Hi all. I come here at least once a day to keep up with news and announcements. No one has posted for several weeks, so I guess I might as well put in an appearance. :)
BTW I'm moving my original fiction site to Domania. Got sick of Angelfire, so I made room for the fics at my Webbilicious site. Should be ready to go real soon.
So, how is everyone? Anybody hear from Sherry?
Where is everyone?
Submitted by sugarcrisp53 on September 8, 2007 - 3:19pm.
Open discussion
When everyone is silent at
When everyone is silent at mealtime, that's supposed to mean that the food is exceptionally good.
Last time I went to Blue Ball bank, there was a fair book for a local fair. Right now the York fair is on as well - it's the oldest fair in the country.
As I told Blondie, I'd like to go see the cattle and the pigs, like to stroll around the grounds with an elephant ear or some cotton candy. They don't have horse races at the fairs hereabouts, like they do in Ohio and Michigan, but I always used to love to stand up to the fence, and try to pick out the horse that was going to win. It usually was a horse that was jumping out of its skin, and if there was more than one, the one with the longer legs.
Mom used to enter canned goods, baked goods, arts and crafts, and prided herself on the fact that for twenty years, she always won more in premiums than our family admission ticket cost. I never thought that was any big deal until I was in high school, and I decided to enter some categories myself. Boy, is that difficult, to make something blue-ribbon quality, and it really hurts when you are sure that nobody else can match what you've done and you don't even come in third.
There was always a nice exhibit at the grange hall. It was mostly canned goods and fresh produce, but the exhibit had to follow the annual theme, and in addition, it had to display "faith, hope, charity, fidelity" and "Ceres, Flora, and Pomona" as part of their exhibit. The folks at #332 finally got old enough that they couldn't climb the stairs to the main affair, so they started holding meetings downstairs. Finally, they disbanded. It seemed sad to see it go by the wayside, but then, it seemed sad to see fewer and fewer people come, and know that the reason was that they had all died. Towards the end, it got hard to fill all the officers' seats. The Grange was modeled after the Masons, ritualistically. There were people in the Grange who could barely remember their own name, but when it came time for degree practice, they could go through everything and not hesitate at any of the words.
When I was little, the church had a big lunch tent. There are lots of carnies who travel from fair to fair, and a lot of people who sleep on bales of hay during the fair time, because they want to be sure their livestock is safe. If the folks from PETA would see that, they'd change their tune. A farmer doesn't raise livestock unless he absolutely loves them, because they are *so* much a pain to raise. It's like having perpetual 2-year-olds screaming "No!" all the time.
But in any case, all these people would descend on the church tent for meals, three times a day. All of us kids would work as waiters, and we thought it fun, although I imagine it would get a bit old if the fair ran more than 6 days. Come to think of it, it got a bit old between meals, because there wasn't enough to do. And there were a bunch of old biddies, one of them would tell us what to do, and then ten minutes later, another would tell us the opposite, and then ten minutes later, the first one would remind us to do the first thing. That didn't seem to bother any of us; we'd just follow whatever instruction we had last received.
But as much as I'd like to see the agricultural exhibits, stroll through the commercial exhibits, listen to the barkers on the midway, I don't think I have the oomph to do all that walking, and the temperature and the flies are oppressive, and these days, I don't think I have the get-up-and-go to get-up-and-ride 45 minutes each direction to the York fairgrounds. I wouldn't want to leave the dog at home, and I wouldn't want to leave her in the parked car, and I wouldn't want to walk her around the fairgrounds. Although I'm sure she would *love* the scents of the livestock barns. She gets *so* fascinated by the smells when we go to the farm to buy raw milk, and she always asks to get out.
I've got a couple of great-grandkids at this point, and it's not fair, because they live way out in Iowa, and I don't get to fawn over their 4-H exhibits.
Fall starts next week, and it always makes me feel sad.
I wish I were insane
Sanity is just so boring