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Sunday, November 26, 2006

whizzing through

I am frightfully busy, making things for Christmas presents. Then (hallelujah!) tonight I got a big transcribing job, so I have to add that into the mix somewhere. It's always nice to be able to buy T's Christmas and birthday presents with money I earn, instead of money he earns.

I went shopping on Black Friday and had a blast -- it was just invigorating enough without being stressful. I had to buy a washing machine (SUCH an unexciting thing to spend $350 on, but mine went to the Appliance Graveyard in the Sky, good riddance, cranky old thing with a bearing going out making it sound like aliens landing in the utility room, spewing water all over the floor from its stupid leaky pump AGAIN) and even that went smoothly. I bought many many yards of flannel which I am hoping to transform into (top-secret list follows; good thing my children don't read my blog) a Jedi bathrobe (that's a Jedi robe made of flannel, of course) and tunic, a nightgown and an apron for C, a coordinating apron for myself (actually the aprons are calico, not flannel), and a bathrobe for my mom, all before Christmas. Also bought some fleece on a really good sale and made five adorable hats for C's friends for under $5 in under four hours. Also bought a couple of new bicycles for some children who really need them, and finished almost all our shopping except for the things I'm going to buy for T which are TOP TOP SECRET.

So things are going well. We put the Christmas tree up and did all this fun shopping stuff just in time to banish a case of the blahs that was kind of hanging around ready to pounce, and I feel fine and happy and productive. I'm just frenetically busy. I just finished an hour or so of transcribing, so now I'm off to go sew the hood on the Jedi robe, record a chapter of a book for Librivox and for my dad, and knit a bit while I proof-listen. JUST when I thought it would be a lot more grown-up and reasonable to start getting to bed before midnight every night. Maybe on December 26th.

Saturday, November 18, 2006

remedying the situation

I took pictures today. yay! Nothing brilliant, but oh, it felt good. And also, now the photoblog queue is loaded until sometime around December 1st, so if I run dry again in the interim, at least that won't sit there with the same sad picture the whole time.

Ooh, another thing! I re-covered a chair. Yes, me, I, with my own two hands, did this. Our chairs are in such sad, sad shape. They're upholstered, and the upholstery is... destroyed is the word I would choose, I think. Completely wrecked. In shreds. Seriously, most people would have thrown them away and bought new chairs months ago but have you any idea how much chairs COST? They cost a LOT! I could buy A LOT of books with what I would spend on four (or, oh heavens, six) new chairs. Someday, like when I win the lottery (which I don't play) or when someone just decides out of a clear blue sky to give us a lot of money, maybe we'll buy new ones with that. Meanwhile, today I was at a rummage sale, and in addition to four nice retro-ish black folding chairs, they also had upholstery fabric, about seven yards for $2. I bought the chairs and the fabric both, figuring I'd try re-covering our sad, sad chairs, and if I failed then even those black folding chairs would be better for daily use than what we have. (We needed them anyway, since I haven't progressed in my madd houshold skillz to making chairs, and we'll need more than we have for the Christmas dinner which I am hosting this year). But it worked. I dismantled the saddest chair and used the tattered remnants of upholstery fabric nagahyde plastic as a pattern, and I cut, and I sewed and stapled, and voila, a chair that doesn't look like we pulled it out of the dump. When it had been sitting there for several years.

Now I just have to devote the next several days of my life to doing the other three chairs, and continue to not accidentally use the staple gun on my leg (so far so good, but it was kind of close) and I'll be all set!

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Things I have not been doing

• Blogging. As is obvious.

• NaNoWriMo. I hadn't planned on doing this, but in case you all thought I'd vanished (if you noticed I'd vanished) because I was busy writing The Great American Novella, nope.

• Taking pictures. Except for the ones I took at a wedding on Saturday, as a favor to a friend, confirming in my mind that I do not want to pursue a career in wedding photography. MY GOSH THE PRESSURE! The terrible lighting and stark white walls that you can't do anything about! The dilemma: Do I bob around the building getting good shots and annoying the living daylights out of all the guests, or do I try to be unobtrusive and get a lot of great shots of the bride's and groom's backs?! The barely-eighteen-year-old bride and her bevy of high-school friends who give endless toasts consisting of long strings of inside jokes while everyone else looks first baffled and then bored!

