The Night Night Police

It is good to be the King!

Good dog Cooper has achieved his role in our household as the King of the pack. He rules with a firm yet benevolent hand.
Cooper is by nature a nurturer. It is he who cleans everyone's eyes and washes their beards and mustaches. He plays with them roughly or gently as the situation calls for. He watches over all, he worries about things and he adapts and adjusts beautifully to most situations. Except for the occasion when someone tries to achieve favored status with his beloved Genevieve. This will not be tolerated! She is HIS human and HIS alone, and quite frankly he cannot understand why she would ever need or want to entertain the affections of anyone else, animal or human.

Sometimes I have to hold everyone down in order to take care of them.

Lately, I’ve noticed Cooper has decided it is his job to make sure all the trains run on time and nothing is forgotten or missed. If someone has been left in the yard, he lets you know, especially if it is himself that has been left there too long. He will announce loudly and long that he has been outside far too long and needs to come back inside………..NOW!

Mealtimes are also his bailiwick. He makes sure the food bowls are filled at a proper time and he monitors each portion with the eye of a practiced dietician. Sometimes he’s so busy checking out everyone elses consumption he forgets his own and has to have a special mealtime alone.
Of course, Cooper also makes sure no animal, cartoon character or President Obama escapes from the television. He holds them all at bay with a fierce dedication to duty.
And now Cooper has taken on a new job. He has decided none of us have enough sense to go to bed when we should. When he is ready for the house to quiet down and get still he sits in front of me and grumbles. If I ignore the grumbling, he will pat me with his paws until I get up and start bedding everyone down.

Just what I needed….someone else telling me what to do! If he starts laying out my clothes for me in the morning and packing my lunch, we are going to be rich.

Meanwhile the Queen Mother, aka resident Diva Daisy reclines on her cushion and sleeps!

Crayons

We've all experienced the pure joy of a brand new box of crayons. Bright and vivid colors, with nice sharp points, clearly defining their color names on the wrappers that hug them tight. Alas, crayons do not stay fresh and sharp forever. Little hands, gripping them so tightly can snap them right in two and then you have two not-so-perfect reds, or blues, or greens. Sometimes, it is the crayon that is used the most that breaks first.

However, as long as all the crayons are present, we can still make a pretty fine picture. It takes all the colors.

Yellow for the bright and happy sun. Red for the delicious apples and bright little boats. White for those nice highlights on everything and black to give the whole picture more definition, shading and interest.

Our country has become a box of crayons.......we have all the primary colors represented along with some nice hybrid colors that happened by mixing together a few other shades and hues. We have a glorious array of beautiful faces in all colors, all religions, all races, all lifestyles. And, I dare say, most of the people I know who are my age ceased to see a clear difference in "color" a long time ago. We were raised by people who saw color very distinctly and were pretty danged vocal about it. But my generation was smart and we learned that there were broken crayons of EVERY color in our box, but there were also some very beautiful and wonderful bright happy ones represented there as well and we colored with our box with wild abandon.

Now....suddenly...we are being asked to only see one shade of crayon. We are being told that if that crayon is broken it matters more than any other color in the box. In fact, maybe we should take all our other crayons and break them in order to make it up to that one broken crayon.

I am afraid if something doesn't change very soon, one of our crayons will be cast aside forever and then our pictures will no longer be as pretty, no longer be bright and vivid and full of hope and promise.

So....what color crayon are you? When you color with only yourself, is the picture pretty or kind of flat and uninteresting? Hopefully, we can get back to a place where all crayons have an equal slot in the box without having to toss out a color or two just because one of them was not colored with well in the past.