Friday, November 20, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Shambles November or not, I'm so happy right now.
Last night A and Ke and Mel and Av and I all cuddled up on my bed and Av read out loud to us from the Hobbit. You can imagine.
Tonight we had ourselves a sequins theme dance party and if I didn't have a strict 10:00 bedtime I would still be there now.
Last night A and Ke and Mel and Av and I all cuddled up on my bed and Av read out loud to us from the Hobbit. You can imagine.
Tonight we had ourselves a sequins theme dance party and if I didn't have a strict 10:00 bedtime I would still be there now.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Eggs and my life
A told me to update my blog RIGHT NOW.
So heeerreeee we go!
Av is in the living room singing a bird song to A and playing the guitar. He has to do something artistic with birds for his project. Bird song!
A is trying to write her essay. Maybe she will end up writing it.
Av just came into my room playing his guitar. He is playing his guitar in my room right now. Now he is leaving. I might go to the living room. That would be social of me. I am in my room sitting on my bed blogging. Bej is in my room sitting on my bed playing his video game. I could relocate to the kitchen table and sit in my corner. I could open the windows on both sides of me and listen to the rain. I could make myself some hot water and drink that. I would bring my computer and continue blogging. Right now I'm sitting quietly trying to decide between staying here and going to the living room.
My plan just became reality. I am wrapped in my white cashmere blanket. That wasn't even a part of my plan until I realized that the air outside was cold. The hot water is heating up. A is talking about it. Maybe I will go get it.
I got distracted with celery and peanut butter when I went to get the water so a bunch of time has passed since I said I would get it. Now I am back in my seat with my hot water and my celery and peanut butter.
Av took his guitar someplace. He might have taken it into the shower room. He likes doing his thing in there. There is too much rain noise for me to hear. When I am in my room I can hear very well and I like it.
Av was not in the shower room. He was outside smoking. He saw a girl practically get naked looking for a bruise. Right now he is looking at his face in the mirror thinking about how he has to shave but can't shave because it is no shave November. His beard is thick and burly.
Bej is looking through binoculars. I think he is looking at me but he could be looking at something beyond me. Now he is looking at A. Earlier this night Bej and A and I went for a walk and Bej brought a magnifying glass. Sometimes he looks at things up close that are already close and sometimes he looks at things up close that are far away.
We encountered a worm on our walk and it crawled into A's foot. She screamed.
This morning I was late for my field trip and when I opened my door the black cat that hangs around here ran past me into the house. I wanted to go take it out of the house because the last time the cat got into the house A screamed and was very frightened. Ke and Ja brought the cat into my room and played with it. I gave it a yarn ball to bat around. A wanted me to take it out of the house so eventually I did. So I felt bad about the cat being in the house but was already late and had no time. I let A blame it on Mel but I can confess to YOU sweet anonymous internet and she will never know.
NEVER
KNOW
The first stop on my field trip was to an egg laying factory farm. Before taking farm class I never thought much about where my food came from. I knew vaguely about animal welfare in animal factory farms but I never really connected it to my food. Now I have! I invite you to all consider where your food comes from. It did not just spawn at the supermarket. Which is kind of how I always imagined it.
So we got to this egg laying farm and we all had to suit up in hazmat suits and special boots and masks and hair nets. I took home six hazmat suits for the six people who live in the apartment. I stabbed my finger in the process but it was totally worth it. Someday we will all wear our hazmat suits and it will be nice.
Once we were suited up we got to go inside the building. Each building has 45,000 chickens in cages stacked on top of each other in long rows. There are about six chickens per cage. The room had a very strong and distinct odor of chicken and chicken poop. Here is a picture of what stacked up factory chickens in cages look like:
But in real life they go on and on and on. The chickens were freaking out because there were so many people in the barn, all flapping and making noise and going crazy. I walked down into a chicken row by myself and stood very still and watched the chickens slowly calm down, starting from the farthest away from me and slowly working their way towards me. When they were calm they stuck their heads out between the bars and looked at me. It was a lot of chicken heads. The eggs were on little conveyor belts. They weren't moving then but when they move they bring the eggs out to be processed. One conveyor belt is a mile long and goes directly to the egg processing plant.
WHICH is where we went next. There was a really nifty machine for putting the eggs into the cartons and lots of broken eggs everywhere. Different brands of eggs is a lie. They are all made of the same eggs. True story.
Unless of course they are "specialty eggs" like cage free or free range or organic.
Next we went to a cow-calf farm. There were baby cows.
I think I'm done with blogging now.
So heeerreeee we go!
Av is in the living room singing a bird song to A and playing the guitar. He has to do something artistic with birds for his project. Bird song!
A is trying to write her essay. Maybe she will end up writing it.
