The Buckets by Greg Cravens for May 19, 2020

What doesn’t he like? He’s a teenager, for cryin’ out loud.

My son gets told once, then we eat. If he doesn’t come to the table, he can find his dinner in the frig. :P

About this point I would stop texting and start yelling

Tell him it’s going to get divided among whomever is sitting at the table in two minutes.

Doesn’t matter what’s for dinner, as long as there’s lots.

If you play hard to get, so will nutrition.

Since my son, the ubergeek has Alexa on every floor, we get announcements

Don’t call him down. Let him stay upstairs. He’ll come down on his own (heh, heh, heh).

My husband is the problem! If I say dinner is ready in 3 minutes, he will sit and still watch TV. If I say dinner is ready NOW, he takes his time getting up, watches me load the plates, I sit at the table and then he gets a glass of wine. I have stopped waiting for him to sit down.

You will like it. You will not like it, when you don’t come down. NOW.(Then go to the breakers and pull the plug to electricity in his room, go to the dinner room/kitchen doors and lock them. The next meal will be eggplant casserole , brussel sprouts, yoghurt soup, or whatever he detests. Dessert will be his favourite. If his plate is cleared.)

PUT THE PHONES AWAY!!!!! he can stay in his room and forget about eating. he doesn’t rule the household…his parents do.

[TEXT TEXT TEXT]

“Eddie and I are having a normal dinner. Your mom is having ’Toby’s Butt’…”

Okay, quick cartoonist’s quiz. Is this cartoon about 1) Dinner 2) Teenagers 3) Being a texting middleman 4) All of the above?

I can honestly say that the punchline has more to do with being the useless middleman in a texted conversation (like I’m forced to do by my family and it baffles me). But I’ve noticed that the punchlines, and the ‘walk a mile in their shoes’ aspect of The Buckets isn’t typically what’s in the comment section.

You guys are a great source of excitement when I get to see what you see here every day. It’s my twentieth year of doing The Buckets this Fall, and for a lot of those years, I had little or no feedback (the comics didn’t always have comment sections, remember?). I don’t know if that was good or bad for the strip, but feedback is a huge part now. salute!

In our house it was simply dinner is at 5, every night. You either were on time or you went hungry. Depending on the menu, going hungry was often my first choice. Once I became responsible for the household chores including dinner, I could at least make what I liked also.

Simple: one call, then dinner gets eaten by whomever is at the table, the food gets put away, the kitchen cleaned and closed. Breakfast is tomorrow. Have a good night.

Perhaps a sports analogy is in order, give him a 2 minute warning.

2 & 3 – But it illustrates just how impersonal our people have become. You might enjoy Isaac Asimov’s mystery SF novel “The Naked Sun” – the folks in the story have carried the premise to its illogical conclusion. The sad part is that I see it coming…

Fried monkey brains

Just snap a picture of what is on the stove and send it.

This made me laugh out loud! When we bought our circa 1955 house it had an intercom system (failing and on its very last legs) so you could talk from room to room without leaving yours. Which is hysterical, because it’s not that big a house and the walls were sheets of mahogany plywood with no dampening insulation.