Category: new things

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A Month of Me: Day 20 – Lens Friends Photowalk

I just went to bed, rolled over once, and then it was time to get up again.  My fur didn’t even have a chance to get messy.  That’s a good thing.  I didn’t have to use that brush thing that The Lady made me bring along.  The only good thing about having to be up and dressed before 6am is that The Lady and Mr. Guy had a surprise for me.  They ordered one of the cool t-shirts that we brought for the picture taking people for me!  It was a special monster-sized one and it was orange!  The Lady’s was pink, but Mr. Guy and I, well all of the guys, got orange ones!  How perfect is that?!  It made me feel like part of the group even though I didn’t have one of those picture taking things around my neck.

 Just like the picture of Mr. Guy and me at the falls, we look alike here, too!  And its not just because of the orange shirts.  It must be our handsomeness!

We went to Meadowlark Gardens at 6:30 in the morning.  The picture taking people wanted to take pictures of flowers and other stuff that grows outside.  All the bright colors of the flowers woke me up.  Mr. Guy did not have enough coffee before we left the hotel so I’m not sure that he was completely awake.

I did not see any blue flowers on our walk through the garden, but I did see these pretty purple ones that looked like a great big ball.


They are called alliums.  I told Mr. Guy and The Lady that we need to grow some of these in our garden at home.

Then I saw pretty orange flowers.  The remind me of my horns.  I’m not sure what these are called.


It think it may be something like echo rojo.   Maybe this is why The Lady was using Spanish, sort of, yesterday!  Echo rojo means red hot poker, I think.

The gardens also had a jangseung.  Jangseung is a Korean word meaning a totem.  In Korean villages, these poles were placed at the edges of villages to scare off demons.


If Mr. Guy was wearing his fancy black hat, he would look sort of like the man on the jangseung.  Mr. Guy only looks frightening enough to scare off demons before he has had his coffee in the morning!


Saturday was a special day at the garden.  They were celebrating the 5th anniversary of the Korean Bell Garden so there were speakers, and microphones, and a podium set up for the people who were going to talk.  We did not stay at Meadowlark Gardens long enough to hear the presentation.  I did take a minute to see what it would feel like to stand at the podium and pretend like I was talking to a whole crowd of people.  Maybe someday, I will become a politician.  If I do, I will be an honest one who does good things for all people…and monsters, even the monsters who have different colors of fur than I do.

We were all hungry when we left the gardens.  We headed to downtown Leesburg, Virginia, which is where the picture taking people were going to spend a big part of their day.  Though before they started taking pictures, we got some doughnuts!


 Mr. Guy picked me up so that I could see all of the different kinds.  Yummy!

And then it was time to walk around the town.  There was so much to look at.


The Lady took lots of pictures in downtown Leesburg, but I was not in very many of them.  I do like this one she took of Ms. Sherri as a photobomber!  Ms. Sherri is one of the first of The Lady’s picture taking friends that I ever met.



Some of the other picture taking people took photos of me.  Maybe they will share them with Mr. Guy and The Lady.

 Mr. Guy carried me around all day and pointed out things that he thought might interest me.


We went to a cemetery and looked at headstones.  Mr. Guy explained that these are markers that show where people who have died are buried.  We looked at the names of the people and their birth and death dates.  Some of them lived and died over two hundred years ago!  Though I didn’t know any of the people who were buried here, it made me happy to think about them and say a prayer for them and let them know that they are not forgotten.

After we had walked around Leesburg a little more, we were tired and getting hungry again. 


Once all of the picture taking people were also tired and hungry, we went to lunch.  

After lunch we went to this place where there were lots of tents and lots of people.  Some of the people were selling weird stuff like old furniture and car parts and signs.  Mr. Guy said it was called a flea market.  I’m glad that we were already there before he told me what it was called.  I sure wouldn’t want to think that we were going to go someplace where all you can do is buy and sell fleas!  I don’t even want to go someplace where they give you fleas for free!  Fleas would be a disaster in my fur.  And I wouldn’t want to share them with the canines and feline when I got home.