Av just came into my room playing his guitar. He is playing his guitar in my room right now. Now he is leaving. I might go to the living room. That would be social of me. I am in my room sitting on my bed blogging. Bej is in my room sitting on my bed playing his video game. I could relocate to the kitchen table and sit in my corner. I could open the windows on both sides of me and listen to the rain. I could make myself some hot water and drink that. I would bring my computer and continue blogging. Right now I'm sitting quietly trying to decide between staying here and going to the living room.
My plan just became reality. I am wrapped in my white cashmere blanket. That wasn't even a part of my plan until I realized that the air outside was cold. The hot water is heating up. A is talking about it. Maybe I will go get it.
I got distracted with celery and peanut butter when I went to get the water so a bunch of time has passed since I said I would get it. Now I am back in my seat with my hot water and my celery and peanut butter.
Av took his guitar someplace. He might have taken it into the shower room. He likes doing his thing in there. There is too much rain noise for me to hear. When I am in my room I can hear very well and I like it.
Av was not in the shower room. He was outside smoking. He saw a girl practically get naked looking for a bruise. Right now he is looking at his face in the mirror thinking about how he has to shave but can't shave because it is no shave November. His beard is thick and burly.
Bej is looking through binoculars. I think he is looking at me but he could be looking at something beyond me. Now he is looking at A. Earlier this night Bej and A and I went for a walk and Bej brought a magnifying glass. Sometimes he looks at things up close that are already close and sometimes he looks at things up close that are far away.
We encountered a worm on our walk and it crawled into A's foot. She screamed.
This morning I was late for my field trip and when I opened my door the black cat that hangs around here ran past me into the house. I wanted to go take it out of the house because the last time the cat got into the house A screamed and was very frightened. Ke and Ja brought the cat into my room and played with it. I gave it a yarn ball to bat around. A wanted me to take it out of the house so eventually I did. So I felt bad about the cat being in the house but was already late and had no time. I let A blame it on Mel but I can confess to YOU sweet anonymous internet and she will never know.
NEVER
KNOW
The first stop on my field trip was to an egg laying factory farm. Before taking farm class I never thought much about where my food came from. I knew vaguely about animal welfare in animal factory farms but I never really connected it to my food. Now I have! I invite you to all consider where your food comes from. It did not just spawn at the supermarket. Which is kind of how I always imagined it.
So we got to this egg laying farm and we all had to suit up in hazmat suits and special boots and masks and hair nets. I took home six hazmat suits for the six people who live in the apartment. I stabbed my finger in the process but it was totally worth it. Someday we will all wear our hazmat suits and it will be nice.
Once we were suited up we got to go inside the building. Each building has 45,000 chickens in cages stacked on top of each other in long rows. There are about six chickens per cage. The room had a very strong and distinct odor of chicken and chicken poop. Here is a picture of what stacked up factory chickens in cages look like:
But in real life they go on and on and on. The chickens were freaking out because there were so many people in the barn, all flapping and making noise and going crazy. I walked down into a chicken row by myself and stood very still and watched the chickens slowly calm down, starting from the farthest away from me and slowly working their way towards me. When they were calm they stuck their heads out between the bars and looked at me. It was a lot of chicken heads. The eggs were on little conveyor belts. They weren't moving then but when they move they bring the eggs out to be processed. One conveyor belt is a mile long and goes directly to the egg processing plant.
WHICH is where we went next. There was a really nifty machine for putting the eggs into the cartons and lots of broken eggs everywhere. Different brands of eggs is a lie. They are all made of the same eggs. True story.
Unless of course they are "specialty eggs" like cage free or free range or organic.
Next we went to a cow-calf farm. There were baby cows.
I think I'm done with blogging now.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
CO
I am living in a madhouse. The whole family (A, Ke, Mel, Bej, Av, me) has been in this apartment all day doing homework and going crazy. Last night I went over to Mi's with Av and A and Bej and Mi was not prepared for all of us interacting. It's that whole you never know how crazy you are until you hang out with an outside observer. Mi has hung out with all of us at different times and different combinations but it is a whole different experience with us all together.
Speaking of Mi, two night ago a crazy photoshoot went down with lasers and a slinky and all sorts of good stuff. Maybe sometime I will have the pictures for you folks to see. But it was great.
Speaking of Mi, two night ago a crazy photoshoot went down with lasers and a slinky and all sorts of good stuff. Maybe sometime I will have the pictures for you folks to see. But it was great.
Monday, October 19, 2009
A Normal Field Trip
Last week my class went on a field trip from Tuesday morning to Friday night, camping by night and visiting farms by day. Here are a few highlights:
- Singing songs around the campfire with coyotes yipping in the background
- Bottle feeding a five day old calf with a heart shaped mark on its forehead
- Standing in the middle of a 7,000 acre wheat field. It was crazy! The land was mountainy and all wheat covered and it looked like South Africa and the sky was huge.
