Category: A Month of Me

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A Month of Me: Day 19 – In the Air Again

Friday seems like a long time ago now!  I could not post from The Lady’s iPad while we were gone to Virginia so I had to try and remember for three days everything that I wanted to write!  That is hard for a little monster with limited storage space!

We got up early, but not too early, to go to the airport.  The Lady told me that we were flying to a new place in Virginia called Dull as.  

Dull as…?  Dull as what, I asked.  

The Lady looked confused.  What do you mean dull as what?, she asked.

She said we were going someplace dull as…  Maybe this was some kind of game and I was supposed to fill in the blank, kind of like a Knock-Knock joke.  Dull as ice cream with no chocolate sauce?  Dull as a story with no pictures?  Dull as blue without orange?  

She said, “No!  No!!  No!!!  Dull is!

Oh!   Dull is…  Dull is a pencil with no lead.  Dull is people who take themselves too seriously.  Dull is watching golf on TV.

“Dull es…D-U-L-L-E-S,” she said in a rather frustrated way.  

Why are we using Spanish verbs?, I asked.  Is, es…what’s the deal?

Sometimes The Lady loses her patience with me when it comes to conversations like this.  When that happens, she sends me to Mr. Guy to straighten me out.  He told me that Dulles is one word, not two,  and it is the name of a place.  Finally it all made sense.  I was happy to hear that we were not going to a dull as or dull is kind of place!

We had a nice uneventful flight, nothing like our last flight to Virginia!

When we landed at DULLES, we went to our hotel.  We had a few hours before we were supposed to meet the picture taking people.  Mr. Guy and I continued the nap that we had started on the plane and The Lady did some work.

Then it was time to go on our first adventure.  We met just a few of the picture taking people and went to Great Falls Park.  I didn’t know there was such a thing as great falls.  I always thought falls were bad things because when people and monsters fall, they break bones, and scrape elbows, and get stitches.  Mr. Guy explained that falls is also a word that describes water flowing over a precipice.  I had no idea what he was saying, but I did get that we were talking about water and not people or monsters so I figured it would be OK.


The falls looked pretty and I liked the sound of the water.

Mr. Guy and I sat and listened while The Lady took pictures.


Except for the no hair and blue fur part, we kind of look a like, don’t you think?  Oh, and Mr. Guy hides his horns a little better than I do.

It was very hot while we were watching the water fall.  And then it started to rain.  We did what everyone does in less than ideal circumstances; we went to Starbucks.  Then we went to dinner with a few more of the picture taking people.  And finally we went back to the hotel and went to bed because the picture taking people wanted to start taking pictures at 6:30 in the morning!  I was going to have to be awake and dressed very early for a second day in a row!  I wasn’t sure that this was a good thing.

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A Month of Me: Day 18 – Boxes, Bags, and Suitcases

Today was a busy day t my house.  I just found out that we are going on a trip tomorrow!  We are going to Virginia to see The Lady’s picture raking friends.  This will be our third trip to see them and every time that we go we fly to a different place.  I will get to see lots of different parts of the state of Virginia if this keeps up.  The Lady also said that I will get to meet some new friends on this trip.  I am an excited furry little blue and orange monster!

This afternoon I had to find some shirts for the trip and find my monster hairbrush.  I don’t really use the brush much, but The Lady always makes me take it when we travel so that I don’t look like a shaggy monster.  I like looking like a shaggy monster!  I put my things in the suitcase.  Now I am all ready to go.

One thing is different about this trip.  The Lady got t-shirts for all of the picture taking people and their friends who aren’t picture takers but hang out with the picture takers, like Mr. Guy and Mr. Ray.  I helped The Lady put everyone’s shirt in a bag with their name on it so that when we get off of the airplane tomorrow, we can give everyone a shirt.  T-shirts are the best!  Maybe The Lady will let me push some buttons on her camera and maybe I can take a picture of all of the picture taking people not taking pictures!  Instead they could all be in the picture.

We have to get up very early tomorrow so I suppose I should go to bed so that I am well rested for our super fun weekend!

Tomorrow I will be writing from Virginia!

Good night, everyone.

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A Month of Me: Day 16 – T-Shirts

 

I learned something about The Lady today.  She likes t-shirts just like me!  Now that she doesn’t have to go to school everyday, she is wearing her t-shirts instead of her teacher clothes.  Mr. Guy wears t-shirts a lot too since he is retired and doesn’t have to go to school anymore.
I get a new t-shirt every time I visit someplace new.  I also have some that have been given to me by my friends.  And, I have a few that are for special days.  I don’t have one like The Lady’s, though.  Hers has her shopping list on it.  Coffee and cameras.  She and Mr. Guy always have coffee on their shopping list.  They drink A Lot of coffee!  The Lady putt cameras on the list because she really likes to take pictures.  
Today, The Lady was in the picture with me instead of taking the picture of just me.  I don’t think we have many pictures of the two of us together..  Usually Mr. Guy is in pictures with me.  The Lady likes it best that way.  She says that Mr. Guy and I are quite handsome and make her pictures look nice.  
I like seeing The Lady in pictures, but we need to find her a t-shirt with something other than a shopping list on it!
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A Month of Me: Day 15 – Time, More or Less

The Lady’s picture taking assignment today was to photograph timeless.  I thought that this was the perfect prompt for her because she is always timeless; she never has enough time for all of the things that she needs and wants to do.  That makes her timeless, right?  Just like a monster without horns is hornless and a monster without a t-shirt is t-shirtless and a Mr. Guy without a blue and orange furry monster is monsterless.  Mr. Guy explained that that was not quite right.  Timeless,  he said,  is something that is not affected by the passage of time.  Hmm…that is not The Lady then; she is very affected by the passage of time.  She gets frustrated and grouchy when time passes too quickly and she still has work to get done.