Again, after spending the afternoon wandering around and looking at all of the unusual stuff at the market, we were hungry again.  Ms. Kay, one of the picture taking people invited all of us to her house for dinner.  We had pizza and salad and wings and a fancy cake with ice cream on top.  

And, she took a picture of all of the picture taking people and all of their friends and significant others.  They let me be in the picture too!  I think I kind of hid Mr. Guy.  Oops!


It made me a very happy little blue and orange furry monster that everyone was so nice to me.  I thought they might think that I was too silly to come along on their photowalk.  Nope!  They made me feel like one of them…but with just a shirt and no picture taking machine. 

By the time we got back to our hotel.  I was very, very sleepy.  This was a long, but super fun, day for this little monster.


And in the morning, we planned to meet our friends for breakfast at 8:00, before everyone was ready to head home.  After getting up at 4:30 on Friday and 5:30 on Saturday, 7:15 on Sunday felt like sleeping in!

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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 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 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.  


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A Month of Me: Day 7 – A New Word, Or Two

I learned a new word today.  Well, actually I learned two new words, but I only meant to learn one.  

Mr. Guy and The Lady made me use that big fat book of words called a dictionary to look up what the word texture means.

Texture – the visual and especially tactile quality of a surface

Tactile???  

Sometimes that dictionary book is not very helpful.  It uses more words that I don’t know to try to explain to me what the word that I didn’t know the meaning of in the first place means.

Tactile sounds like what you walk on when you spill the thumbtacks from The Lady and Mr. Guy’s bulletin board all over the floor.  So, Texture – the visual and especially painful feeling of a walking on a surface covered in thumbtacks.  Hmm…I don’t think that is right.  At least texture and  tactile both start with “t” so I only have to go back a few pages in this dictionary book to find out what tactile really means.

Tactile – pertaining to or affecting the sense of touch

Let me see if I understand this…Texture – the visual and especially the quality affecting the sense of touch of a surface.   Maybe I get it.  Walking on thumbtacks on the floor would definitely have a texture that affects my sense of the quality of touch on my monster feet.  I wonder if all texture is painful.  I had to ask The Lady about that.

The Lady told me that not all textures are painful.  She said that texture is just a general word used to group all the different words used to describe the way things feel.  Smooth, rough, prickly, scratchy, are all words that can be used to describe texture.  I asked her if thumbtacky was a texture word.  She and Mr. Guy said that maybe it could be if that was the best way to describe how something felt to me.

We went on a scavenger hunt for different kinds of textures.

My fur is soft.  My claws and my horns are hard.  Mr. Guy’s bald head is smooth but his face fur is prickly.  The sidewalk is rough.  The floor where I was playing is lego-y.

We went outside and looked at the bark on the trees in our yard.  My favorite one is the river birch tree.  It’s bark is shaggy.  In case you don’t know what shaggy means,  it means having long, thick, unkempt hair or fur.  Sometimes The Lady tells Mr. Guy and me that our fur looks shaggy.  When that happens, Mr. Guy gets his trimmed.  I tell The Lady that my shaggy fur is part of my character and I don’t want it to get trimmed.  I don’t even really want it to get brushed!   So far, that has worked!  I think that now I understand this whole idea of texture a little better.

I do have one more question, though.  How can we have a river birch tree in our front yard when we don’t have a river?  I want to know the answer to this question, but I’m afraid that if I ask, Mr. Guy will make me go get another big book with lots of words that I don’t know.  The brain of this little blue and orange furry monster is too full to hold anything else new today.  The answer to this question will have to wait until another day.

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A Month of Me: Day 6 – What Not To Wear

Mr. Guy asked me to go outside with him this morning so that he could show me his zoo-kini.  I wasn’t sure that I wanted to see that, especially first thing this morning!  First of all, Mr. Guy doesn’t really like to go to zoos because it makes him sad to see all of the animals in captivity.  And secondly, Mr. Guy doesn’t seem like a bikini kind of guy, at least I hope he isn’t a bikini kind of guy.  So why would he want to show me a special outfit, that I don’t think that he would like. to wear to a place that I know he doesn’t like?  Maybe his brain is more re-tired than I thought!

