by Bruce Grimes

One day Bruce and Andrew were searching the internet and found a very scary Cookie Monster emoji. That prompted them to make their own scary Cookie Monster cookie: A combination St. Patrick’s Day and Easter cookie. 

“We’re scared now!” they hollered. Bruce and Andrew baked a big batch and then transported to Egypt through a teleporting portal to sell their cookies on the street there.

Egypt used to have sand dunes and scary mummies. That’s why Bruce and Andrew thought their scary cookies might be popular there.

But when the arrived in Egypt, people asked them for lemon cookies instead.

“We want lemon cookies!” they shouted. They picketed for lemon cookies. They held up paper signs that said “We want lemon cookies.” The crowd chanted over and over: “We want lemon cookies! We want lemon cookies!” They also chanted: “We want soft bread! We want soft bread!”

The chanting must have whetted their appetites because then they started saying, “We want pasta, too!”

Bruce and Andrew were in a pickle. They thought, “Where can we build a bar and restaurant to give people what they want to eat? It would be a great to have a bakery there too.”

They built a sand castle as big as Bruce’s bedroom back home. They built a kitchen over a fire pit they could use to bake cookies and fresh bread, and also boil pasta.

Next, they needed all the ingredients for their delicious foods. But Bruce and Andrew were poor, and couldn’t afford to buy ingredients.

“Hey,” Bruce said, “let’s make our stuff out of sand. There’s plenty of sand here for the taking.”

“Yeah, let’s do that,” Andrew replied. 

The people became an angry mob. “We want real food, not sand food!” they cried. 

Bruce and Andrew said, “We don’t know what to do. We’re so poor, but we want to give people the foods they like to eat.”

They asked the crowd to bring ingredients to them. “We need lemons, flour, baking soda, eggs, butter, and sugar,” they called out. “And yeast! If you bring those to us, we will bake delicious lemon cookies and fresh bread for you!”

The crowd cheered. They lined up in a long parade and presented to Bruce and Andrew the ingredients one at a time. A tall man handed them a lemon. A smiling woman handed them an egg. A giggling child brought a bag of flour and yeast. A man in a wheelchair brought everything else: butter, baking soda and sugar. 

Bruce and Andrew got to work. They baked and baked! 

After a few days of non-stop baking, they were very tired. “Why don’t we hire some people to do the baking?” They hired Fred and Barney and taught them how to bake the popular lemon cookies and fragrant fresh bread. 

Fred and Barney were hard workers. They got good at baking dozens of cookies at a time.

​They sold the cookies for $2 a piece, and bread for $3 a loaf. It was dirt cheap. 

Just not, you know, sand cheap.

by Bruce Grimes

Two apes, Randy and Doug, escaped from Africa and stowed away on an airplane to California. There, they went  into a pizza restaurant, dressed up like humans, to apply for jobs. They wanted to earn $1,000 to $1,200 to donate to a homeless shelter and to Feed My Starving Children. 

Jill the restaurant owner took one look at their strong arms and said, “You can probably throw pizza crusts like pros! You’re hired!” Randy and Doug made extra-large pizzas so fast and so delicious that people crowded to the restaurant to taste them. They started to get inventive with their flavors: They made cheeseburger pizza and steak pizza. Delicious! Customers wanted more.

Then Doug and Randy invented fruit pizza with bananas, strawberries and grapes. The customers loved it! Jill tripled the prices of the fruit pizzas because the customers loved them so much. 

She gave Doug and Randy a bonus of $1,100. Jill said, “You guys have been great for business. Thank you so much for bringing in new customers.”

The restaurant had been on the TV show “Bar Rescue” and the host John Tapper tried to improve the business. It turns out that the apes, Doug and Randy, did a much better job!
“You’re welcome!” they told Jill. “We’re going to turn this into more money.” They bought a lottery ticket that won $1 million. Wow! They gave most of it to the homeless shelter and Feed My Starving Children, and then they used the rest to buy a car with airplane controls that could fly. 

They flew to Minnesota and went to another restaurant there, the Chinese Buffet. They asked for jobs there so they could earn even more money for the causes they wanted to support.
“We’ll work overnight and stay out of trouble,” Randy and Doug told the restaurant manager, Andrew. 

“Please clean and wash everything in the whole restaurant,” Andrew said. “And do snow removal.”

They did triple the work that Andrew asked for. With their long arms and strong muscles, they could reach all the way up to the ceiling and in all the corners. They cleaned the whole place until it sparkled.

Andrew was so happy that Doug and Randy did such a great job. “Now I don’t have to hire a cleaning crew for a whole month,” he said. Andrew donated all the money they earned to Feed My Starving Children. 

“Will you please come back again?” he asked. But Randy and Doug said no. “We’ve got to go to the Minnesota Zoo. We’ve always wanted to live there.”

Before they left, Doug and Randy threw Andrew a birthday party. He was turning 100 years old! They served beer and wine, ice cream and chocolate cake . . . and fruit pizza.
It was a delicious adventure.