Just a little more of the Fair

While we were actually there for several hours, I realized after we got home that we could have stayed for many more hours to see all the attractions that were available at the Fair. For example, roving entertainment was provided (according to the official 'Program') by The Bobbers, the official Evergreen State Fair Roving Band and Eric Haines (Comedy/Stilts/Juggling - I wonder if we DID actually see him!) There was a Texting Contest, an ice cream contest (and I missed it!) an egg toss, chain saw carving and a photo op with 'your favorite KIRO TV personality!' We did see the 'Sow and Litter' display as well as the 'Llama and Alpaca Display' but somehow missed the 'Northwest Native American Display' - though I wonder which ones of them were willing to actually BE on display. Contests were aplenty: 4-H Dogs Novice Sits & Downs, OC Forages Judging Christmas Trees (huh?,) a 4-H Dairy Goats Groom Squad, and Pigeon Judging. There was even a 'Cavy Bowl' which made me wonder if it was anything like 'cat bowling' - you'll have to ask Todd. Unfortunately we also missed the YMCA Silver Steppers, the lip sync contest and Karaoke. Alas. And Sheep Shearing Demos.

One other thing I noticed about the schedule - they close the Dog Barn at 8pm because of the Fireworks. What dog owner can't understand that?

Until next year...

Evergreen State Fair

It's State Fair time again - time for all the 4-H-ers to show their stuff, time for cookware demos, plastic toy sales, hot-dogs-on-a-stick and carnival rides. Our state fair may not be the best state fair but it's OURS and we love it.

This year we arrived in time to watch pig races. And boy can those little guys run! (Or, as we were exhorted by the MC: "Watch this little pack of porkers pounding the pavement...")

There were chickens with feathers on their feet, bunnies with long hair on their ears, pygmy goats with massively pregnant bellies, shorn sheep, clipped goats and braided horse tails. There were a dozen little girls riding bare-back... (um, bare-back riding... um, there is just no way to put that down in print without it looking like a clarification is needed about who, exactly, is 'bare.' Not the little girls)... teen boys guiding pigs around a ring with canes, dogs being obedient, cats being judged, Clydesdales being big, and cavies just taking naps. Informational signs were everywhere letting us know that sheep aren't dumb, and goats get 'de-budded' and the mammary track is worth 37% of the judging. The 4-H kids were just dying to answer questions - want to know the gestation period of a pig?

And there was food. I'd say that over 50% of our state fair is food booths. Corn on the cob, barbecue pork sandwiches, shaved ice, cinnamon-sugar elephant ears (my personal favorite,) kettle corn, ice cream in all its permutations... you name it - there was a booth for it.

There were quilts; beautiful, colorful, wonderful quilts. And beading, crochet, dress-making, flower arranging, jam and jelly preserving and cake decorating examples. There were ribbons awarded for all of these, along with best photo of an insect, largest pumpkin, most creative scarecrow, and most elaborate Grange display of crops just, obviously, to name a few.

A veritable feast for the eyes. And the tummy.

We came home exhausted and had to have naps. I'll probably have to post some more pictures tomorrow.

Urban Hiking

We went wandering in Seattle on Sunday - who could resist such a nice day? Our goal was the Queen Ann neighborhood, a great big hill full of stately mansions and curvy streets just north of the Space Needle, offering great views of the city and the sound - and largely accessed through staircases rather than streets. Did I mention it was a steep hill?

Now, I don't do hills very well. This we know. But hills are good for you. Not only that, at the top of most of them are big panoramic views that are as irresistible to me as a snassage is to a puppy. So off we went. With only a little bit of time necessarily lying on the median grass gasping for air, we found our way up to Highland Drive where the little parks and overviews are just waiting to impress. And we found stairscases. All manner of stairscases.

Of course we also had to make our way to the waterfront for lunch at Anthony's - and were sorely tempted to call a cab for the walk back to the garage where we had left our car. But we resisted. Refreshed after lunch we were, and able to finish our Urban hike.