  I don't know what's up with the lack of plain old recreational photography. Maybe I can blame it on the fact that the sun goes down at 4:20 (thank you hill to the west), leaving me no time to go for a nice walk and take pictures unless I want to forcibly drag along my kids. Or on the fact that even if I do drag them along on a walk, I have taken pictures of EV ER Y THING within walking distance over the course of the last eighteen months. Or on the fact that my beloved and beautiful Dart will not have its brakes repaired until tomorrow, and I've been too skeered to go for long drives with the skeery non-power-assist brakes it has had for the past few weeks. High gas prices! El Niño! I don't know. I'm kind of getting the itch again anyway. I'm thinking Yosemite on Saturday. We'll see if I can get pulled over again; that was fabulous.

• Communicating with anyone not residing in my home. I don't call. I don't IM. I feel like a heel because there are people I love very much who never hear from me because I am so lazy and, I dunno, kind of... blah. Which probably also explains the rest of this list.

• Folding laundry. But then that's no surprise.

• Knitting. I keep meaning to. But then I don't.

However, all is not lost. Some things I have been doing:

• Reading. I all of a sudden got a hankering for Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat a couple of weeks ago, so I read them. And I have a stack of library books, thanks to this site and this one too.

• Working on my husband's car webpage, whose link I won't share for Creepy Internet Stalker reasons. As soon as Google starts picking it up (who knows when that will be), if you know my husband's super-secret first name and, say, the kind of car he's restoring, you might be able to find it. If you cared. Not that you care.

• Stumbling. If you don't know what I'm talking about, get Firefox and then go here. Proceed at your own risk; do not blame me if you never work again.
  

And that's just about it. I had hoped to reach a total of thirteen, and this could be a weak attempt at a Thursday Thirteen, but I guess I'm just not cool enough for that.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

things that make you say grr duh

Let's say you're walking along somewhere in a small town and you see a cell phone lying somewhere, all lonely and abandoned. And let's say it's on and the battery is charged and everything. Do you:

a) leave it there and keep walking, assuming someone will come back for it?

b) pick it up, find an address book entry marked, say, HOME, hit SEND, and say to the person who answers, "Hey, I think I found your cell phone."?

or

c) pick it up, take it with you, and use it freely until the owner realizes it's really and truly lost and notices that she has a whole lot of recent calls and text messages and who knows what all on her online statement that she didn't make, and she calls customer service to have it suspended?

I'm a letter B person myself. I'm nosy. Maybe you're more of a letter A person. But whoever the jerk was who found MY cell phone obviously went for letter C. With gusto.

Oh, well, good thing I was way overdue for my new-every-two free phone anyway. Except that now I have to start all over buying accessories and spare batteries and all that fun stuff. yay.

This also means that if I had your phone number(s) (Susan and Jenn, I am totally talking to you. Kristen, I think I still have an email with yours somewhere), I probably don't now, and you should email me with it(them). I don't even have my brother-in-law's phone number, or T's best friend's. I hope he wrote that one down somewhere, otherwise we'll just have to wait for him to call us because the guy doesn't even have e-mail and I became super lazy about writing important stuff down if I have an electronic device in which to save it instead (Please Lord don't let Microsoft Money crash and burn anytime soon).

******************updated to add***********************

I so totally hesitated to write this update, but in the spirit of full bloggerish disclosure and honesty among friends I feel that I must.

Guess what I found under the armrest in my car when we went to go to Awana tonight? (note: I had driven the car twice already today for short distances. I am SO SO OBSERVANT.)

Um, yeah.

What remains a mystery is the fact that when I logged into my account this morning online to check and see if anyone had been using my phone in the last couple of days, when I'd not seen or used it, the website said that someone had. There were more minutes than there had been, and it said that the last call made had been this morning at 8:30, when I hadn't had my hands on my phone since Monday afternoon. In fact I can be relatively certain that my phone battery was dead at 8:30 this morning, because the battery lasts a max of like a day and a half on standby. After I called and suspended the use of the phone, the minutes rolled back and the last-call date and time did too; I assumed this was the little telecom gnomes wiping my account clean of all those nasty evil stolen minutes.

You can hum the Twilight Zone theme now if you want. Or else the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum one. You choose.

At least the replacement phone didn't cost me anything. I guess now I have a spare, at any rate, and woo hoo, am I glad I didn't already dump all those chargers and accessories and stuff. Can you imagine if I'd had insurance on the silly thing and filed a claim? I'm SO GLAD I didn't pay the extra $6 a month for insurance, or else I would be in the seventh level of hellish embarrassment right now. Instead of only the third.