- Exploring an old abandoned grain elevator in the middle of nowhere
- Seeing a double rainbow over a cow barn in a misty foggy valley surrounded by mountains
- Free fruit - SO MUCH FREE FRUIT! Farmers love to share and I love it. Raspberries, plums, pears, apples, grapes, persimmons, all freshly picked and delightful. I fruit until I couldn't eat any more.
- All the rest of the food. Turns out farm people are food people, which makes complete sense when I think about it but I never realized it before. Yum.
I wasn't excited to go on the field trip before I left because it was so many days away from home and I wasn't pumped for camping in the rain and snow. But when I did it I ended up really enjoying it. I didn't even have to camp in the rain and snow. When we first showed up I was helping set up a tent in the snow absolutely dreading sleeping in it but then my teachers said we could sleep in the grange if we wanted and even though most of my class wanted to be tough and outdoorsy and sleep in the snow I was all for sleeping in the grange. No regrets there. The more I learn about farms the more excited about them I get and the more I mentally plan my someday farm. I've learned so much already and it has only been a few weeks. I have tons of homework and have to work for hours on it every day, but it is worth it because of all the learning I get out of it. This week is chicken week. Excited? I know I am.
Friday night was pretty rough emotionally but we worked through our issues and even though I ended up running away about to cry at one point Av and Mel and A seemed to care and stopped me to talk more and I think we all figured out what was going on was a misunderstanding and I think it is better now. And I like that because I had thought for a while that my friends had grown way closer with each other than with me and that I wasn't as welcome in their little worlds, but that wasn't really how they felt, because they thought that I just wanted to spend time with Bej and not them, but I thought they didn't want to be close with me. So that was reassuring and I haven't felt distanced from them since. Everything seems to be good again.
On Saturday night I decided to try going to an off campus party. Av and Mel and Ke and A are all about the off campus party scene and always go to parties and I never want to go. It's hard because I want to hang out with them but I don't like going to the parties or being at the parties, so usually they go to the party and I stay at home and then they get all their party bonding in and I feel like a loser. So I thought I would try one out just to make sure I didn't like it and I didn't like it. BUT that is not even the important part of this story. The important part of the story is that Mel and I were outside the party on the sidewalk talking when a guy came by and said there was a really drunk girl over there could we help her out because he doesn't know what to do, and we said sure and went over and found the really drunk girl. But then it turned out she wasn't just drunk, she was also an alcoholic and bipolar and thought she was going to have a seizure and had post traumatic stress syndrome and had been riding trains for the past 10 years and had two months to live and was crazy. And the guy who told us to look after her was her boyfriend ditching her. We didn't know what to do with her because she didn't know anyone and didn't know how to get to the house she was staying at so we ended up driving her to the hospital with so many people jammed into a car. La, Bi, Mel, Av's friends from back home, and me. We didn't get home until three thirty in the morning. But when we got home we all joined up with Av and A and Bej at our apartment and had a wild game of catchphrase and Av and Bej played music and A and I shared Ru's sleeping bag and it was great.
The End.
- Singing songs around the campfire with coyotes yipping in the background
- Bottle feeding a five day old calf with a heart shaped mark on its forehead
- Standing in the middle of a 7,000 acre wheat field. It was crazy! The land was mountainy and all wheat covered and it looked like South Africa and the sky was huge.
- Exploring an old abandoned grain elevator in the middle of nowhere
- Seeing a double rainbow over a cow barn in a misty foggy valley surrounded by mountains
- Free fruit - SO MUCH FREE FRUIT! Farmers love to share and I love it. Raspberries, plums, pears, apples, grapes, persimmons, all freshly picked and delightful. I fruit until I couldn't eat any more.
- All the rest of the food. Turns out farm people are food people, which makes complete sense when I think about it but I never realized it before. Yum.
I wasn't excited to go on the field trip before I left because it was so many days away from home and I wasn't pumped for camping in the rain and snow. But when I did it I ended up really enjoying it. I didn't even have to camp in the rain and snow. When we first showed up I was helping set up a tent in the snow absolutely dreading sleeping in it but then my teachers said we could sleep in the grange if we wanted and even though most of my class wanted to be tough and outdoorsy and sleep in the snow I was all for sleeping in the grange. No regrets there. The more I learn about farms the more excited about them I get and the more I mentally plan my someday farm. I've learned so much already and it has only been a few weeks. I have tons of homework and have to work for hours on it every day, but it is worth it because of all the learning I get out of it. This week is chicken week. Excited? I know I am.
Friday night was pretty rough emotionally but we worked through our issues and even though I ended up running away about to cry at one point Av and Mel and A seemed to care and stopped me to talk more and I think we all figured out what was going on was a misunderstanding and I think it is better now. And I like that because I had thought for a while that my friends had grown way closer with each other than with me and that I wasn't as welcome in their little worlds, but that wasn't really how they felt, because they thought that I just wanted to spend time with Bej and not them, but I thought they didn't want to be close with me. So that was reassuring and I haven't felt distanced from them since. Everything seems to be good again.
