May 16 – Time to Commence Again

Today is one of my favorite days of the year.  It is The Lady’s last day of school, which means we’ll have lots more time together after today.  It’s also the day that she has to go commence, which, after all these years, I now know means to begin even though it happens at the end of the school year.  I like the idea that it is commencing with summer vacation!  What I don’t like is when The Lady commences, she always wears those ridiculous looking clothes!

That big black robe thing that The Lady wears makes me think that she should be on daytime TV  as the next Judge Judy.  Shhh…don’t tell Mr. Guy and The Lady that I watch that stuff when they are not home!  A new show Judge The Lady…that doesn’t sound good.  Maybe The Lady Judge…better, but…I don’t need to worry about The Lady’s TV career.  She is happy as a teacher.  I bet that is because she only has to wear these weird clothes a couple times a year!

And then there is that hood thing.  I still don’t know why it is called a hood.  Hoods go on your head.  The Lady wears this thing like a cape.  It should give her some kind of super powers, but it doesn’t.  You know why it doesn’t give her superpowers?  Because it is ugly!  Pink and green?  Who puts pink and green together?  I know, I know.  She didn’t pick the colors.  They have something to do with the special color for her school and the fact that she studied those weird dots and lines and  squiggles at that school .  If she had asked me, I would have told her that she should have made different choices.  Like she always tells me, choices have consequences and sometimes those consuquences are with you your whole life!

She should have gone to a school with prettier colors and studied something that didn’t make you wear pink!  If The Lady had been an engineer instead of someone who reads dots and squiggles and lines, then her cape hood would have been orange.  That would have been a much better choice – as far as the hood color.  But I don’t think The Lady would be a very good engineer.  We shouldn’t tell her that either.

When The Lady was getting ready to leave, part of me wanted to go with her and part of me didn’t.  She had to go early so that she could rehearse with the orchestra.  That’s where she and her friends all practice reading their dots and lines and squiggles together.  Every person has different looking books to read and they all use something different to make sounds.  The Lady blows on a black tube.  Some people blow on silver tubes and others on gold curly tubes.  Other people saw on big pieces of wood with strings.  And some people use sticks to bang on circles.  I have no idea how all these people doing different things sounds good together, but it does.  I should mention that almost all of these people wear pink hoods so they too have gone to school to learn to read dot, line, and squiggle language.

All that to say that the commencing night takes a long time.  The orchestra plays, lots of people talk and then lots of people have their names called and they walk across they stage and shake lots of hand and get a fancy folder and have lots of pictures taken.  It is kind of boring for a furry little blue and orange monster.  Don’t tell The Lady I said that either!

I did notice something after The Lady got her weird clothes on.

The Lady’s hood looked like a perfectly-sized monster hammock!  I could crawl right inside it, go to the commencing night with The Lady, and sleep through the whole thing!  This was a great plan!

When I shared my plan, The Lady disagreed with it.  She said that first of all I would get squished when she sat back in her chair.  She had to sit back in her chair so that she would be comfortable during all of the boring parts.  And secondly, she said that she did not want to look like a confused kangaroo whose pocket was on the wrong side of her body.  I don’t think I look at all like a baby kangaroo!  Have you ever seen a blue and orange kangaroo?

I stayed home.  That was really OK because that green and pink does nothing for my pretty blue and orange fur.

And I got to catch up on Judge Judy reruns!

 

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!

A Month of Me: May 3 – Life Is Good

Every now and then Mr. Guy and I get lucky.  Today was one of those days.  A few days ago Mr. Guy and I were looking at stuff on the computer.  We saw this t-shirt that we thought that The Lady would She enjoys making stuff with stuff with sticks and string.  She says it makes her happy and helps her relax.  T-shirts make me happy and giving a present of a t-shirt to someone else makes me really happy!  Mr. Guy told me the secret code for his plastic money and we ordered her one as a surprise.  We knew that The Lady would like the picture of sticks and string on the shirt and Mr. Guy and I like the words…Life is Good.  Most of the time I think life is really good.  Only when I have to spend time walking for an hour going nowhere on dread treadmill, or when we lose someone that we love, am I not sure life is that good.  Mr. Guy and The Lady try to remind me that even when I am sad, there are still lots of good things to be happy about if I just open my eyes and my heart.