(I call it 8 miles; Mark, of course, thought it was more like 6 but what does he know?)

Stimulus? What stimulus?

I've read so many articles lately about how the economic stimulus money is bogged down in bureaucracy and red tape and not much is actually getting out there to accomplish what it was intended to accomplish. Other articles bemoan the delays and feet-dragging of the banks to refinance loans, in spite of more federal dollars disappearing into their coffers to make that possible. Billions and billions of dollars are coming out of taxpayer pockets - and evidently going nowhere. The economy is doing what the economy does, moving along on its own, recovering what it can based on the production and consumption of goods and services while its future expansion is crippled by the prospect of all those billions of dollars disappearing - a virtual black hole of federal deficit.

Stimulus money was supposed to get 'out there' NOW. Immediately. "Shovel-ready" projects, they said. Start infusing fresh money into the economy right away. Ha!

Here's what I want to know:

• Since it didn't happen, why don't we just cancel the whole thing and save ourselves the liability that we are now putting on our children and grandchildren?
• Why haven't we learned yet that it isn't the government that creates jobs?
• Why can't we just admit that the federal government is truly, profoundly, lousy at solving problems?

It isn't solving this one. I fear to think of the results of its efforts to 'solve' the health care situation.

The Dying Art of Blogging

I was interested in Mark's comment about how so many people have given up blogging in favor of making inane comments with no real point but a lot of angst on Twitter or My Space. So I looked up the article in 'Wired' to see why. It seems that the 'takeover' of blogging by professionals has drowned out the voice of the lone thinker/writer and that the possibility of that lone opinion being noticed in the world has all but died out. 'So why bother,' was the jist.

I guess I don't care. I've always tried to stay 'under the radar,' not over it, and didn't really want to be noticed by strangers in the first place. I never used links or tried to title my postings so that Google would pick them up in a search for a specific topic - in fact I tried very hard NOT to get picked up by Google.

('Wired' did note that you can get noticed by hecklers though. Great. Just what I want - someone insulting me besides.)

I understand that Twitter and Face Book allow writers to forgo the formalities of sentence construction, punctuation, alliteration, agreement, description, spelling even... basically anything resembling actual content... in favor of pithy postings like "OMG, yr really HOT" but I have trouble seeing that as an advantage.

I don't think I'm going to make the switch.

(Sorry Mark, no banjo discussion comes to mind yet...)

Oh Boy, Puppies!

We just HAD to run down to Portland yesterday to see the puppy. (We had other, very valid justification for a 400 mile day-trip, of course. We finally were able to meet Laura's father - visiting from New Mexico - got a tour of the foundry Todd manages, and went to the 100th birthday party of two friends who just each turned 50 - congratulations Greg and Joann - but THIS is about the puppy...)

I took the camera, of course, but had some difficulty. (Lately I've been finding the failures just as interesting as the successes, picture-wise.)

Here's the thing: Puppies move fast. So do people playing with them, as long as they have an interest in keeping their fingers and toes. So I have a bunch of photos of blurs, and people not really where they were when I started taking the pictures, and close ups that got a little too 'close up,' and, well...

Here's Todd, for example, playing with Dillon:

And Dillon saying Hi:


And Mark, talking to Dillon, from an angle not-exactly-where-I-started-from:

There were a few more successful shots though:

What fun!!

A new addition to the family

Todd and Laura got a puppy! She's about the sweetest little thing you ever saw - her name is Dillon and she is a Rhodesian Ridgeback, about 9 weeks old. By the looks of her paws, she's going to be quite a large addition to the family. (They look pretty thrilled with her, don't they?)

They have been busy with their new house - painting, replacing fixtures and finishes and generally working to make it their own - but when the perfect dog suddenly became available they took that plunge too. I wish them luck - training a dog on top of all the work they already do is going to be a challenge. (Being a cat person, myself... cats being really beyond all possibility of training... I'm rather looking forward to hearing my son coax his new little one to 'go make poopie' and all that other stuff.)

