So you filled your hands

One thing I'm fairly confident I'll never grow out of is the Big Geeky Fantasy Epic. I've been writing them since I was a wee squirt: at the age of five, I made up a series of stories entitled "The Tricky Gypsy," in which an old woman comes to a house inhabited by four or five orphan children, who invite her to dinner, and so to reward them she smears mutagen on their chairs (some nerds have Doctors Who; I have my 80's cartoon Turtles -- and yeah, I can still sing the theme song) and asks them to tell her their favorite animal. One was a peacock, another was a husky, another was a wolf, another was a cat... and when they woke up the next morning, they had been turned into their favorite animal! This, of course, caused more troubles than living alone with no parents in a large house in the woods, but luckily, as they weren't actually orphaned, just misplaced, their parents saw them in a window at a pet shop and bought them, so even though they weren't changed back (at least not for the first three sequels), they still had their happily ever after. (The eponymous Roma woman was never seen again.)

Hilariously, I'm pretty sure I've been telling this story in some form or another my whole life.

(Despite my Big Geeky Classical Education, I own a copy of Ovid's Metamorphosis but have never managed to read much of it. I'd say I should fix that now, but as far as my great allegorical apartment move goes, it's already packed.)