And now, these headlines...

After several days of absence, I have a few things to report.

The sheep have been shorn and now look ridiculously small. I thought they were mature sheep but with their wool removed, they look positively toddler-ish...and also strangely bald...all over.

I discovered that our neighbors up the road have a couple of llamas. The strange creatures and I stared at each other for several minutes the other day while I was on a walk. Llamas are proof that God is funny.

The Shelter is in the process of renovating the attached barn ( where we have offices, the classroom, and the attic) and the first step towards demolition happened this week. The new portable classroom arrived and was deposited on the lot next door to us! It is one of those two-part, pre-fab, wide load house things that always make you cringe when you see them coming towards you on the road. At least- I always cringe...because I just imagine them falling over on top of me as they reach me....plus, I have had my share of narrow scrapes with them as they swung wide on a curve.... So it's kind of ironic that next month I'll be working in one of the monsters. Nothing like bearding the proverbial lion in its den. Now all we have to do is clean out the classroom and move about a gazillion tons of junk into the portable behemoth. That's what next week is for- April Vacation! ( Which, yes, I will be working.)

For those of you who remember "Shishka bob" girl...She excitedly told me the other morning that she had had a dream about a shishka bob! Except, once she related it to me, it sounded more like a sparkly, orange mermaid. But she was convinced that it was one and the same - a kind of "Transformer" thing. Uh....OKAY. We won't try any interpretations here.

One of the girls left this week...one who had been here a while and was, to put it mildly, a pill and a half. But she was a semi-lovable pill and for all her moodiness and unreasonableness, I will miss her, kind of. She seemed to fancy herself the poet laureate of The Antrim Girls' Shelter and on the morning she departed, she proceeded to read a specially penned farewell. It consisted of a motif of tears..." I cry for so-and-so, who I got really close to..., I cry for this person, I cry for that person" ( it got very old and soggy very fast) and I almost quote here," I cry for you all, as you cry because I'm leaving." Oh my word...It was so ironic because she had driven everyone bonkers, practically...and now she was painting pictures of girls in the throes of inconsolable weeping...over her departure. Can we say "Delusions of Grandeur"? I couldn't make eye contact with anyone in the room - it would have been too painfully embarrassing...and who knows- I might have started laughing! Talk about melodrama! This girl was the QUEEN of melodrama. After her emotional and teary reading, ( which fortunately, included a couple of other girls in tears - which I was a little relieved at, because I didn't want the grief to look TOO one-sided) she came around the table and hugged everyone. The best part of it, though, was Matt's imitation of it at lunch to the staff who had not been present. Oh my word. Sigh. I guess you had to be there though. I hope you don't all think I'm heartless and cruel...I'm not really making fun of her...I'm just ' celebrating her weirdness' as Brad would say. You just had to know her. Talk about high drama. But the sad thing is, despite the fact that she's gone, we have no lack of drama in the house, even still. Teenage girls boggle me, quite often. It seems that the vast majority of them that I have met have a desperate need to be drama queens. I think they need a good prescription dose of reality medicine.