When I asked him about his zoo-kini, he said that he most definitely was not putting on a bikini and that we most definitely were not going to the zoo!  Oh, thank goodness!

Okay then…so what was Mr. Guy talking about?

He has a zoo, well maybe its a garden not a zoo, full of zucchini in the backyard.  He has big zucchini that we picked, little zucchini that are still growing that we can pick in a few days, and lots of yellow flowers that will turn into more zucchini soon.  It is a good thing that everyone at my house likes zucchini because it may be all that we eat all summer long!  The Lady told me that there are many  different ways to cook the zucchini.  We can sauté it or grill it.  We can make pancakes with it.  We can even make bread with it.  Sometimes The Lady lets me help her cook.  Maybe she will let me make something with all of our zucchini.

I am so happy that Mr. Guy has the eating kind of zucchini and not wearing zoo-kini!!!

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A Month of Me: May 5 – Give Me Five

The Lady’s picture taking word for today was “five.”  Since she is taking a picture of me every single day this month because it A Month of Me…Me, Blueper B, I tried to help her think of something fun we could do together today.  I discovered that five is a very hard number for little blue and orange furry monsters.  I have one head and one mouth and one tongue and one  orange belly, I have two eyes and two horns and two teeths and two arms.  I have four claws on each of my two arms. 

I have one Mr. Guy and one The Lady.  I have one Offspring One and one Offspring Two. Well, technically, they are The Lady’s offsprings. Anyway, that makes Two Offsprings.  I live with two canine furry monsters and one feline furry monster 

 I don’t have five of anything!

The Lady and I thought some more.

The Lady got excited when she remembered a game called Yahtzee.  She said it would be perfect for today’s picture taking because it has lots of fives.  I asked her what kind of fives.  She told me that it is a game that is played with five dies.

FIVE DIES!!!!

This sounded worse than the wreck center to me.  I got very upset and told The Lady that I did not want to play her game!  She seemed surprised since I usually like to play games with her.  She asked me why I did not want to learn to play a new game.  She said that it was a game that she loved to play when she was very young and she thought that I would like it too.  I told her that she was wrong!  I did not want to play any game that meant that five humans or monsters would have to die.  The Lady starting laughing at me.  That made me mad and sad at the same time.  She said, “Not five dies, five dice.  D-I-C-E, not D-I-E-S!”   Well, I’m glad she didn’t mean five dies, but I had no idea what d-i-c-e were.

The Lady found the box with the game and showed me the things called dice.  To me, they looked kind of like square ladybugs without any antennas.  These dice things had black dots all over them.  The lady showed me that each one had six sides.  Each of the six sides had a different number of dots from one to six.  I bet that is so you can tell how old each square ladybug is.  Hmmm…I thought we were looking for fives.  Oh wait, there are five dice.  

The Lady explained that playing Yahtzee would help me to learn to count and to add and to multiply because I would have to count all of those dots of the ladybugs dies dice.  We went over the rules and then started to play the game.  The Lady said that we would stop and take a picture when I dumped the dice out of the cup and we could see lots of dice with five dots.

I think that I like this game especially because I get to play with The Lady.  Mr. Guy doesn’t;t like to play games, so Yahtzee will be something special that The Lady and I can do together.  Mr. Guy will keep reading stories to me.  I don’t have to count the letters or words or pages in the books when we read together, but he does make me read the words sometimes.

I had fun and I learned new things today.  It makes me happy to  be able to help The Lady with her projects!

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A Month of Me: May 2 – The Treadmill

Remember yesterday when I said that I was looking forward to new adventures with Mr. Guy and The Lady this month?  I might have to change my mind and it is only the second day of May!  The Lady told me that we were going to the wreck center today.  I don’t know why we would want to go someplace that was all about wrecks.   Then Lady explained that wreck was short for wreck creation. That made it sound even worse!  We were going someplace to create wrecks?  This sounded very scary to this little blue and orange furry monster!  When I told The Lady that I did not want to go, she explained to me that it was not wreck, but rec, which was short for recreation.  She told me that a recreation center is a place where people go to play games and exercise.  Things were now sounding a little better now!  I like to play games.

