Teenage Monkey Eats His Family Out of House and Home

Any minute now I will get back to garden blogging. In the meantime, can someone tell me exactly how much food is required for a fourteen-year-old boy? Tonight, he ate two and a half pork chops, all of the fried zucchini and okra, and some sauteed zucchini and carrots for dinner. About an hour later, he was making himself a hot dog. He is not overweight. He did just grow taller than me.

I bought green apples, red apples, oranges, and bananas today. This evening, the red apples and bananas are gone. He ate about four pounds of fruit in four hours.

We went out to dinner with my monster family last week. He ate his entree of salmon, half of another steak offered by an aunt, bits and pieces off of other plates, and at least two and a half servings of cheese cake and one serving of another dessert.

I have a teenager with a bottomless pit of a belly. I am getting a little scared. Do y'all have any idea how to afford the appetite of a teenage boy?

Bad Bedfellow

This morning, I was sleeping well having nice dreams about sunshine and flowers when something crawled across my face. I woke up and brushed it away and the sucker stung me on the palm of my hand. Then it crawled under the covers making me scream and bounce around the bed. Mr. Bad Bug then crawled to the edge of the bed. I went and got some tissue to kill it with. Okay, maybe tissue paper is not the right weapon to use to kill a stinging creature. I was still a little asleep and a lot in pain, cognitave function was not at it's best, just saying. I tried to squash it and the little monster stung me through the paper on the tip of my finger. I dropped it and it stung me again on the side of my finger. At this point Manly Man is awake and very confused. I leave the room to go find Benadryl. When I returned to the bed room, Manly Man was in his tennis shoes and boxers trying to find the bug with a giant mag light. He said it fell off the bed, but we never did find it. I took the blankets outside and shook them out just to be safe. This was the worse wake up ever. Now I am afraid to sleep in my bed.

Our Friend Ben, You are not going to Believe This One

Do you see that grey blob on top of the dusty ceiling fan? Can you guess what it is? Is it a giant dust bunny? Is it a scared squirrel?

Nope, it is Teenage Monkey's dirty sock. That's right he threw his dirty, stinky sock up on the ceiling fan about twelve feet up in the air.

Somebody help me. Please help me.

Testing

Stuart from Blotanical is trying to help me get my feed back up. I followed the instructions for the work around, but still nothing as of yesterday. Hopefully, he performed some interweb magic and all will be well. This is a test to see if what he did fixed me. I seem to be a problem child.

Rambling Again

This will be another rambling post as I really do not have a point. I assume that if you are here, it is not because of the quality of my writing, but to laugh along with the insanity of my life. Either that or you are related to me. By the way, my lurking sisters, I can see you have been here by looking at the site meter. Leave me a comment already.

This is my purple Castor bean plant. It can grow very tall. It lived through this summer without any additional water from me. These are tough plants.

Here in north Texas we are between summer and fall. The plants still look a little stressed and we need rain. October is historically one of the wettest months. I can't wait to get my fall/winter garden in and start getting those veggies again. I actually have a better fall/winter garden than spring/summer garden. We rarely have a freeze and the cool weather crops get a nice long growing season. I am going to grow broccoli, Swiss chard, sugar snap peas, lettuce, collards, spinach, carrots, cabbage, broccoli rhab, onions, and garlic.

The large red flower is a pomegranate bloom. This is a dwarf plant that produces tiny little poms and I just love it. The flowers around it are a salvia of some sort. This salvia is tall and leggy. It is also invasive and reseeds itself everywhere. I would get rid of it, but the humming birds love it, so it stays.

Here is a penta in full bloom on my front porch. There is no direct sunlight here, but this little flower is doing just fine. Sometimes I ignore plant labels and just do what I want- with mixed results of course.

Why doesn't my ginger bloom? Do you know? Anybody?

Happy Birthday Nola

I wanted to make a short post in honor of Nola's birthday. Nola blogs at Alamo North. We met on the interweb, probably through Brenda, but I really can't recall. Through our blogs we discovered we live in neighboring counties. I hope to meet her at the Scarecrow Festival in Kaufman next month. She is funny and bright and I am happy to know her. She is one of the funniest commentors around. Happy Birthday Nola. I hope you spent the day at the fair.

Dumb Dogs and Other Critters

Hugh at Rock Paper Lizard wrote a truly funny post comparing his cat to a possum. In the comments I mentioned that we have had a couple of retarded dogs. Hugh, in return, asked if they were clumsy. I decided to answer him here.

Here are Tisha and Trixie being nice. Normally, the little one chases the big one all over the house. Tisha was a birthday gift for Middle Monkey. She has spent the last five years paying us back by hunting Middle Monkey every chance she gets. Trixie, the calico, is Tisha's daughter. She barely tolerates us at all. We are just her food source.

Here is Abby. She is my dog or better said, I am her person. She has an obsession with me. I cannot go anywhere in the house without her right under my feet. She seems to be convinced that something is going to get me and it is her job to be my bodyguard. This causes a lot of tripping and yelling, "Abby outside." She has a very large bone, which she likes to drop on our feet. This hurts -BAD. Abby does not qualify as retarded, just a little touched.

Here is the bunny family. I paid for two female baby bunnies. I actually brought home a male and a female.

Here is Mario formerly known as Lucy. Mario is still in trouble for the unplanned bunny family.

Now for retarded dog stories.

When I was a teenager we had a grey hound named Missy. Missy loved donuts. My dad is a veterinarian and Missy was his clinic dog. One morning she put her head in an empty donut sack to lick the sugar. The sack got stuck on her head and she got scared. Now, grey hounds are fast. She went running all over the clinic through the waiting room, in the office, and through the exam rooms. Most of the staff, the ones who were not helpless with laughter, were trying unsuccessfully to corner her. She ran into almost every wall before someone managed to catch her and get the sack off her head.

Our last German shepherd was retarded. She ate the net off the trampoline so she could jump up on it and sleep.She would run down a monkey and pants them. That's right, she would get them down and pull off their pants. She would not stay in the yard and we could not bring her in the house. We tried to bring her in, but she would run around like something crazed knocking over furniture and monkeys. We put a shock collar on her to keep her in the yard. Now, I don't approve of shock collars as training tools, but this dog was going to get run over and we had to do something. I would rather put a shock collar on people who abandon animals on the side of the road. In the end, the shock collar was a complete failure as she was to dumb to remember that if she jumped the fence she got shocked. She just kept jumping the fence and being surprised when she got shocked. After a few times, I felt sorry for her and took it off. At that point we realized she was not a town dog and found her a home in the country. She was not any better for her new family and they sent her back. She ended up living out the rest of her life with my dad at the vet clinic where she couldn't get loose. You could see in her face that she wanted to be good, but she just was not smart enough to figure out how to behave. Poor Sammy was always in trouble.

Do you have a dumb dog or a smart dog?