Mr. Guy and I were happy that the shirt that we ordered for The Lady came in the mail today because today especially, The Lady needed to be reminded that life is good.  

The Lady is a professor at a college.  She likes her job teaching people about music, but lately she says that being at her school is not as safe as it used to be.  In Texas, people can have guns on college campuses.  That is scary to me!  I don’t even want to think about that!  Today, at a school just like the one where The Lady teaches, but thankfully not hers, someone brought a gun inside the school and killed someone and then killed himself.  I just don’t understand this.  Mr. Guy and The Lady can’t help me to understand because they don’t understand it either.  All I know is that I don’t want something like this to happen at The Lady’s school.  Mr. Guy says that maybe she should retire, like he did, and then he and I wouldn’t have to worry about her when she goes to work.  I don’t think she will do that, but I wish she would!

Mr. Guy and I hope that the new t-shirt that we got will make The Lady think about how happy playing with her sticks and string makes her.  Then maybe she won’t worry about guns and school.  She can think about what color string she can twist into knots to make a hat for me for next winter.  

Like The Lady and Mr. Guy remind me, life is good even when I think its not.

A Month of Me – Day 25

Today was a special day for a couple of reasons.  First,  Mr. Guy said that he and lots of people other than me were wearing orange shirts today for a special reason.  He told me that there are many places in the world where women and girls are treated very badly. Sometimes they are even beaten! I told him that I think treating women and girls like this is terrible! I can’t believe it. I can never see Mr Guy hitting The Lady, or Offspring 1 or 2, or the girl four-legged monsters at our house, or any other girls.  And if he ever wanted to hurt any of them,  I wouldn’t let him!  I know that that would never happen in our family, but that is not true in other places.

Mr Guy explained to me that the United Nations set up a group called “Just Say NO” where people could get information about how to help  stop these terrible things from happening. (http://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/take-action/say-no)


On that day everyone wears orange to show that they do not like violence against women and girls. So Mr Guy and I wore our orange shirts all day long to show that we do not think anyone should be violent with women, or anyone else for that matter. I don’t understand why anyone wants to hurt someone else.  We should all be kind to each other!

The second reason that today was special is because I got to go visit Mr. Guy at school.  He usually teaches about computers, but now he is a school librarian until he retires.  I like his old classroom with all of the computers, but I like the library better.  It has lots and lots of books!


Mr. Guy showed me the great big dictionary.  It is a book that has lots and lots of words but it doesn’t tell a whole story.  It just tells the story of all the words.  Sometimes I get my words confused.  Mr. Guy said that the dictionary will help me to figure out how to use words correctly and it will also help me to learn new words.  


A dictionary is advantageous if an individual wishes to ameliorate and optimize his proficiencies regarding the avoidance of improper and erroneous locutions.

Using the dictionary is a lot of work for a blue and orange furry monster!


Mr. Guy also showed me another big book called an atlas.  It didn’t have as many words as the dictionary.  It had pictures of places all over the world.  Mr. Guy told me that there are seven continents in the world.  I asked what a continent was.  He told me to go look it up in the dictionary.


“A continent is any of the world’s main continuous expanses of land (Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, South America).”

We live in North America.  Mr. Guy told me today that this summer we are going to visit another continent.  We are going to England, which is on the continent called Europe.  



This is all too much for my little monster brain.  No wonder Mr. Guy and The Lady are always so tired when they get home from school.  All of this learning stuff overburdens my the capacity of my cerebral function.

After all of this new stuff, I just wanted to find a comfortable cathedra in which to read a gratuitous periodical.


Get me away from this dictionary!!!

Finally I had to just go sit in Mr. Guy’s lap and let my brain rest.  I always like it best when Mr. Guy holds me and I can be his little monster and he can be the smart one.





A Month of Me – Day 12

Today was the last day of school for The Lady!  Yay!  She came home early to finish grading her last exams so that she would be completely done for ther semester. Mr Guy came home at the usual time; it is not his last day of school.  Just like last night,  they left right away.

The Lady was playing music for something called graduation.  I learned three things today! When someone goes to school for a while and finishes lots of classes, they graduate. That means there is a big ceremony for them. They give everyone who has finished a fancy piece of paper called diploma. It is a paper that says they are finished. And you can get more than one of these diplomas. All this school stuffl is too hard for this blue and orange monster to figure out. It seems to me that finished means done, all done, forever. The Lady explained that there are lots of levels of school. You can get a diploma for each level! 