And then we got there…we weren’t going to play games; we were going to exercise.  The Lady got on this funny machine called a treadmill.  To me, treadmill sounds like someplace where they make tires.  Or, maybe its where they take the old tires from the wreck center.  Whatever it is, it did not look like it was going to be a fun thing to me.  

We stepped on this thing. The Lady pushed a bunch of buttons and all of the sudden the floor started moving.  She told me to walk.  I have short little monster legs and they had to move very fast so I didn’t fall down.  Once I could walk without wobbling, I asked The Lady where we were going.  Usually when we walk, we go someplace where we see pretty things and she takes pictures of them.  I should have known that this was not going to be a fun walk because The Lady did not have her camera.  The Lady told me that we weren’t going anywhere.  We would stay in this one place and walk for an hour.  An hour?!? And we weren’t going anywhere?  What a crazy thing to do!

I had to ask why we were doing this.  The Lady explained that walking on the treadmill keeps your body healthy and burns calories.  I think my body is healthy and I don’t even know what calories are; but, if we have to burn them, I would much rather burn them over the fire pit in our backyard where we can have snores when we’re done!  The Lady explained that calories are energy that we get from food.  We need to make sure that our bodies use more calories than we eat so that our bodies don’t get too big.  She said her body was bigger than she wants it to be so she would be coming to the wreck rec center a lot to burn her calories.  This treadmill thing is one of the craziest things that The Lady and I have ever done together!  After about thirty minutes on this, I felt like one of those tiny brown furry monsters at the pet store; I think they are called hamsters.  I have watched the hamsters spin on wheels.  They run and run and run…and go nowhere.  I finally figured out that this treadmill machine is like a hamster wheel for people!  I don’t like it.  I wonder if the hamsters do.

Mr. Guy came to the rec center too, but he did not get on this people wheel thing called a treadmill.  He got on some other machine that was called a lip tickler, or something like that.  I don’t know why he needs a machine to tickle his lips.  I think his beard and mustache can do that…at home!  My fur sometimes tickles my lips.

I spent a whole hour on the treadmill with The Lady.  They had TVs to watch while you were walking to get nowhere.  It was kind of fun to watch the Food Network and decide what kind of calories I wanted to eat today so that I would have something to burn tomorrow when we come back to the rec center.

I think that I need some snores…even if I can’t burn my calories at home.  I was a very tired monster when this adventure was over.  In fact, I was a wreck!  Maybe that place really is a wreck center!

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Seeing Seattle

It is trip time again!  I never even finished sharing all of my adventures from our trip to England and now I have another adventure to write about!  We just got home at 10 o’clock tonight, but The Lady said we should stay up and write about our trip to Seattle now.  She said something about it really doesn’t seem so late since we are still on Seattle time and that is different from Dallas time.  I don’t quite know how that works.  All I know is that I am a sleepy blue and orange monster. but I want to tell you all about our trip, so here goes…

We left on Thursday after The Lady taught her classes.  Mr. Guy helped me pack my things while she was at school.  He told me that we were going to Seattle so that The Lady could learn new stuff about picture taking.  I thought she knew about picture taking, but apparently there is lots more stuff that she needs to learn.  Mr. Guy and I picked The Lady up at school and we went to the airport.  After we got checked in, we had some lunch.


We don’t eat the “M” meals very often.  It is special airport food.  I sure do like those french fries!  While we were eating our lunch, Mr. Guy got a message saying that they had changed the gate for our airplane.  We had to go to a whole different terminal.  I was afraid that we would have to walk, but Mr. Guy said that there was a thing called SkyLink that would take us.  He said it was kind of like a train.  A train at an airport seemed a little strange to me, but as long as I didn’t have to walk, I was okay with strange.


We didn’t have to wait too long for the train.


I was happy to see Seattle on the sign when we got to our new gate.  I didn’t want to have to move again.  Really, I didn’t have to walk at all.  Mr. Guy is always a good sport and carries me.  Oh!  I got a new shirt for this trip!


It’s perfect, don’t you think?