Friday, October 27, 2006

what I did today

before (blurry. I am so awesome at self-portraits. way to move out of the focus area, Rachel.)

and

after. (yay for the single little strand of hair going across my forehead. It was windy.)

Note: Whenever possible, get your hair cut by someone whose first language is not English. Yes, there's a bit of difficulty explaining exactly what you want, but my goodness does it cut down on the uncomfortable need for small talk. My stylist today (I say that as if it has been less than eight years since a stylist touched my hair) was Natalya from Uzbekistan, and aside from telling me helpfully that "wite-amins" would help my poor thin hair to thicken up a bit, she was really nice about the not-talking. (Seriously, she was very nice, and conversed quite well -- far, far, FAR better than I would if I moved to Uzbekistan to start cutting hair, that's for absolutely sure.)

Also, I bought jeans. It was actually a little bit of an anticlimax, because I was all prepared to Lose the Mom Jeans and Go Below the Waist and all that, and it turned out that at least two of the pairs of jeans I already wear qualify as below-the-waist and therefore probably aren't Mom Jeans at all. So I'm not as unhip as I thought I was. Except I couldn't bring myself to buy stretch denim jeans because, let's face it, one awesome thing about denim is that it's kind of corsety, and it sort of shapes you, even without being super tight. It's magic. Not so much with the stretch denim; I haven't seen my thighs look that fat, like, ever. Also, there seemed to be very few options in the gap between Mom Jeans and jeans with 70's-designer-style decorations on the back pockets. I just am not ready to go there yet. However, I did buy a pair of boot-cut below-the-waist jeans, and one pair of straight-leg below-the-waist ones. Kristin, you should be proud of me.

AND I found a nice soft red boucle sweater that I really like. I'm going to hate pulling it out of the washer, with that shuddery wet-acrylic feeling, but I like it.

Also, speaking of boucle, I bought a big skein of boucle yarn. This stuff is from the devil, as it turns out. Not only is it almost impossible to work with (I think there's a stitch... there [tentative poke]. repeat), but also, I could not find the pulling end no matter how hard I tried, so I had to take the paper off and unwind the yarn from the outside, and the skein has... it has grown. It is fully round and every time I look at it it's bigger. I'm afraid to go to sleep tonight because I think I might come out front and find it absorbing stuff, Blob-style, filling my living room. It's pretty colors, though.

And I bought a knitting book that I'm going to take back because it turns out to not be very helpful. I would scan a sample so that you could see the unhelpfulness of it, but that would bend the book up and I so want that $11.95 back. I could buy yarn with that money.

AND I went to Panda Express. Mmm, yum. I wish I could go back right now. Take that, haters of the bliss that is fast Chinese-esque food combined with a buffet.

And I went to Costco but forgot to buy cat food even though it was on my list and we were already totally out and had been feeding the cats leftovers from our fridge since this morning, so when I got home I went next door and asked our tenants if we could borrow a cup of cat food. Because I am all together and with-it like that. Further evidence of my extreme tiredness near the end of my shopping trip: I was on the phone with T as I was driving home and he swears that I said I felt "much more safer" driving my parents' van while my beautiful Dart is awaiting a rebuilt brake cylinder booster (read: while my beautiful Dart doesn't want to stop once it's moving unless you ask it really forcefully and well in advance). I deny this. How could I not? But he insists.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

things that are happening around here

Thing One:

My seven-year-old daughter has a temporary tattoo:

I think it's kind of cute and glittery and girly and pretty (although I just noticed that the fairy's posture looks just the slightest bit suggestive in a Bare Naked Ladies anime-babes-that-make-me-think-the-wrong-thing kind of way), and since my problem with the idea of a tattoo is the permanence of it, I thought it was fine when C wanted to spend her two quarters on a fairy tattoo from the machine at the grocery store. Heck, I think I might spend two quarters on a fairy tattoo from the machine at the grocery store next time I'm there. After all, it's not like she'll have some bleached-out green version of it on her wrinkled 80-year-old neck. Her dad, however, was not so comfortable with the idea, and he kind of failed to see the cute girly glitteriness and went straight to "that'll come off in her bath, right?"

********************************
Thing Two:

I KNITTED.

A WHOLE DISHCLOTH. Do you SEE the knitty goodness?