Second, I learned that The Lady not only sings, but she plays a musical instrument called a clarinet. I knew she played the piano. I often spend my days in the office where the piano is and have heard her play. She doesn’t play her clarinet much at home. Last weekend I heard something funny.  I think she might have been playing it in our library. But I was not in there and did not see it so I wasn’t sure what those sounds were. I know now, but I still have not seen her clarinet.

The third thing I learned was that when you graduate, you get special clothes! They are not t-shirts.  I like my t-shirts. They are called rigamarole or something like that.  The Lady has a black robe with funny looking arms and something she called a hood.  This all sounds like something a nerdy superhero might wear. The Lady let me try on her hood. It did not seem like much of a hood to me. I could not put it on my head! It went on my shoulders. 


The Lady said that the color of the hood tells people what you took all those classes in while you were in school.   Hers is pink because she went to school to study music. Pink really clashes with my orange fur!   I don’t think I want to study music!  Mr Guy said his hood was lemon yellow because he studied to be a librarian. I asked what that meant. He said that a librarian is someone who works in a library and deals with lots of books. That sounds fun!  I like books. The other night, when I was thinking about getting a rain hat, I wondered how yellow would look with my fur.  Someday maybe I can go to school and learn how to be a librarian like Mr. Guy and I can get a yellow hood and have a yellow hat too!  Then I would definitely look like a nerdy superhero!

For now though, I guess I’ll just have to be a furry blue and orange monster with lots of t-shirts and no rigamarole.

A Month of Me – Day 9

Mr. Guy and The Lady have been very busy today.  Mr. Guy said that he spent all day giving a star test.  I didn’t know that he was teaching theater!  I wonder what kind of star he was looking for.  Was it boy star or a girl star?  Could a blue and orange furry monster pass the star test?  I want to be a star like Nicky that I met from Avenue Q!  Mr. Guy said that it was not that kind of test.  Well, that makes me sad.

So then he must testing people on all the stars in the sky.  That would be a hard test!  All those little yellow dots look just the same to me yet they all have funny names.  And why do people need to be tested on all those names anyway?  I have enough trouble remembering the names of all my friends and they all look different and most of them have easy names.   The hard part is remembering which name goes with which face.  Mr. Guy said that he was not giving a test on stars in the sky.

Well then, it must be a test about hockey.  I know that the Dallas Stars play hockey.  I think its kind of strange that Mr. Guy would give a test about The Stars.  He doesn’t know anything about hockey!  I don’t think that he could pass a test about The Dallas Stars.  I know that they are playing a bunch of important games against the ST. Louis Blues so that they can win a cup.  I don’t know what the big deal is about winning a cup.  There will be a lot of germs if all of the Dallas Stars have to drink out of the same cup.  My friend, Mr. Jim, went to see the Stars play hockey on Saturday.  Maybe I can get a Dallas Stars t-shirt and look like I might be able to pass Mr. Guy’s test about the Stars.

What?  Not these Stars either?

I give up!  What kind of stars is his test about?

Mr. Guy said that the test is “The State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness.”  For several days that hold everyone at school hostage in a room and make them take this STAAR test.  It sounds like something that a furry blue and orange monster would not like at all!  And, the people giving this test must be kind of like if Mr. Guy was giving the hockey test…how can they be giving a star test when they don’t even know how to spell the word “star”?  Star is not S-T-A-A-R!  it only has one “a” if it is spelled correctly!  Oh well.  I don’t have to worry about this test.  Thank goodness!

Mr. Guy said that his brain was tired so he and I read the news, played a few games, and shopped online.  

I am still looking for the perfect hat.  We looked, but we did not find one.

I wanted to look for some new shirts, but Mr. guy was looking at soap.  His brain really must be tired!    He was so tired that he let me push the buttons on his computer.

The Lady said that she is giving tests this week too, but hers do not have incorrectly spelled names and she does not get locked up in a room every day.  I think if I ever have to take a test, I want to take the kind that The Lady gives instead of The kind that Mr. Guy gives.

Even though they were both tired, they found time to play with me, hold me, and help me write my blog post.  That makes me a happy little monster!