an English map. Where I wanted to go will be yet another 70 km away. I never would have attempted this if I had known. But at 5pm in the evening up at 2600 meters high road, going back down will be more humiliating than going onwards even if the cloud cover allowed me visibility of 3-4 meters. 70 km is a piece of cake on any freeway or level roads. You guys on your Harley, please remember me and my wife were on a little 125cc scooter on an extremely winding road largely in the clouds or in drizzling rain. At times, the cloud broke allowing periods of extreme visibility. I was deep into a series of mountain ranges that I have not been into with immense cedars and pine forested slopes up and down and on every side of me. The clouds I came through and the clouds that I will be going through continued to stream , curl and writhe themselves around the mountain tops It was not possible in those clear conditions to go fast either. It will be sacrilegious not to go slow to allow that grandeur to sink in and to relish that delicious feeling of being in such places especially as that was the first time in my life I have been on that road. Just to bring home to me what we 'missed' even though I was going very slowly were the times I got to stop by the road. Brilliant red fungi and delicate ferns and mosses showed themselves. I saw groups of caterpillars making their way up the side of the road barrier walls to the reflecting cat's-eye to anchor themselves to develop into colorful metallic pupaes. As part of the chapter of life and death for that world, other bugs were there which stuck its long proboscis into the pupae sucking away at the life of that would-be butterfly. I had to ignore my role as observer to intervene to kill that bug so that the butterfly can live and dream on. In short, that trip brought home to me the love I have for mountains and for the desire that Tinkerbell joins me on any such trips that I will do there. To do those mountains off the motorable road, I must get back into shape and get back into a regime of exercises. I will need to get back to my mountain biking, workout in the gym and my tai chi chuan training exercises. That will eat into the already little time I have to read and write to you folks. If you like my account of life in Taiwan, I suggest you should go to my wife's homepage where she got photos and written account of us and Tink and places that we have been to and will be going to in Taiwan and elsewhere. I think she writes even better than me. She certainly will not mangle the English language and misaligned and twist adjectives and prepositions that I have this weird propensity to do. http://www.worldisround.com/home/shimmertje/ I also must come to terms with the timidity of Greys. Even at home with me head rubbing Tinkerbell, if I drop even a lighter on the ground, Tinkerbell will be spooked by that and will fly off to circle before re-landing on me. If she can spook even in a secure home environment, I must accept that she can spook anywhere else. The place that I chose to free fly her met all my criteria (and I suspect your criteria too). Considering the accounts I have read of parrots flying to next door or at worse, over the next door roof I thought I gave amble allowance for her, Tink showed me instead she can fly to the next town if she is spooked. If I want to train myself for hiking in the mountains, I will have even less time to intensify the training for Tinkerbell. And even then, what if she spook again. I am just too cowardly a guy to repeat that nightmarish experience again. I am even shivering now as writing this recalled to my mind with vividity the numbness, shock and pain that I had when she winged her way off disappearing into the distance. I have taken Tinkerbell out on Kaylor harness, a harness that she eventually showed dislike and she spend much time trying to chew it off. Getting her into the harness meant chasing Tink down with her squarking at me. As I thought that was temporary with her eventually free flying by my side, I gave the harness little further thought. Slowly riding on that mountain road that day, I wondered if I use a softer harness that she will not try to fight, the lack of security of a softer harness will be more than made up for it if she does not try to bite it away. I recalled my years of training in hard martial arts in boxing, karate and shaolin kungfu. I was kind of proud how well I can punch off top of brick resting on a palm and how weakly and soft slow moving tai chi chuan is by comparison until the day I met a Master in 'soft' tai chi chuan half my size and about twice my age. I was turned around like a toy and I learned new lessons in greeting the floor from different angles and even more lessons in humility. Soft is by no means weak and I thought that perhaps may apply equally to parrot as well as to humans. Strong will not be strong if Tink kept attacking and biting at it and soft will not be soft if it stays on coming into play only when and if needed. Two days ago, I decided to get needle and thread and making use of the soft lanyard of my mobile phone, I recreated a softer harness for Tinkerbell. She fought me at first but after I got it on, I nearly wanted to shout 'Eureka!' when she accepted the new harness after a few half hearted nibbles. She went through her flight recalls, and 'touch target' in that new harness. I told my wife if she can get a seamstress to resew properly for 200NT (1US$ to 36 NT) with good strong thread the harness I made. My wife than came back saying that seamstress did another harness and sewed over the harness I made charging me 50NT for that two harness as they were such easy job. I first marveled at those two harness before scolding my poor wife for agreeing to pay 50NT. I will get back to that seamstress to give her kisses and another 200NT for bonus and while I may accept a 'No' on the kisses, I will not accept her no on that bonus. Tink accepted the new harness last night with a token squawk and we went off to thank again the groups of people that cheered me on during that hunt for her and to drop by at that family who rescued her for more of that wonderful plum wine. Btw, part of the deal was that I teach them how to swim free of charge. My system of teaching swimming is so unique that I can guarantee anyone who is paranoid of swimming and water that he/she will not be afraid and will not drown even in deep water after the first lesson and they can swim after the second lesson. They passed my first lesson successfully (another reason why I did not have time to write here as I had to discharge my debt) and the 2nd lesson is in abeyance while we all try to cower at home trying to hide from the SARS going on here. Following the local news to find taxi driver plying his taxi and noodle seller selling his noodles for the 4 days while they had fever before dying on the 5th day is not reassuring to me. I do hope that Taiwan and elsewhere can contain the SARS before the world becomes a hot zone and you guys are affected instead of just reading it in this email. On returning home, the harness was left on Tink who seemed to accept the new softer material. She did explore the harness but it was not with a 'GET IT OFF ME' attitude. Tinkerbell will still be trained in free flying and recalls. I never will use the harness to drag her to me and will train her in the open ' as if there are no harness at all' on flight and recalls. The harness with a long line serves to prevent any further bouts of premature aging on my part. That harness will also allow her to join us (if I can persuade my wife as well) on the mountain hikes that the last trip reminded me of and that I will return to. To sum up this long letter, my physical preparations to hike in mountains will impact on my letter writing here. Tink need not have to tell me in 100 words why I must free fly her before I free fly her and I probably will not clear that table to intensify clicker training of her. I will train her to recall with whistle but Tink need not reach the stage (she probably never will) where she will stop her harassment of HT or Zorro or ballpoint pens or keyboards to come immediately on recall. I will keep you guys posted on major outings with Tink. I love to read the emails here but I will generally be in lurkdom. From time to time, I will emerge out from workload or workout load and plain lazing around to stand on my soap box here in these mailing lists. Please understand my time situation and please try not to be too annoyed with me should I fail to follow up on emails or reply to any of you directly on the lists. All private emails to me will always be responded but your patience is requested as I may still be very late on those. ===== With warmest regards Shanlung Joy - wife, Tinkerbell - CAG & surrogate daughter |
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