Day 27 1/8/05
We woke up around 5:30 am this morning. I was getting picked up by Homer at 6:30 am and I wanted to help out a little bit before I went. We were going to an 8 hour conference by this Mennonite Nurse named Melissa who was giving a lecture on Ten Steps Towards Super-Duper Health. She invited several of the Amish farmers to set up booths and sell their stuff. Albert wasn’t going to go, they were going spend the weekend at Albert’s sister’s. They couldn’t get a driver who was cheap enough. But at the last minute Albert decided to go to the conference too. Homer was late picking me up, Albert ended up taking me. Before he left, he was talking to Marie in her bedroom. She was crying and saying something in Penn. Dutch. We left and went to the conference. Melissa said there were going to be 150 people there. There were about 70. It was largely a mixture of Mennonites and Amish. Mennonites are like Amish Light or Diet Amish. They have to wear plain clothes like the Amish, but they can be light blue or have floral patterns though. The women have to wear white caps, and without the strings that the Amish women have. They can have cell phones and drive cars. They can get divorces only if they are “mistreated”. It is looked down upon if they re-marry though I think. They have to look really plain. On a whole from what I saw, they were usually fatter and were less eye-candy than the Amish. I helped Albert set up a little bit. We were set up right next to Futurorama Hearing Instrument Center. It seemed like a glorified hearing aide company. They had a sign which said they were voted best Hearing Instrument Company 2 years in a row by the main Lancaster Newspaper. They had this big sign up with a group photo of the 5 main people that worked there. It was 3 women and 2 men. They all had their names up there with letters after them. One or two of them had a B.S. and some other weird letters. My favorite one was “HIS” (Hearing Instrument Specialist). The three women were sort of attractive in a weird Lancaster, Pennsylvania way. One guy (the owner) was short, fat, had a widow’s peak and a round head. The other was giving this kind of sexy serious look - like if James Bond were a Hearing Instrument Specialist, he would look like him. The only letters after the “sexy look” guy’s name were “HIS”. I don’t think he had as much educational training as everyone else. One of the guys and one of the women were manning the booth. They were both the owners. The guy was the short, fat, widow peak one. He had this weird, nervous twitch when he wasn’t paying attention or thought people weren’t looking. He would blink a lot and shrug his shoulders. He was really going at it. Albert brought way too many boxes and coolers, he said he’s used to not having enough so he tried to bring extra this time. I went into the kitchen to help out. Sara, the bread lady was there with her husband Mervin who I hadn’t met. Abe Stoner and his wife Annie were there too. Abe Stoner is a dairy farmer who deals with a lot of Sally Fallon people. Homer Adams and Christian Ackerman were at the conference also. They were manning their booths in the main area. Peter Aeschelman and his wife Barbie (which seems to be a pretty popular Amish name) and ten year old daughter Sylvia came in. They are a freaky looking family. They look like the Adam’s family. Peter is super tall and gangly, with a big, long face and some missing teeth on the sides. He looks like an Amish Rob Zombie. He looks like he should have fangs and long yellow fingernails. His kid looks like Wednesday (Adams’s family), big pale face, red eyes, his wife is short with a skinny face and pale complexion. I have mixed feelings about Peter Aeschelman. I’ve heard from some Amish that he is kind of shady. They said he pasteurizes his yogurt before he makes it and still calls it raw. This is generally done to make it more creamy. He doesn’t produce dairy, only meat. He is kind of like Sally Fallon's Amish middle man. He buys products from people like Albert, Sara and Homer then resells them. I have mixed feelings about him. He’s really hardcore Amish. He has 11 kids (one reason his wife looks so worn out); he won’t go to Disney land again because it’s “owned by the gays”. He grabbed my arm pretty hard one time and ordered me around a little bit. He brought a lot of his “kvass,” which is a Russian addictive, naturally fermented soda (not organic or as healthy as people make it out to be) and was happily pouring it out to as many people as he could during lunch time. By the way, I was at the conference to help cook lunch. Maybe he’s just a good businessman. He’s also heading down to Florida in a couple of days to help one of his customers who distributes cream for him. His customer’s buildings got destroyed by the hurricane and he is going to go