I know that there are machines that tell you about your time.  Mr. Guy wears a little one of these on his arm.  As the day goes on, his time gets bigger.  His arm machine must collect time for him.  The Lady doesn’t have one of those machines.  That must be why she never has any time.  She doesn’t have a machine to collect it for her.  Again Mr. Guy said that that is not quite how time works.

Mr. Guy told me that everyone has exactly the same amount of time every day – 24 hours or 1440 minutes, or 86, 400 seconds.  He said that days feel long or short depending on what you are doing or not doing.  Sometimes there really is not enough time in a day to accomplish everything that you want to do.  But sometimes, it just feels that way because people waste their time.  They don’t use it for important or meaningful things.  The time machines like Mr. Guy has are called wrist watches.  I guess this is because you have to watch your wrist to see how the time is moving.  Mr. Guy told me that a wrist watch is a kind of clock and that there are lots of other kinds too.  They can be big or small, inside or outside, on the wall or on the floor.  We looked at all of the clocks at our house.  I was surprised by how many we have.  We definitely are not timeless!!! 

We have a great big clock in our dining room.  It is called a grandfather clock.  We don’t have a grandmother clock or a grandchild clock.  I wonder if the grandfather clock gets lonely just sitting in the corner all day every day just counting the seconds, minutes, and hours .  That clock has been at our house for a long time, longer than me and also longer than The Lady.  It’s been here since Mr. Guy was a little monster like me.  Mr. Guy said that our grandfather clock was given to his father by his grandmother…that is all very confusing!  Why is it not a grandmother clock, then?  Or maybe a grandchild clock since Mr. Guy is the grandchild and now the clock is his?  Oh well, I guess it doesn’t really matter what you call it.  All I know is that it is a great big clock and I like to watch how it counts the time by swinging its pendulum back and forth.

Right now, the grandfather clock and The Lady are telling me that it is past my bedtime.

Good night!

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A Month of Me: May 14 – Mothers Day

The two human offspring and I spent the afternoon telling The Lady how much we appreciate her having taken care of all of us.  We all want to wish The Lady and all moms and mom figures a happy Mothers Day.  We know that being a mom is not an easy job, but someone has to do it!  

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A Month of Me: Day 12 – Cookie Monster For A Day

When I am out and about in the world, people always mistake me for some monster named Cookie Monster.  When I tell them that I am not Cookie Monster, I am Blueper B, they always seem a little disappointed.  I finally had to figure out who this Cookie Monster monster is. 

Mr. Guy helped me find a picture of the Cookie Monster on the Internet.  He and I have the same color of fur and sort of the same eyes, but Cookie Monster does not have orange horns, or claws, or orange fur on his belly, or orange stripes on his arms.  In fact, Mr. Cookie Monster doesn’t have anything orange on him.  Why do people get us confused?

Mr. Guy said that sometimes people will lump all monsters with one similar characteristic into a big group even though they may be very different in lots of other ways.  He said that this happens with humans too.  I don’t think that this is a good thing.  Every monster and every person is unique and special.  Just because we may look like or be like another person on the outside doesn’t mean that we are like them on the inside too.  We probably don’t like the same things, feel the same things, want the same things, or need the same things.  I think people and monsters need to look more than fur-deep before they come to conclusions about others.  I don’t look like Mr. Guy or The Lady, be we are all alike in lots of ways that others can’t see.

So, since i am always mistaken for this Cookie Monster monster, I decided to try to learn a little about him.  

Wow!  This Cookie Monster monster is famous!  He has been on television for almost fifty years.  And, he likes to eat, especially cookies.  Cookie Monster is a lot older than me.  I am only three.  Yet, we still look a like.  Does that mean that monsters don’t get gray fur or that their fur doesn’t fall out when they get older?  Mr. Guy’s hair used to be brown and now it is gray.  I have wondered what color my fur will be when I get as old as Mr. Guy.  Will it be gray?  Or purple? Or a darker or lighter blue?  I don’t know.  Now that I see Mr. Cookie Monster monster, I think that maybe my fur will stay blue and orange for ever and ever.  That sounds good to me.

I told The Lady that I wanted to eat cookies so that I would know what it feels like to be Mr. Cookie Monster.  She said that we could work on that because she had to make cookies today for her food blog, Sifted Together, that she writes with her friend Ms. Tracey.  Ms. Tracey and The Lady send messages to each other about food all the time.  They make the food, take pictures of it, eat it, and write about it on their blog.  They are kind of like Mr. Cookie Monster, especially today since they were making cookies.