When we finally got on the plane, I put my little monster head down and went to sleep.  I don’t remember any of the trip.  I didn’t even have a snack.  I guess all of that moving from terminal to terminal tired me out!  Next thing I knew we were picking up our luggage and getting in a fancy black car to go to our hotel in Seattle.  I went right back to sleep.  The Lady said that it wasn’t as late in Seattle as it was in Dallas because we gained two hours.  Here’s that time thing again!  I just wanted to go to bed.  So, I did!

I was nice and rested when I woke up on Friday.  Friday was the day that The Lady’s picture taking classes started.  The event was called Click Away.  I like that name.  It makes sense to me since I always hear The Lady’s camera go click, click, click when Mr. Guy and I are around.


Mr. Guy and I looked around while The Lady was in her morning class.  When she was done, I asked what her class was about.  She said, “Boudoir photography.”  I said, “Boo what?”  She explained that it was a special kind of picture taking where ladies wear the kind of clothes that people don’t see them in most of the time.  I asked her if she meant pajamas.  She told me that that wasn’t it.  I must have looked confused because she finally explained that the ladies wore fancy underwear.  I don’t know why anyone would want their picture taken in their underwear!  The Lady explained that this kind of picture taking helps ladies feel pretty and helps them to accept how they look even if they may not always feel pretty.  I thought about that and wondered if anyone wanted to take a picture of a blue and orange furry monster in his underwear.  Then I changed my mind.  I think I’ll stick to just letting The Lady take pictures of me in my t-shirts!

The Lady also took some classes in taking wedding pictures.  I guess I won’t be in any of those pictures either.  I am too young to get married.  But even when I’m older, I don’t want to get married.  I don’t think that there is a girl monster out there who would love me as much or take care of me as well as Mr. Guy and The Lady.  I think that I will live with them forever.  Besides, the closet with all of my t-shirts is at their house.  

This was The Lady’s favorite place at the conference.


The Lady got a new camera there.  I asked her if you had to have a special camera to take pictures of people in their underwear and wedding people.  She said, “No.”  She told me that she could use her new camera to take pictures of me and Mr. Guy too.  So far, she hasn’t taken any pictures with it yet.  She said that she wanted it to stay packed in its box so it could travel home safely.  I bet she will take some pictures of me this week…I will be wearing a t-shirt, not just my underwear!

On Saturday night, Mr. Guy, The Lady, and I went to The Seattle Space Needle.  We had to walk almost a mile from our hotel to get there.  That wasn’t so bad, but it was raining.  The Lady said that it rains a lot in Seattle and that she likes the rainy weather.  I don’t mind the rain, but I sure wish I had had a raincoat!  Mr. Guy did his best to keep my warm and dry.


When we got to the Space Needle to buy our tickets, they said it would be two hours before we could ride up the elevator.  That is how you get up high so you can see the city.  While we waited, Mr. Guy and The Lady took me to the Chihuly Gardens.  I asked them what  grew in the Chihuly garden.  The Lady said it was a glass garden.  They grow glass?, I thought.  That sounded a little strange to me.   The Lady told me that it is a glass sculpture garden.  Dale Chihuly, the glass artist, makes all kinds of beautiful shapes with colored glass.  I was a little nervous to go to a place where everything is glass.  I am a careful monster, but I was still worried that I might break something.  Mr. Guy said that it would be fine as long as I didn’t touch anything. He held me very close so that I wouldn’t trip and fall and break something accidentally.


Some of the glass looked like Christmas trees.  They were brightly colored and had lights shining through them  They were beautiful!

The light bouncing all around through the glass was really neat looking.  I liked the place where the glass was on the ceiling.  I knew that I could not break anything if the sculptures were up high!


While we were looking at the glass on the ceiling, I met a really nice girl named Lindsay.  She was from California and she wanted to be my friend.  Though I have done a terrible job with my Hundred People Project, Lindsay made me want to get back to it because she asked to have her picture taken with me.  That made me a happy little monster.  Her mister friend took a picture of us and The Lady took one too.  Now I have twenty-five people!  I will make it to a hundred.  I will.

After I had my picture taken with Lindsay, I saw something that looked like a big glass bowl.  Mr. Guy said that they should put Chex Mix in it.  I don’t think that is what it was for!


