My brother Barry is in a lot of trouble with Mom because of some stuff he did. And since I love to tell on my brothers, today's blog is going to be all about Barry and his silliness.Well, as you might remember, Barry likes to eat paper, so Mom gives him some of her junk mail every day to eat. And she gives some to me sometimes, too, because I like to tear it up, but I don't usually eat a whole lot of it. But during all the time that Barry has lived here, he has been very good about waiting until Mom gives him the paper before he starts eating it.
Then a couple of weeks ago, Barry got the idea that he could just help himself to the mail on the table, before Mom even opened it. And he ate up some stuff which Mom was hoping was not anything important such as a bill she was supposed to pay. And one time Barry stole part of the newspaper off the table, even though Mom hadn't finished reading it, and he ate that up, too.
So Mom started hiding all her important papers under a big book on the table, and that mostly kept Barry from eating them.
But then last week on Wednesday, Mom went to the Humane Society board meeting, and when she came home, she brought a bunch of papers and reports and a notebook that she took notes in because she is the secretary of the board. And Mom put all this stuff on a table by our front door, so that she could remember to take it all upstairs later to where the computer is, and write up the minutes of the meeting. Mom has left her board meeting stuff on this same table many times in the past, and nothing bad ever happened to it before.
Well, guess what! On Thursday afternoon, Mom went to the blood center and gave blood, and when she came home, she found out that Barry had been very, very naughty. He got most of the papers off the table, and he ate the financial report, the president's report, the development report, and the top half of the shelter and clinic reports. Also he ate the staples that were in some of these reports. What he didn't eat was Mom's notebook, and he didn't eat a page with a proposed budget for the capital campaign. (I'm not sure what all these things are, but I know that Mom thought they were important.)
So Mom had to send an email to some people at the shelter to say, "Help! My dog ate my homework!" and ask for new copies of the reports that Barry ate.
Anyway, the only good part about this was that Mom had a great excuse for not writing up the minutes over the weekend, and in fact, she still hasn't written them.So after that, you may think that Mom had learned her lesson and would never leave anything ever again where Barry could eat it. But I am sad to say that Mom is a slow learner, so here's what else Barry did that was naughty.
Mom made a nice flyer about the cactus club, and she went to Kinko's on Friday and got 150 copies of it made. Then she took these flyers to a sale that the cactus club had on Saturday at the River Market, and she brought home the flyers that were left over, which was at least 100 of them. These flyers were in one of those boxes that they give you at Kinko's, and the box is made out of cardboard that's kind of like the cardboard that is in the middle of a roll of toilet paper. This kind of cardboard is nice and chewy and fairly tasty, if I do say so myself.
So Mom put the box of leftover flyers on the table by the front door, and she thought about whether Barry would eat it, but since the papers were in a box, she decided he wouldn't bother it. Well, of course, she was WRONG about that! And Tuesday evening when Mom went to a meeting of another group she's in, Barry started looking for trouble again. He found the box and he pulled it down off the table, and he started eating the box. There were pretty, green flyers all over the floor, and they looked kind of fun, so I might have chewed on a few of them myself, but I am not going to tell you for sure whether I did or I didn't.
Anyway, when Mom came home, she was really mad because Barry ate the whole box lid and about half of the bottom of the box. And a bunch of flyers were kind of chewed up, but some didn't look all that bad. So Mom picked them up and found quite a few she could save, and really, I don't know why she was so upset. But I will just say that now Mom is keeping a big, heavy dictionary on the table by the door, and if she wants to put any papers there, she puts them under the dictionary.
And that's the story of why Barry is in so much trouble. Mom was worried that the box he ate might get stuck inside him, like that blanket thing got stuck inside me, but it seems to have gone right on through without a problem. And that's a good thing.
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