I have always been under the impression that I could not knit. This dates back to a dreadful experience in Girl Scouts, when we were all supposed to make little knitted bells as ornaments for the library Christmas tree, and I just couldn't do it. The two memories I took away from the attempt are:

• the shameful feeling of coming to the leader for, like, the eighth time, and having her rip my bell apart AGAIN and tell me to start over because I was doing it wrong, and

• the realization that the world didn't fall in if I failed to complete an assignment. As my high-school grades will attest, this was a Very Bad Lesson to have learnt at such an impressionable age.
  

So you can see why I was scarred.

Anyway. I learned to crochet instead, and periodically I would try knitting and fail again and put away my one lone set of needles until the next time. This time it worked, thanks in part to Kat's cheerleading and advice, and also thanks to about.com's knitting area, which is totally awesome. I made a dishcloth because I could learn as I went without having to care if the result was ugly because who cares what a dishcloth looks like?

***********************************

Thing three:

I have a little bit of money, and aside from the two pairs I bought at Goodwill a month or so ago, pretty much all my jeans are getting ratty. So I need to replace them. I MIGHT happen to buy jeans that are not Mom Jeans, but LET IT BE KNOWN BY THESE PRESENTS that it is not because I feel like I have to. It is certainly not because of any dictates by the fashion police or clothing manufacturers who think it's really important that everyone throw out all their clothes every few years so that a) they can look ridiculous to their kids fifteen years later and b) the aforementioned clothing manufacturers can make more money. If I buy jeans that are mid-rise, it will be because, well, I need jeans, and they are available, comfortable, appropriate, and nice-looking on me, and that is all. I would like to remind the fashion-conscious youth of America that they are not the first generation to think that their mom's clothes were dorky and that obviously THEIR clothes are the only ones worth wearing. Nor will they be the last. I can't WAIT till there's a whole generation of 40-year-old women clinging to mid-rise jeans while their young daughters mock them in Internet videos.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

rather interesting and totally awesome

(separately)

Here's the 'rather interesting':

(oops, the Ctrl-C didn't take. I just pasted an entire chapter of Villette here. Trying again.)

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 12 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

There we go, that's better. Thanks Kat, who is as always ever so helpful in pointing out interesting Internet things to me. (warning: Turn OFF your speakers for this one. There's a really annoying sound-embedded ad.)

And for the totally awesome, everyone-must-see-this part of today's post:

(Turn your speakers back on.)

Go watch this now. This means you. Especially if you are a girl or a woman or ever looked at a girl or a woman or at a magazine ad or a movie star or any print or video media portrayal of female beauty. Please?

Sunday, October 15, 2006

many random things

I have a spot on the side of my nose that I can see in my peripheral vision, which drives me batty. I have said it before, but I find it patently unfair of God to decree that I should have spots and wrinkles at the same time. Further, I far prefer the nice British-ish term "spot" to "zit". "Zit" sounds like the name of a dog in a 1950's sci-fi book, and yet paradoxically it always brings to mind a skinny fifteen-year-old with buck teeth, a prominent Adam's apple, and a loud way of guffawing at un-funny things.

**************************

I have recently discovered that the style of jeans I wear are called "Mom jeans" by the youth of America. In spite of a) my persistent belief that the waist of pants should sit at the waist of the woman, and that any other place looks kind of ridiculous, and b) my insistence that, not being in high school, I don't have to care what other people think of my clothes as long as they are clean and in good repair, this disturbs me a bit. Are "mom jeans" the embarrassment equivalent of the candy-apple-red, white-polka-dotted sheeny rayon pantsuit with the frilly cravat that my mother used to wear, until Jenn mercifully (but totally accidentally) put it out of its misery by dropping it into a serendipitously-placed pan of used motor oil in the laundry/utility shed when she lived with us during high school? If so, perhaps I should maybe go try on something that's mid-rise and straight-legged. Because that would be actually pretty bad.

***************************

While we're discussing my lack of hipness, perhaps I should share that as I'm typing this, I'm listening to a Yanni song. Whoops, it just went to Loreena McKennitt. I don't think that brought me much higher on the hipness scale, but what do I know, in a world where jeans that show all your belly fat are preferable to ones that don't.

***************************

I have stopped updating the librivox chapters in the blog. Not that anybody noticed. They're always available at the "my librivox recordings" link over on the right, if anyone's interested. I'm well over halfway done with both solo projects now and am planning to do Anne of Green Gables next.

