Bring Me A Bucket!

Having a blog can really mess up your life. Take this weekend, for example.

After having pointed out that I had no desire to go to the county fair, I realized that it was a bit unfair since I've never been. Also, Scrawny Mike told me that I had to try a funnel cake. But really, I went because that would give me something to talk about. See how messed up that is?

Knowing that I was going to be eating a bunch of unhealthy food and being too cheap to pay $5 for parking, I walked. This turned out to be the best part of the trip. It was a nice day, a little warm, but not so hot that I kept scanning for shade.

Once inside, I passed all the teenagers with large belt buckles and the FFA and 4H animals which were being auctioned off. By the pound. Nothing like the units to bring you back to reality.

Anyhow, seen one cow, seen them all, so I moved on to the non-animal part of the fair. Here is a ride I didn't go on:




Ironically, I decided to eat because just watching that ride made me nauseated. I started with the funnel cake, which Scrawny Mike had described as "like a donut with powdered sugar". What I received was this:



That's not a miniature plate. That's enough food to feed a family of four for three days, and it wasn't even particularly tasty. Sadly, I was eating it as I wandered around the exhibits and ate almost two thirds of it.

The exhibits were the best part. I think the judging must have happened much earlier in the week, so some of the entries were past their peak. A few of the fruit entries were rotting. But the squash monstrosities were... interesting:


I stopped at the master gardeners' table and checked to see if they had any suggestions for getting rid of bindweed. Everyone agrees that I'm screwed if it's in my garden.

At the bandstand a bunch of young white guys were playing reggae. I heard three songs while I was looking at exhibits. They all sounded exactly the same. It was like being in college again.

I saw a bunch of quilts and took some terrible pictures of them:


Every quilt that I thought was good had a ribbon on it, so I thought for a while that I would make a great judge. Then I realized that pretty much everything had some kind of ribbon. I may have to enter something next year to test how far they are willing to go.

By this time my feet were hurting and I felt ill because of the funnel cake. In an astounding example of brain fever, I decided that eating something else might make me feel better. So I got this:


That's not a small plate either.

I sat on a bench, ate my fried onion, and watched a bunch of kids try to ride a mechanical bull, which was fairly entertaining. Every once in a while one of the teenagers with a large belt buckle would show up, and the operator would switch it from the easy level to "show the damn teenager who's boss" level. That was pretty entertaining, too.

Anyhow, at that point I decided I needed to leave, so I walked home.

It took a full 24 hours before I felt better. I'm never doing that again.