It was a very pretty blue bowl!  I liked Mr. Chihuly’s glass because he used a lot of blue and orange, the best colors for almost anything!  I was nervous being this close to Mr. Chihuly’s big blue bowl.  I didn’t want to stay in this spot for very long!

Next we saw more glass sculptures up on the ceiling. More orange glass!


This part was in a great big glass building, but it was just plain building glass not the cool kind of glass used for the sculptures. 

There were also lots more glass sculptures outside.  I don’t understand how they don’t get broken.


Mr. Guy got mad at The Lady because she let me sit on the wet rain covered bench.  I didn’t mind, but  my monster underwear did get a little wet.  That was OK because nobody was going to take pictures of my underwear!   I do definitely need a raincoat before we again visit any place with lots of rain.

After we finished touring the garden, we still had an hour before our elevator time.  We went and had a snack, fried cheese curds.


The words “curds” is kind of an ugly sounding word.  I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to eat anything called “curds.”  Mr. Guy said that they were good and that I should try them.  I did and they were, but the word curds still does not sound appetizing!

Finally it was time to get in the elevator line to ride to the top of the Space Needle.  The Space Needle is 605 feet tall.  That is like 600 hundred of me standing on top of each other!


I was a little scared, but not too much so.  We got in line with lots of other people.

The elevator ride to the top was super quick!  It took us longer to ride the hotel elevator to the twelfth floor where our room was than it did to ride all the way to the top of the Space Needle.  When we got off of the elevator, I felt like I was in a giant spaceship.
We then went outside to walk around the outside of the spaceship Space Needle.  It was rainy and cold and SO WINDY!  I was a frigid little monster.  Not only did I need that raincoat, I also needed my orange sweater that Ms. Joni made for me. 
I didn’t even think about bringing my sweater because when I was packing in Dallas, it was almost too hot for a t-shirt, forget a sweater!  If I had my own cellphone with all of those fancy app things, I could have checked the weather in Seattle while I was packing.  I mentioned this to Mr. Guy.  He said no phone for me.
Back inside, there was a great big map that showed all of the places where people have traveled from that have visited the Space Needle.
Mr. Guy added our names to the map.
One of those yellow dots is me!

After Mr. Guy signed our names, we walked back to our hotel.  It was still raining, but it was not nearly as cold and windy on the ground as it was 605 feet up in the air!  We needed to get back and pack.  The Lady got lots of new picture taking stuff and Mr. Guy was not sure where it was all going to go.  I got a new t-shirt and the Space Needle, but it did not take up much room in our suitcase.

When we got up on Sunday morning, it wasn’t raining anymore.  We took a short walk around our hotel.  There were lots of pretty orange flowers, and the leaves on the trees were also turning orange.  The trees in Texas do not have orange leaves.

We took a few pictures and then it was time to leave for the airport and our trip home.

When we got to the airport, I was hungry.  Mr. Guy bought me a sandwich on funny a bread.  It had a hole in the middle of it.  That seemed strange.  I was worried that Mr. Guy got defective bread.  He told me that it was supposed to be that way.  The bread was called a beagle, or a bugle, or something like that.  


It tasted good, but I still don’t know why all of the sandwich insides didn’t fall out of the hole in the middle of my bread.  I like un-holy bread better.  Is that right?  Well, you know what I mean.

When we finally got on the airplane, I fell asleep in Mr. Guy’s lap.  I didn’t wake up until we were almost back in Dallas and the flight attendant starting talking to me.  

She wanted to know my name and where I had been.  I got excited because I thought that maybe I could have my picture taken with her and I would be up to person #26, but nope.  She said that she was not allowed to have her picture taken while in her working clothes, something about 7-eleven, or costing nine dollars and eleven cents, or something.  I didn’t want to get her in trouble, so I will have to find another person #26.

Finally we were back in Dallas.  We waited for our suitcase to come around the racetrack.


Once we had our bag, we headed home and I started writing.  And that is my story about Seattle.

THE END!



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Me in Ely and Cambridge

Here it is Saturday. I think I am starting to catch up with the days. Even though it is already Saturday, I’m writing about Friday.