***************************

Oops, now it's Enya. This is far from the only kind of music I have on my computer. It's just what I felt like listening to while doing a negative-scanning job.

****************************

This feels like the kind of note I would write when I was thirteen (on peach-colored binder paper, with big circles for dots on the i's), wherein I would announce at intervals what song was playing on the radio and how I felt about it. And yet... my friends still liked me. Crazy.

*****************************

OK, I have a bit of a literary question for all you brilliant English major types out there. Why, in "The Highwayman" (Loreena McKennitt's musical version of which I may or may not be listening to right now, at quite a loud volume for 11 PM), do the soldiers tie the musket to Bess, other than as a necessary plot device? How would that further serve their purpose than to simply gag and bind her? I do not understand. Not that I don't totally love that poem, in the same way that I love the impassioned music of the Romantic era. I'm just... wondering. Randomly.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

let's play a little game

When I was in second and third grades, I had a teacher who liked to use Fortunately-Unfortunately Story-Building as a class exercise. So, in honor of Miss M (who is still teaching and now lives right down the street from me; otherwise I might use her whole name), here is

My Weekend: Fortunately and Unfortunately

Fortunately, I went to the retreat with my beloved mother and sister-in-law and had a fabulous time and God spoke to me about several Important Things. We went for hikes and it was beautiful and I took some nice, happy pictures.

Unfortunately, I felt rather manipulated by the music much of the time. Maybe it was just me.

Fortunately, there was one song we sang that is now my favorite even though it made me cry every time we sang it:

Blessed Be Your Name
by Matt Redman
- - -
Blessed Be Your Name
In the land that is plentiful
Where Your streams of abundance flow
Blessed be Your name

Blessed Be Your name
When I'm found in the desert place
Though I walk through the wilderness
Blessed Be Your name

Every blessing You pour out
I'll turn back to praise
When the darkness closes in, Lord
Still I will say

Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your name
Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your glorious name

Blessed be Your name
When the sun's shining down on me
When the world's 'all as it should be'
Blessed be Your name

Blessed be Your name
On the road marked with suffering
Though there's pain in the offering
Blessed be Your name

Every blessing You pour out
I'll turn back to praise
When the darkness closes in, Lord
Still I will say

Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your name
Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your glorious name

Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your name
Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your glorious name

You give and take away
You give and take away
My heart will choose to say
Lord, blessed be Your name

I have a rather -- is it stoic? -- interpretation of that passage of Job (referenced in that last bridge/verse in the song), a passage which many people find perplexing or hard. Not me. To me it means, dude, everything beyond our bare-bones basic existence -- the nakedness with which we came from our mother's wombs -- is an extra -- a bonus -- and if God chooses to give us stuff, awesome. Praise Him. If He gives us some stuff and then he takes it away, well, it was all a bonus anyway, so: awesome. Praise Him. I don't spend a lot of time wrangling with questions like "Why does God let this stuff happen to me?" when I'm in pain. I figure, hey, God let life happen to me, and we live in a fallen world so bad stuff will happen during that life, and I am small and God is big and if the Why matters, then I'll find it out later, and if it doesn't matter, then I won't. Kind of boring, I know. But I love that song, because the idea of praising God through good and bad is a really important, difficult, beautiful idea, and also because it's quite catchy.

Whoo. I digress. I totally strayed from the formula there. Back to it.

Unfortunately... um, can't think of another Unfortunately that fits here. Mom, Debi, and I had two roommates who snored so loudly that we made a trip away from the retreat into town on the second day to buy earplugs? (I don't say that to be mean. Everybody snores sometimes. These people, bless their hearts, just did it very energetically. Whatever your hand finds to do, etc.)

Fortunately, there were the much-anticipated Six Meals No Planning No Cooking No Cleaning.

Unfortunately, I came home just in time to endure two days (and counting) of the worst bout of (I think) food poisoning I've ever had (based on incubation periods and the non-illness of the other people who were there with me, though, I think it was from the salad bar at the Hometown Buffet at which we ate on Thursday, and not the retreat. Or else it's a virus.).

Fortunately, this meant that even though I overate wildly during the 48 hours of the retreat, I now weigh four pounds less than I did on the morning I left. How sick is our skinny-obsessed culture that this makes me want to get food poisoning once a week for the rest of my life? (do not tell me about how all I lost is water weight. I don't want to think about that. Rather, I am happy thinking about the simple fact that The Scale Went Down.)