On Saturday night I decided to try going to an off campus party. Av and Mel and Ke and A are all about the off campus party scene and always go to parties and I never want to go. It's hard because I want to hang out with them but I don't like going to the parties or being at the parties, so usually they go to the party and I stay at home and then they get all their party bonding in and I feel like a loser. So I thought I would try one out just to make sure I didn't like it and I didn't like it. BUT that is not even the important part of this story. The important part of the story is that Mel and I were outside the party on the sidewalk talking when a guy came by and said there was a really drunk girl over there could we help her out because he doesn't know what to do, and we said sure and went over and found the really drunk girl. But then it turned out she wasn't just drunk, she was also an alcoholic and bipolar and thought she was going to have a seizure and had post traumatic stress syndrome and had been riding trains for the past 10 years and had two months to live and was crazy. And the guy who told us to look after her was her boyfriend ditching her. We didn't know what to do with her because she didn't know anyone and didn't know how to get to the house she was staying at so we ended up driving her to the hospital with so many people jammed into a car. La, Bi, Mel, Av's friends from back home, and me. We didn't get home until three thirty in the morning. But when we got home we all joined up with Av and A and Bej at our apartment and had a wild game of catchphrase and Av and Bej played music and A and I shared Ru's sleeping bag and it was great.
The End.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
I plead pizza eggs on that banana
Av is making a blog, which is wildly exciting and an inspiration to us all. Mostly me. So now I am inspired and blogging.
Father and Sister are visiting this weekend. Ke and A and Sister and I went and saw him do his think downtown on Friday night and it was intense and nice to finally see him in action. A and Ke and I all cried. Sister fits very nicely into the family. She hated all the parties on Friday night so Bej and I took her stargazing on the field instead and it was very nice.
Right now Av is in the corner writing a song and Sister is in the kitchen cleaning up her sandwich. Last night Av played music for us and we all danced, which happens all the time around here but it never gets old.
Anddd as I was writing that there was a knock on the door and in came Bej, No, and Bej's mom. This the kind of thing I am talking about when I say there is no time for the internet anymore. Too much real life getting in the way. I ended up going out for burritos with Father and Sc and Bej and Bej's mom. The photos that Bej's mom took will be up on facebook so don't even worry.
Last night we were blasting music and dancing and the RA on duty came and knocked on our door and A went to answer and asked if we were being too loud and then the RA launched into this whole speech about how we chose to live in quiet housing until Asia interrupted and said we actually are not in quiet housing. Then the police officer and the RA were horribly embarrassed and introduced themselves and said they would wipe the egg off their faces. So that was unexpected.
I'm not sure I've talked about my sheep yet. I have so much to learn about sheep but I am so ready to learn. I wish I had a car so I could go over to the sheep field all the time and hang out with the sheep. At least I get to go once a week. Sheep make the best noises when they bite grass.
We found a little door with a free ice box behind it and it looks to Mel how all doors look to A. Which was funny to me because I'm in the middle of the two heights and both perspectives were really different than how I see doors. I never thought about how different people's perspectives on stuff like that must be.
Father and Sister are visiting this weekend. Ke and A and Sister and I went and saw him do his think downtown on Friday night and it was intense and nice to finally see him in action. A and Ke and I all cried. Sister fits very nicely into the family. She hated all the parties on Friday night so Bej and I took her stargazing on the field instead and it was very nice.
Right now Av is in the corner writing a song and Sister is in the kitchen cleaning up her sandwich. Last night Av played music for us and we all danced, which happens all the time around here but it never gets old.
Anddd as I was writing that there was a knock on the door and in came Bej, No, and Bej's mom. This the kind of thing I am talking about when I say there is no time for the internet anymore. Too much real life getting in the way. I ended up going out for burritos with Father and Sc and Bej and Bej's mom. The photos that Bej's mom took will be up on facebook so don't even worry.
Last night we were blasting music and dancing and the RA on duty came and knocked on our door and A went to answer and asked if we were being too loud and then the RA launched into this whole speech about how we chose to live in quiet housing until Asia interrupted and said we actually are not in quiet housing. Then the police officer and the RA were horribly embarrassed and introduced themselves and said they would wipe the egg off their faces. So that was unexpected.
I'm not sure I've talked about my sheep yet. I have so much to learn about sheep but I am so ready to learn. I wish I had a car so I could go over to the sheep field all the time and hang out with the sheep. At least I get to go once a week. Sheep make the best noises when they bite grass.
We found a little door with a free ice box behind it and it looks to Mel how all doors look to A. Which was funny to me because I'm in the middle of the two heights and both perspectives were really different than how I see doors. I never thought about how different people's perspectives on stuff like that must be.
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