Today’s Fortune: Your greatest fortune is the large number of friends you have.

Wow! Another fortune is right! I have so many friends now that I can’t even count them all, and it seems like every day I make some more friends! I am even starting to grow on the geezers here, which is good, because they were not very nice to me when I first got here.

Most of the sock monkeys here at my house are very old. Mom has been collecting them for a long time. They live in our kitchen, because there is a lot of room for them up over the cabinets, and since there is yarn everywhere else, that seems to be the safest place for them.  They are kind of musty and dusty, and there are lots of old things vintage collectibles up there with them.  And lots of dishes.  Mom really likes dishes.

Since they are mostly old, they don’t come down and play very often, but I am working on that. I think everybody should know about them, just like they know about me, so I am going to talk about a few of them every so often, until they have all been introduced. There are way too many to talk about at one time.

Before I got here, Dad took a bunch of good pictures of the geezers.  These are called “portraits.”  He took one of me last weekend, but I still haven’t seen it. It takes him a while to get pictures done sometimes, but they are always a lot better than the ones Mom takes, so I will show everybody the portraits of the geezers, too.

Mom says when Dharma gets here, she is assigning us something called a “chaperone.” I had to look that up. It means: “an older person who accompanies young people at a social gathering to ensure proper behavior“. I am not sure why we need one of those, but Mom says she is going to have Bleach keep an eye on us. This is what Bleach looks like:

He is pretty grouchy, so me and Dharma will try not to make him mad.  He is called Bleach because his brown is faded to light tan.  Mom thinks somebody tried to give him a bath a long time ago, and stuck him in a washing machine with bleach in it.  That might be why he is so cranky.

Mom found him at a thing called an “estate sale” which is where a lot of old monkeys come from.  He was flung on a table outside, and he was sopping wet because it rained the night before.  Mom rescued him, and the lady having the sale let Mom have Bleach for free.  (That was some good negotiating Mom did, because I cost Dad a whole dollar.)  She took him home and dried him out, and he was all fixed up.  Mom is very good at fixing up monkeys.

Another one of our geezers is Lee Roy.  Mom found Lee Roy at an antique store.  Antique stores are very good for finding old monkeys, and a lot of times you can find John Deere tractors and happy cows there, too.   Here is what Lee Roy looks like:

Lee Roy does not listen to anybody.    His hands are plugging up his ears.  His ears are really strange.  They are big loops like donuts.  He has had his hands in there for so long that they are probably permanently stuck there.

Then there is Bartholomew.  He is very quiet, and seems to be very sad.   I think maybe that is because he has to sit on a parking meter all  the time.  Mom got him from an estate sale, too, but she had to pay for him.  He was Dad’s favorite monkey until I got here.  Now that I think about it, maybe that is why Bartholomew is sad.

Mom has a big thing called a “churn” up on top of the cabinets.  Mom says that is how they used to make butter back in the old days.  She says people would put milk in there and mash the stick up and down, and it would turn into butter.  That sounds like a lot of work.  Mom does not use the churn to make butter.  We get our butter from the grocery store.  That is much easier than mashing our own.

The geezer who lives on top of the churn is named Carlin.  He is very funny.  He tells jokes all the time, and keeps asking when Jesus will bring the pork chops.  I have never had pork chops, so I am wondering that, too.  Here is what Carlin looks like:

So those are some of our geezers.  I think that is probably long enough to talk about geezers for one day, so I will talk about some of the others later.  They are a pretty interesting bunch, and I am glad that they are starting to like me.

I am also going to see if Mom will make some of them come down and play, instead of just sitting around collecting dust.  They need to get around like I do, so they can make a large number of friends like I have.

Todays Vocabulary Words: Portraits, chaperone, estate sale, churn