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.