birthday

So, today is my 40th birthday. Not that anyone around me believes I am 40. It's kind of weird, because I don't believe I'm 40 either. And my rainbow lorikeet, Sir Lancelot the Loud Lorikeet, just turned 20, and in September I'll have had him for 20 years. Which is now half my lifetime. I didn't think about the relationship between my life and Lancelot's life until I woke up from having a dream this morning.
I was at a Wal-Mart, only it was huge, bigger than any one I've been to. I went into the pet section and I was looking at the fish. They were in aquariums the size of pools, more like going to Mystic Aquarium than shopping. I was admiring a really cool black moor goldfish who had huge fluttery eyelids, still thinking that every black moor I've ever bought died very quickly, when I noticed something in a nearby tank that didn't belong.
It was a parrot, trying to swim.
I ran and got someone with a ladder and convinced him to climb up and rescue the parrot before it drowned. He was really annoyed but he did it and gave me the bird. It was a rainbow lorikeet and it was half-drowned, wet and shivering. I tucked it into the front of my shirt and started walking around trying to find its cage and whoever was in charge of the pets section. The bird section was disgusting. Filthy, tiny cages, with clearly unhealthy birds in them. I did find an empty cage that might have belonged to the lory, but it wasn't labeled and like the others was too small and too dirty. I couldn't bear to put a shivering, half-dead bird into that cage.
So I decided to steal it.
I walked around the pet section and figured out where the security cameras were. I left the parrot in my shirt but didn't hold it so my hands were free, but the bird was visible if you were looking. When I found a dead spot (blocked by something) I tucked the bird out of sight and left the store.
When I got to the car my mom started yelling at me, what was I going to do with another bird, etc. I said that I had rescued it, it wasn't going to be near my birds because it might be sick, and I would rehabilitate it and find it a home. I tried to feed it some nacho cheese doritos (why I had them with me I don't know) and the bird was clearly starving. I was trying to think of how I could sell the bird without explaining that I had stolen it (which my mom didn't know). I decided to name it Braveheart, thinking it was a boy. Then I examined the bird (it was very tame, clearly hand-fed) and found that someone had given the bird a PIERCING through its left wing, a hoop that went between the wing bones somehow. Hanging among the feathers from this hoop were 2 or 3 "charms". I only remember one of them, a Venus symbol. From this I figured that the bird was really a girl, but I already named her Braveheart and clearly she liked it.
I got her home and started looking for a spare cage that I could keep in the kitchen. She was dry by then and sitting on me. Somehow I got it in my head that she was one of my babies from when I used to breed Lancelot and once that was there, there was no way I'd sell her or give her up, even though I've always said I don't want any more birds nor to start over again with a baby.
I don't remember much more than that.

12 19.15.8.13 16 Tzec 2 Ben Manifestation portal
(Venus image source; rainbow lorikeet source)