The Lady told me that we were going to make Animal Cookies.  I wondered why we were making animal cookies.  Why weren’t we making monster cookies or human cookies?  The animals at our house did not ask for cookies.  The Lady explained that animal cookies have nothing to do with who is going to eat them.  They are called animal cookies because they are shaped like animals.  Okay..I wondered how that was going to happen.  We are going to make cookies shaped like animals?  This could be interesting.

We began by gathering all of the ingredients.


We put them all together in the big blue mixing machine.


When we did that, the eight ingredients mushed together and became one big blob of ingredient.  The Lady called it dough.  When we got it all mixed up, we had to put it in the refrigerator to chill before we could make the animals.  This was strange to me because we took the butter, one of the ingredients, out of the refrigerator first and we had to put it in the melting machine even though we didn’t want to melt it; we just wanted to make it a little soft.  Then after we made our blob dough, we put it back in the refrigerator to make it cold.  I did what The Lady told me to do, but it all didn’t make much sense to me.

After the dough got cold again, we took it out of the refrigerator and rolled it so it was one great big cookie.  I bet Cookie Monster would really like our great big cookie!  Then The Lady told me that we had to cut all of the little animal cookies out of our great big cookie using special plastic pieces with a button.


They worked like magic!  I pushed it in the dough, pressed the button, and out feel a dough animal.  We put them in the oven and they turned into animal cookies.  We made lions,  zebras, giraffes, and elephants!


Then we ate them!

I liked being Cookie Monster for a day, but I am most happy as me, Blueper B, a little furry blue and orange monster who is not on TV.

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A Month of Me: Day 10 – Back On Track!

 

Today was a great day for this little blue and orange furry monster!  I got to go work…or is it school…or maybe it’s both…with The Lady.  She has gone to this school almost every day for a long time and I have never gotten to go with her.  I’m glad that she said that I could go today because I am curious about what she does at school/work that keeps her so busy all the time.

She was giving final exams at school today.  That sounds so serious.  While her class was taking their test, I sat in The Lady’s office and played games on her computer.  There wasn’t much else for to do in there.  I couldn’t read any of her books because none of them had words.  They just had dots and lines and more dots and more lines.  And they were all black and white.  They must have been in some foreign language.  None of these books even had any pretty pictures to look at.  Bejewelled on the computer was much more interesting, and colorful, to me!

After her class finished their test, I got to meet them.  They were all very nice to me.  Now I understand why The Lady likes her job.  She gets to spend her days teaching nice people like Mr. Eric, Mr. Carlos, and Mr. Sovanarith.  They even let The Lady take their picture with me!  I like these guys!  

Then I remembered my 100 People Project.  Almost two years ago, I said that I was going to try to have my picture taken with 100 different people in a year.  Well…that didn’t happen.  We would get busy.  And then we’d forget.  And then we’d get busy again…I was kind of sad that i didn’t finish my project like I had hoped.  I only made it to #25.  Today, because the people that The Lady teaches were so nice to me, I decided that maybe it was time to start again where I left off…with #26.  I have learned that I just have to keep trying.  Mr. Guy and The Lady told me that if I work hard and keep going, I will eventually make it to 100 people in my 100 People Project.  I asked The Lady’s students if they would take pictures with me.  They all said yes!

So here are #26, #27, and #28!




Look at all these smiles!  I thought these guys were smiling because they got to meet me and we had our pictures taken together, but maybe they were smiling was because they were all done with their tests.

I also got to meet another person that The Lady works with, Ms. Sarah.  She works in the office and helps the students and the teachers all day long.  I think that she is way busier than The Lady!  I have heard about absent-minded professors like The Lady!  Ms. Sarah and The Lady are good friends.  They spend a lot of time sharing stories about their canine furry monsters.  

Ms. Sarah agreed to have her picture taken with me too!  #29! Now  I think that I can accomplish my 100 people project maybe before I turn 100 years old!

It makes me happy to know that if The Lady can’t spend her days at home with me and Mr. Guy, at least she gets to be at school/work with lots of super nice people!

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A Month of Me: Day 9 – Bubbles!

This afternoon when The Lady got home from school and before she had to leave again, Mr. Guy and The Lady took me outside to teach me how to blow bubbles.  I have watched Mr. Guy blow bubbles before, but I have never done it myself.  Mr. Guy gave me a great big bottle of funny smelling water and a stick with a big hole in the end.  He told me to stick dip the stick in the funny smelling water until the hole was filled in and then blow in the hole.  It all sounded easy enough.

But it wasn’t.

My big monster claws had a hard time holding the stick with the hole in it.

The water stuff was all drippy and made my fur feel sticky.

And, my mouth isn’t shaped right to blow in a little hole on a stick.

It took me a lot of tries to make this whole bubble blowing thing work.  

I was starting to become a very frustrated little blue and orange furry monster, but then I mde it work!
An I was a happy little monster.

Today was not a quiet happy like yesterday.