balloons make crappy pets

I recently took home a big, red balloon to replace my leprechaun. I found him huddled with his siblings in the corner of a reception hall on a rainy night. The room looked like there was just some fancy cocktail party or something, because there were plastic martini glasses and small skewered weiner dogs all over the floor. There were also those tables that are too tall to sit at, and are just there for you to stand next to and put your drink down when you need to use both arms to tell a funny story to someone you are trying to impress.

Anyway, I picked him out of the crowd, asked him if he would like to come home and be warm and stuff, but I warned him he'd have to leave his family behind, because I did not have room for 12 red balloons that were each 3 feet across. At first, he decided to stay with his family, but when I started for the door, he came running up behind me.

Just so you know, he is a fully grown red helium, maybe three feet across, and he has four yellow lobes on his under side. He kind of looks like a spherical flower, or maybe some sort of electron orbital. His name is Voight.

Unfortunately, he's had trouble adapting to life in his new surroundings. He doesn't like to play nicely with the bear I have hanging from my fire sprinkler, and his fear of windows makes him irrational and cranky unless I keep them all closed. Hopefully, he'll calm down after the first week: it has been rough for him, so I'm trying not to judge, but right now he is a handful. If you decide to adopt a balloon, just be warned that they are much harder to train once fully inflated.

dls