down there to help rebuild it. So I don’t know what to think of this guy. I’ve come to realize lately that I am a horrible judge of character. We were able to joke around a lot as the day went on. We made jokes, I told him to bring me back some sand when he goes to Florida and he said, “I’ll bring it back between my toes.” Maybe he’s good and bad. Working with all of them in the kitchen today made me not want to leave Pennsylvania. It was the most fun I’ve had since I’ve been here. We were cracking jokes the whole time. The kitchen had a pro-kitchen dishwasher, the kind where you put the dirty dishes on a tray, put it in the metal box and slide the walls down. They could not figure out how to turn it on and make it work. I figured it out, and every time they needed the dishes washed they would ask me to do it. They started joking about how, thank God I was there and how I am the best dishwasher ever. It was extremely easy to operate. All I had to do was put the dishes in and slide down the walls. It would then automatically turn on. I didn’t tell them this; I thought it was funny. When I finally told them how easy it was, we all laughed. There was a vitamin company called “SuperPepPills” there. The speaker Melissa was supporting and working for them. They had a machine called a bio-platonic machine which was supposed to measure the level of cartenoids (anti-oxidants) in your body and tell you your “body defense score”. Then depending how good your score was, the average was 20,000-25,000, they would tell you how much of their vitamins you needed to take. You put your hand on the machine and a blue laser would shine on it. I got 30,000. Ann the speaker had 44,000. The rest of the people in the kitchen ranged from 20,000 to 40,000. Homer Adams got 76,000. We were all joking about that. The people who were doing the test never saw a score that high before. He started selling them on the value of fermented vegetables and raw milk. The Amish and I loved that. If anyone could have gotten 76,000, it would have been Homer Adams. We told him that he scored so high that he was going to go back the other way now. That he was so healthy, that he is going to get sick. We couldn’t stop joking about that and how for breakfast he had six eggs, bread and as much butter as bread on it. The speaker, Melissa was introduced on stage by this fat, ugly, diabetic, extremely unhealthy Mennonite lady named Rita. She was talking about how much the vitamins had helped her and how much better she feels since working with Melissa. Again, another extremely unhealthy looking person in my life trying to tell me how to be healthy. WARNING! WARNING! I did not enjoy the speaker. She was a nurse who was really into Western Medicine and then went to a conference by Sally Fallon and started combining the two. She is like a combination of Sally Fallon, modern crap science, “Praise the Lord” and “You need supplements to be healthy.” She borrowed a lot from Sally, she even had some of her slides from her Weston Price slideshow. We kept making fun of her. We asked each other if we thought that someone needs vitamins to be healthy, we all said, “No”. We kept on saying, “Melissa, will get there soon.” We were also making fun of ourselves, saying, “If they’re not talking about grass-fed stuff, we don’t care.” I had a wonderful time. I ate a lot. I talked to Dorothy McCoy there. She’s English and is pretty heavily involved in the Weston Price Association. We talked about how she’s had Chronic Fatigue for 13 years and now it is getting worse. I related since I am tired all the time also. I asked her if she knew of Aajonus and would try the raw meat thing. She seemed grossed out by that. I wonder if that would help her1. Albert was still acting a little weird today, off and on. We talked about the raw meat thing a little more. I explained it a little better. He even said that he might try it. We got the Jersey in her stall today, she kept on breaking free. She dragged me again a couple of times. I told Albert I should climb on top of the pipes and then grab her chain and hook her up. We didn’t do that. Instead, we got her squished in a stall with another cow, then we tied a string behind her on the two poles so she couldn’t get out. It worked.
1 I meet people like this all the time. They say they want to be healthy and will do anything to get it. What this usually means is that they will do anything to be healthy, as long as it fits into their comfort zone. The only solution for this is that the pain gets so bad, that they have to step outside their comfort zone or die. Even though they were dying they will still eat crappy food. It is easy for people to forget the pain they were in before. I know some people whose cancer was reversed by The Primal Diet.
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