Unfortunately (sort of), the combination of Very Unhappy Innards and the Very Important Things about which God spoke to me at the retreat has kept me away from the computer almost the entire time I've been home. I am dreadfully behind on my blog-reading.

Fortunately, LT just finished teaching C her math lesson and made me a bed on the couch where I am supposed to lie down and read. Because I feel sick. They are so nice to me.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

a really, really weird entry. sersly.

So, what do you want first? The county-fair rundown or the grisly details of yet another splinter removal (C's, of course)?

The splinter? OK. Gotcha. I'll throw in a side of Mother Of The Year Award goodness for you too.

This actually started on Friday, which was, ohmygosh, one of those days where, when you're living it, you're all, 'no way is all this nonsense actually happening to me. right? this is some kind of joke?', what with the truck breaking down a few times and the hundred zillion degree heat and all. While we were in the middle of this (during the second attempt to revive the truck, which had conked out this time with its nose fully out all the way across the road my in-laws live on, which was the SECOND-worst place it died that day), C fell down, cried a little, and told me she felt like she had 'something in her leg' which had a bit of a scratch along it. I said it was probably just swollen a little because she had hurt it, and went back to looking sympathetic and praying that T would get the truck started soon, before a) we all died of heat prostration and b) someone came along and T-boned our truck which would totally have helped our day be way more exciting than it already had been. And this was BEFORE the truck died at the gas station, taking up an entire row of pumps because of the trailer behind it. Did I mention that we don't have tow insurance on the truck? We don't. So. Anyway. C fell down. Fast-forward to today, when I noticed that she was still feeling the pain of that scrape a bit more than I thought she should, and really sat down and looked at her leg, and saw that the area around the bottom of the scratch was swollen and tight and red and hot. And it looked vaguely like there was some pus under the edge of the scratch. And I pulled off a scab and some pus came out. Of my daughter's leg. This is not supposed to happen, because this isn't the eighteenth century and I am not (praise be to God) some time-traveling doctor woman who's performing surgery in the wilderness. So I called T in (T's hand-eye coordination is way better than mine) and amid many tears and a little screaming and much hydrogen peroxide, we performed a minor surgery in our bathroom and pulled a 3/4" sliver of wood out from under my child's skin. There was... more pus. A lot more.

Excuse me, I just had to go give her another guilt-hug. I've been doing this all afternoon. I hope she doesn't know why.

So now she's OK, and we've cleaned the site and put on ointment and drawn dotted lines around the red area so we can monitor it to make sure it gets smaller instead of larger. Because, you know, I am such a good parent.

OK, no more pus in this entry, I promise.

County fair, let's see. We went on Friday night, after all the truck troubles, and had a good time. They had bumper cars this year, which -- oh my gosh we are SUCH party animals -- we had been hoping and wishing they would, and then when the kids and I went to the fairgrounds to buy ride tickets last week and saw the truck with the bumper car ride actually being pulled onto the grounds to get set up, it was, I am not joking, the highlight of the day. Or maybe even the week. We went out again later to make sure that they hadn't changed their minds just because they knew we wanted this so badly. While we were there, we had to drive kind of close to a trailer and we heard this kind of clattery sound like we'd knocked over a garbage bag, and I half-jokingly-half-freaking-out said, as we were driving the two miles home, that I hoped it hadn't been a PERSON we'd hit, you know, like some passed out carny or something, and it wasn't. No, it was a really large black cargo net kind of thing. This we knew because when we got home and I went to open the trunk, I tripped over it, because it was still attached to our car. We felt like felons, tossing it in the trunk, driving back out to the fairgrounds, tossing it out where we'd accidentally picked it up, and then driving away all calmly, not knowing whether to giggle like maniacs or not. (honestly, I kept thinking about Jennifer and myself and how if this had happened when we were in high school we'd still be talking about it like every time we talked to each other. And snorting with laughter.)

Anyway. Fair. Rides were fun. Pictures I entered did OK but not fantastic. Same with kids' entries. Spent too much on food. Parade was hot and rather boring but a nice fireman gave C a stuffed unicorn. The end.

pictures:

Cautious LT LOVES the Tilt-A-Whirl.


bumper-car madness


more bumper-car madness


the forestry guys had a little-kid obstacle course contest thing set up where they'd put on fireman clothes and run around looking all cute and doing funny things. C had a great time.


(teach YOU to stand there taking pictures of me.)


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