My Alternate Universe

Welcome home Lauren!! I've been back for a week and a half from Idaho, and I finally have enough time to write a little bloggitty blog post.

Last week and this week I'm working on a farm called "Danny's Farm" here in the Pasadena area with Tyler Penniall--I call him my free-lance client. I'm also working at my regular job with ABC, and let me tell you, it's a party. The farm is just in the middle of a suburb called Altadena; it's on just a lot the size of a residence, with a little corral and some stalls for the animals. We've got pigs, goats, cows, mini-horses and one regular horse, chickens, roosters, and doves, bunnies, sheep, guinea pigs, cats... I think that's about it. It's really fun for the kids! The two weeks that I'm doing it I'm Tyler's 1-on-1 aide, one of the few aides there. All of the children are developmentally disabled, and most have autism. Funny stuff always happens... like Samantha, a little girl with gorgeous strawberry-blonde hair and freckles with Down Syndrome who is OBSESSED with Hannah Montana. She doesn't really talk, but she constantly head bangs and dances like Hannah Montana. I kind of feel like I need to get a Hannah Montana T-Shirt and wear it to see what she does :)
Probably the best joke I've ever heard was from one of the little guys at the farm-- every day he had another one to tell us that never made any sense. He said "What did Batman say to Superman?" "Smash the door!!" And then he would laugh hysterically. What fun!
An interesting thing that happened to me last night from the farm -- it proved that our house is cursed for birds. Someone came and dropped off a baby chick for us, and I took it home so that it wouldn't be alone in the office overnight. We bonded all night... I let Peace (his or her name) walk around the ground to follow me around all over the house, which was so so so cute, and then I put her to bed. Well, when I went to get her in the morning, she was dead in her cage. It turns out that the chicks really need a heat lamp if they're away from the mothers, to simulate the heat of the chicken coop. Well, I was pretty mortified when I had to tell the director of the farm, but then she tells me that she thought it would die. Well thanks for telling me, Lisa.
Well, y'all might be interested to know that I am now a vegan. I have some digestive ails, and I decided to try going vegan to see if it would help me feel better. And I have my life back! I feel much, much better all the time now that I'm eating vegan. It's pretty exciting, and it feels good to be successful. A little story... when I was 11 I was a vegetarian for 6 months until my grandma forced me to eat her Chicken à la King... she cited death by protein deficiency. Since it's a dietary preference and not idealogical, I've also decided that if I'm somewhere that I need to be polite, I'll eat the chicken or fish and just be constipated for a few days. But I don't imagine it happening very often, because if I don't eat at home where I cook my own food, I'm usually at a restaurant, not in someone's home.
Anyway, life's a party over here! Between the tofu, dead chickens, and flesh wounds from out-of-control autistic children, life is good.