Today we had breakfast in the hotel. The Lady said that breakfast was served every morning in the hotel!  I thought it was nice of them to give us breakfast everyday. Blue and Orange monsters need to start their day with a good breakfast. 
After breakfast, it was back on the bus. The people in Britain call it a “coach”.  I thought a coach was someone who taught game players how to beat up other game players.  That is not what it means here.  Mr. Martin was there waiting for us. He is the coach driver, not the coach.  Mr. Martin drove us to a place called Ely. There is a big church there called a Cathedral. The Lady and the singing people were going to sing a concert there. 

We had to park a hundred miles away and walk to the cathedral. Well, it was not 100 miles really, but it seemed like it. Mr Guy carried me all the way from the coach (see I’m learning to speak British!) to the cathedral.  When we got there, I was surprised. The only churches I had seen were small ones like the one in Delaware next to store where The Lady and Mr. Guy adopted me. Ely Cathedral is GREAT BIG. It is all stone and colored glass windows. As we walked it seemed to get bigger. It was almost a scary place. 


Some nice folks there gave us a tour. That made it seem less scary. Ely is very old. Because it is so big and made of stone, things echo everywhere. All the voices sounded louder.  We learned a lot about the history of the cathedral. I did not get it all. I think there are things I needed to know before I got there about Norman (whoever he is) and some other guy named Henry D8. Maybe he is related to R2D2.  Even though I was confused, Mr. Guy really seemed interested. So I guess it was all good. 

In the afternoon the singing people did their concert. It was really good. I had never heard them sing before. I was a little worried that they would not let blue and orange monsters in to the concert. The cathedral people were very nice.  A couple of them asked Mr Guy all about me. He told them how I go places and have this blog. They thought that was great! So I got to go.  When we got to the chapel where the singing people were going to do their concert, there was some blue there.  The Chapel was called The Lady Chapel and the blue lady was The Virgin Mary.



If you want to hear what the singing people sounded like, here is a link to one of the songs that they sang in The Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral.



When the singing was over, we got back on the coach and Mr Martin took us back to Cambridge. We had the whole afternoon to look around there. Cambridge has a big and old college. It is bigger and older than the college where The Lady teaches or either of the colleges where Mr. Guy and The Lady went to school.  The Lady got me a new shirt just so I don’t forget about Cambridge!! YAY!!! 


I’m not really going to go to Cambridge for college. I would have to leave The Lady and Mr. Guy. I don’t want to do that.  And, I am not really good at school things.  I like it when The Lady and Mr. Guy teach me what I need to know. 

One thing that Mr. Guy taught me about while we were in Cambridge was telephone booths.  I thought booths were someplace that you sat with your friends at a restaurant, a place where you were supposed to eat and talk to your friends who are right there with you.  Telephone booths are places where you do talk to your friends, but you have to pay money to talk to them on a piece of plastic that is attached to the wall of the telephone booth with a big thick piece of wire.  This all seemed very strange.  Mr. Guy’s telephone booth is much smaller.  He can carry it in his pocket wherever he goes.  He does not have to stay attached to a big red box on the street corner to talk to his friends.


While we were in Cambridge, we also did something called punting.  I thought punting was something that those coach people did to help their team beat up the other team.  Apparently in Britain, punting means something else too.  We rode on a funny boat where a guy stood on the end and pushed us along the river.  



It was fun and we got to see more of Cambridge.  It was a little like bumper cars though because not all of the boat drivers were good and boats kept running in to eat other.  It was not scary, though.

Neither was this dinosaur.


We had a snack with Mr. Mickey and Ms. Robin.  They liked me and were not embarrassed to walk around with me.


After our fun afternoon and evening, we went back to the hotel. We were going to leave Cambridge in the morning and we needed a good night’s sleep. 


So that is what Friday was like. I will tell you about Saturday (which is really today) tomorrow!

I know…the time and days are all confused because I wrote this on time but did not post it on time and now it is several weeks later.  After I wrote this post, I realized that it was going to be hard to get this done while we were in England.  I will tell you all about the rest of my trip, but I will write about it from where I am now, back in Texas!