It's a Hard Knock Life

Sorry folks, I know this isn't what my blog is for, but I'm having a Babs moment, and I need to bitch, I mean vampire, sorry Mommy. (and please excuse the run-on sentence with poorly placed prepositions.) In atonement for wasting your eyes on my current crabbiness, I shall give you my humble complaints in an amusing manner. (now I must apologize to Dtrizzle, whose intellect is hurt when I write in this manner.)

Annie and her friends had to mop the floors and do the laundry and all sorts of difficult chores in their orphanage, so I guess I shouldn't be too upset about mine, but right now I am. Come to think of it I have to do laundry and mop the floors and cook meals, too. At least it's only my own, and there's no mean Ms. Hannigan yelling at me with a bottle in her hand. (Though I really like her slippers.)

My orphanage is different than Annie's in a bunch of ways. First, most of us get farmed out during the day. Me and 6 of the others, have to leave during the day. We've been assigned to other places to go do work for big people, instead of for the orphanage or something. We leave in the morning for big people places and come back at night to start our chores.

It's also different cuz one of the orphans here is part cow. He has big brown eyes, eats a lot of cheese, and loves grass. He doesn't go anywhere. Maybe he's scared he'll accidentally start mooing if he tries to talk to people. I know sometimes I talk like the people I was raised around and other people laugh. If I was raised around cows or pigs, I'd be really scared of being laughed at. Apparently, he made some sort of deal where he still has to do work for big people, but he gets to do it from the orphanage.

Since he's part cow, he hasn't yet learned how to do the stuff the rest of us do, like wash dishes or do laundry. He tries, but he seems really forgetful. Lots of times when people go to do laundry, his stuff is just sitting in the washer or dryer. The machines will have been off for a long time, and he won't be around, but his stuff is there. He also forgets to do his dishes a lot.

He was gone for 3 weeks once, maybe touring state fairs or something. (He did come back with a lot of candy.) Those weeks, there were no dirty dishes on the stove; there was no gigantic pile of dishes in the sink, and we never ran out of dishes because people washed them and put them away. It was very nice. One time, I heard one of the other orphans trying to explain to him that without a Ms. Hannigan to tell us what to do when, we all had to do our own dishes and stuff. He got really mad and started mooing at her. He told her she couldn't have her plant in the kitchen (it's a food plant) and all sorts of other stuff. I was really scared. Mad cows frighten me. I wanted to hide under my bed, but there's no "under," so I hid in it.

He's very noisy even when not mooing at people. He has these goofy little white tags on his ears that are attached to some sort of box on his collar. The tags put sounds in his ears all day. The sounds are loud and anyone standing within 5 feet can hear them, too. I didn't know cows were so hard of hearing. Sometimes he talks to the cable connecting the tags to his box for hours on end. Sometimes he just moos along with the sounds. If he's sitting by something, he may kick that to make extra noise to go with the sounds.

He rarely ever goes to his room. It must be different than mine. Mine has a big window that opens with a crank. I hung green curtains on it to make it pretty. Maybe the orphanage people wanted to make him feel more at home and made his room like a stall, with no windows. I think it must not have a window cuz he's always downstairs with the big kitchen doors open. He opens it even when he's not going out it, even when he's not downstairs, even when he's outside! Maybe it reminds him of his barn when he was a baby.

The doors stay open all day long. It is cold here during the day, usually 50s or 60s. Good outdoor temperature, bad indoor temperature. But since he has the door open all the time, the whole house gets that cold. If he had a window in his room, he'd stay in his room with his window open, making his room cold, instead of the whole house. At least that's what a reasonable person would do. Maybe being part cow makes him unreasonable.

I've gotten sick a couple times because of the cold. It gives me a sore throat, which turns into a nasty cough and stuff. I shiver when I get out of the shower. When I try to cook or eat, my nose runs from the cold. I leave my door closed all the time, and spend as much time as I can in my room, but it can even get cold in there. He's got lots of fur and stuff, so maybe it doesn't bother him as much. I know some of the other kids who have been at this orphanage longer don't like it either, but they gave up on talking to him long ago. It's hard to reason with someone who just keeps mooing back.

He's leaving soon. Going to a different orphanage or something. So am I. Maybe the people who move him will give him a really nice barn with other cows, instead of another orphanage where he'll get more kids sick. When I leave, I'm going on an adventure to find my parents. I think it will take me about 3 days.