11042010

Spent a few days in Saint Louis with the family last week - ended up bringing back two new(old) roommates:

These guys have been with the family for just over four years now :)

People often ask me why I named the cockatiel Google. And really it was my dad who named him. The then-unamed bird was the runt of the litter when my sister and I walked into the pet store. There were four baby cockatiels in the pen at the time; Three of them had the standard yellow and gray coloring, while the fourth had no yellow plumage at all. My sister, fresh from homework assignments on punnett squares, ran over to the pen, pointed at Google and cried, "Ha! Heterozygous recessive gene!"

We journeyed home with our new bird and presented him to our dad, who asked why did we pick such a runty cockatiel. We started going over possible names, mostly suggestions that were based on his coloration more than anything. But dad shook his head and said that we should name the bird Google, and hopefully he would "grow to be as big as the search engine."

(FYI, he's still kind of small, but thanks for trying, Dad!)