stupid things designed by stupid people

I'm making bread and pizza today. Not pizza to eat, but to freeze. I find it's super handy if I make the dough, roll it out on the pan, and freeze it for some time in the future. I did try pre-topping the pizzas, too, to save extra extra time, but then I realized it's much better to make a pizza with whatever you have on hand at the time you want to eat it. I'm a big fan of the leftover pizza, anyway.

Anyhoo, while both the doughs were rising, I decided to clean out *Hermes' cage. It got me thinking about cage design. It's a nice cage, I do like the look of it and the colour, but there are a couple things that had me bothered right away.

First there's a grate at the bottom seperating the bird from the paper. I thought it was weird when I first saw it, because I don't remember my old bird cage having such a thing. I have no idea the purpose. It's not like Hermes walks around on the bottom all day and we don't want his little bird feet covered in little bird poop -- which brings me to my point. The grate is a poop collector. It sticks right on and piles up. So even when I change the paper, it still looks like a disgusting poop explosion in there.

Here's one of our many intellectual msn conversations

So it's been on my list of to-dos to remove the grate. Which I did with reckless abandon today. Not like this is going to make me clean his cage any less, it's just going to make it easier overall. I don't mind rinsing the bottom off every week. That's not a problem, but scrubbing a pile of shit off a useless grate feels...wrong. At least this way, the poop will be disposed of every second day and it's not going to be this huge shit pile that makes it look like some bird-like relative of an elephant is living in there.

Second thought came about with the paper tray itself. I like to reuse paper for his cage. Oh. First things first, I'm super cheap. I reuse paper until there's no white spaces left on it. I double-side; if I print something that only fits the top half, I'll save that paper for when I need to print something else that'll fit on the other half. Therefore, I'm not about to use fabulously shiny new paper that's never had a drop of ink on it just for poop. I'm going to use the paper that I've printed on both sides already then Hermes can poop on it and then I can throw it out (guilt free!). But here's the irritating thing. The tray just barely accomodates letter sized paper. And by 'just barely' I'm talking the paper fits save for half an inch on one side and the top. Half an inch. Who designed this damn thing? How about you take the dimensions of a piece of paper and design the cage tray around that. Why isn't this an obvious design detail? So what? I have to either squish the paper down, fold it in, or cut it to size. Cut half an inch from the top and bottom of every paper so it fits without bending up or getting caught on the cage bottom as I'm sliding it in. Gah. It seems like such a miniscule issue, but it's just common sense to me and it bothers me when this sort of thing doesn't seem obvious to the rest of the world. Shouldn't there be some social outrage? Are the manufacturers of bird cages not actually using their bird cages? And wouldn't this sort of thing come up when the manufacturers of bird cages were all sitting around a huge table brainstorming new and exciting bird cage designs for their spring/summer bird cage collection?

Lead bird cage manufacturer: Hem hem. It's come to my attention that no paper size in the entire world will fit into our cages without modification. So I had this eureka moment -- let's take the dimensions of a piece of paper and -- wait for it -- build our cages around that!

Other bird cage manufacturers chiming in: *gasps of shock and awe* I can't believe we haven't thought of that before! *clapping* *standing and patting him on the back* What a genius idea! We'll make millions! You just revolutionized bird cage manufacturing!! You just took us out of the dark ages, my man!

(because that's how I imagine bird cage manufacturers are like)

And that's my post about poop and dealing with poop. It was pretty epic, right? So epic, in fact, that I'm having trouble coming up with a nice closer. Poop.

*That's the budgie's name. Well, that's my name for him. Idle Husband doesn't really like it and prefers to call him something else entirely. But I win this one cuz I see Hermes all day long. Mwha. ha.