comedy – Dustin Monke

Our watchful protector and not-so-silent guardian

Last week, I worked the afternoon and evening shift while my news editor, page designer and all-around nighttime showrunner April Baumgarten took a well-deserved vacation.

That meant I had to get into the habit of sleeping in, working until around 11 p.m. or later and staying awake into the early-morning hours — something that until early 2013 was entirely normal for me after spending the previous decade working in newspaper sports departments.

It sounds kinda fun, right? Sleep in and stay up late! Well, it wasn’t so bad when I was a single guy. Now, with a wife and dog at home waiting for me, it’s not so fun.

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You don’t need a plastic bag to cook a turkey

Every once in a while, there is advice that sounds good, but you just shouldn’t take it.

I ran into this situation on Thanksgiving when I decided to take the advice of others and use one of those plastic roaster bags in my straight-out-of-the-box roaster to help avoid cleaning up baked-in turkey juices.

It sounded like a great idea. We use similar bags all the time when cooking with a crock pot and they work like a dream. So, in an effort to avoid cleaning the contraption, I decided to use a roaster bag for the first time. We had picked up a couple for next to nothing about a week earlier and, like a fool, I assumed they worked just the same as my crock pot bags. You know, put them in the roaster, set the temperature, place the food in there, walk away and wait for that delicious smell of turkey to waft through the house.

But, because of my foolishness (or stupidity, depending on how you look at it), things didn’t go as planned.

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Noodle vs. The Bunny

Sometimes, I wonder if my dog doesn’t have an inner monologue that only other animals can hear. Like a cartoon character.

If you read my column, you probably know I love our dog, Noodle, a 2½-year-old Schnoodle who has become more like a kid than a pet. But maybe what I love about him the most is that he just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

Case in point is this summer’s saga of Noodle vs. The Bunny.

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A dog’s retirement home

Almost a year ago, we decided to get another dog. Not in the traditional sense either. Only nine months after we had adopted Noodle, our schnoodle puppy that some of you may have read about in previous columns, we “adopted” Donovan, my sister-in-law’s 13-year-old chiweenie. Sarah likes to call our home his retirement home.

Don is a military dog. Sarah’s sister was reassigned to Washington, D.C., for training, and the place where she and her daughter would be living wasn’t set up for pets.

On top of that, she is scheduled to be transferred overseas this year, which made it nearly impossible for her to keep Don without jumping through some huge hoops. So she turned to us, knowing all the moving combined with Don’s age wouldn’t work for him.

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In retrospect, pogs were a bad decision

You know all that old stuff you have and still can’t believe you ever bought in the first place?Try to remember it was once new and you loved it.

Perhaps you have seen the lists floating around the Internet lately, recapping many of the ill-advised fashion or technology decisions many of us made in the ’80s and ’90s.

I’m not ashamed to say I once rocked a ’90s bowl cut parted down the middle, covered by a bucket hat while wearing a brightly colored Starter jacket over a No Fear T-shirt and an unbuttoned flannel.

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