We have Kea, Kākā, Kākāpō, and Kākāriki (of which there are 3 species).

Kākā are more olive brown than green but are really neat and beautiful birds and are growing in numbers thanks to conservation efforts.

Kea are mostly green with red underwings and will pickpocket you, but then again so will weka. The bit about them stopping traffic is absolutely true - I have a friend who has witnessed this.

Kākāpō are, in the words of my ecology professor, “really bad at being parrots”. They suck, but endearingly so. They are so bad at being alive and climbing things and reproducing but you cannot help but love them. Again, they are green, but in a shambling moss pile sort of way.

Kākāriki are much smaller and are kept as pets internationally. The three kinds are the red crowned, the yellow crowned and the orange fronted. Of these, the latter is the rarest (currently critically endangered). All 3 are decidedly very GREEN, to the extent that their name means “green”.

There are also several other species endemic to various outlying islands. We have, in total, nine surviving endemic parrot species and several subspecies of those.

Is anything you do before you get to work in the morning not in service of the work day? You might work out or walk the dog, but otherwise it's probably just eating, showering, and commuting. If you're not counting the commute as an unpaid part of your work day, it's time to start. Now that work day is 7-6, maybe more.

Isn't it fun after all that to have to cook for yourself and clean everything up if you don't want to waste all the money you earned on restaurant food? And it's not like groceries are even that much cheaper these days.

I'll do you one better- if the 4 day work week had a different 4 days for employees on a company or even individual scale, you have 20% less work traffic Monday through Friday. I suspect taking that edge off for non-work commuters (like those buying groceries) could reduce crashes even further with less cars on the road at peak times.

Even better than this, public transportation infrastructure could reduce the number of cars by letting people on local work commutes travel more efficiently in busses or trains.

but the funniest thing is that if Trump really did that and cut all trade with Spain, the biggest impact in my daily life I can foresee is a small reduction in how much olive oil cost us, since there would be some surplus as half of US imports of olive oil would stay home. A very welcome development, if you ask me.

Ohhh mr Trump!! don’t threat us with destroying spanish US exports that make … (check notes) 0.9% of our GDP if we don’t commit to spend… (check notes again) 2.5% of our GDP in purchasing US military goods!!

I used to be you. Trust me when i say that. "It's just a job" is easy to say until you see drones take off loaded and land empty. "I need the money" is easy to say until you hear about the US betraying and abandoning her allies and you watch an empty lot in the desert fill with tanks that, until a few days ago, had been protecting the people you thought you signed up to protect. "I didn't have a choice" is a lie you tell yourself when you hear about an AC-130 crew destroying a hospital.

Have you directly supported combat aircraft that have killed people? Have you directly supported logistics aircraft that moved weapons and ammo and troops into combat zones? Have you heard about war crimes committed by the US and realized the war criminals and their tools were able to get where they did because you helped keep an airfield in operation? Have you seen armed white men supervise impoverished Indian and Filipino migrant workers building and maintaining infrastructure on behalf of the US government and Kuwaiti royal family like some sort of 21st century version of plantations in the Antebellum South? Have you seen a team of hurricane "first responders" treat the hurricane response duty like a vacation, drinking and partying every night while the people off the base are dying due to lack of electricity?

I have. I haven't seen combat, I'll admit that. But everything i just described, i saw in Kuwait in 2019 and Puerto Rico in 2017. I saw and experienced other things, too, things I'd rather not have seen.

"Oh him? That my emotional support hobbit."

"Uh huh. And what he got?"

"That's my hobbit's emotional support hobbit."

"And I suppose those two are also emotional support hobbits as well?"

"No, of course not. Those two are my emotional distress hobbits."

".....?"

I don't usually add comments to my watercolors when I post them, but this one needed an explanation on the color changes. Every time I try to light one of my pieces for posting, the lighting always seems to distort the actual colours used. This time I experimented by only lighting the top photo, and not the bottom.