Honing in on Krispy Kreme

We ran some errands this morning that took us into Redmond and down to Issaquah, another little burb that is a bedroom community to Microsoft, driving through all the little backroads that could possibly entail. We knew our destination in Redmond, no problem, but were a little less sure of Issaquah, since we've only been down that way a time or two. As we were looking for the right street and address of the shop we were trying to find I mentioned that I knew we'd run across a Krispy Kreme donut place in our wanderings and thought it might have been in Issaquah.

Hmmmmm.

It didn't take a lot of time for that thought to percolate. Being big fans. (And I mean that in the worst possible way.)

Mark allowed as how he didn't think he could turn one down if we DID just happen to find the place. I added that I really had no idea where it was, just remember seeing one.

After a few minutes I also thought that it might have been on the north side of I-90... maybe on one of the main roads through town...

Of course we honed right in on it. Not a single wrong turn or misdirection. Didn't have to stop to ask anyone. Didn't look at a map. With nothing more to guide us than a sweet tooth, we drove right to it.
Amazing.

We really do need to refocus.

Crop update again

Our heat has finally dissipated some and I am back to concern about the gardens. You asked about how the squirrel-planted corn was looking in the overall scheme of things:

The pumpkins after watering...

And before -

The sunflowers and peas last week:

This week the sunflowers are all blooming and the peas have exhausted themselves in the heat and pretty much given up. Alas. The tomatoes are ripening by the dozen - we are going to have to take drastic measures here!

Still more...

More weekend pictures

Flowers, waterfalls, wildlife, vistas... every view picture perfect. Or it would have been for someone with better technical skills. I found it difficult to capture the vast hillsides of flowers - on the camera it mostly just registers as 'dotted' green stuff. And to try to catch the blindingly bright snow-covered mountain behind the richly colored foreground - very difficult with my equipment. But I did find that some photos had the right mix of light for either the flowers or the mountain.


You can actually see the mountain behind, in this photo (Mark in the foreground) and can get an idea of the contrast involved. This was just one of the many waterfalls we saw that were coming down the mountain from underneath the glaciers.

And this is the mountain from the bottom; from the Nisqually River, still rushing in August. The broader, rugged riverbed offers a hint of the power of the water and debris that must flow here with the spring thaw. The Nisqually Glacier is the one you can see reaching down from the mountain on this side, feeding the river.

It seemed like it was all about 'technical' stuff there. Everyone but us (literally - everyone else!) had 'gear' with them. Every single person on the trail (and there were hundreds) was equipped with ski poles and most also had packs, hiking boots, crampons, rope and their own guide group. And the snatches of conversation we heard while people were passing us (as we were stopped to catch our breath on the always-up trail) were mostly of hiking gear: what they had, what they had left at home, what they carried on their LAST hike, what they were going to carry on the next one, who had the best gear, who had the most gear... ad nauseum. Good grief people! Technology isn't everything. (Is it?)

And for all the ski pole slinging going on, there were many who were tripping over the ends of their poles or just carrying them over their shoulders, having given up on keeping them from tangling up in their, or their partners', legs. It was amazing we saw any wildlife at all, what with all the ski pole clacking going on.

We did though - see wildlife: deer, marmots, chipmonks, foxes and some stupid large bird, almost turkey-sized, who seemed not to realize that he was pretty far toward the bottom of the food chain and was just wandering around in the brush by the side of the trail, happily pecking for bugs. A grouse, maybe?

Mt Rainier...

... quite possibly the most beautiful place I have ever been!

We just got home from a weekend away - reservations made long before we knew we'd have a heat wave, and high hopes for a cool respite on a mountain with glaciers all over it dashed by full sun, near record temperatures and accompanying record high insect count...

(OK, they don't actually count the insects but we all agreed they were at a record high too.)

Just one more complaint before I move on to more positive stuff: There is no ''horizontal' in this national park. Just straight up a mountain, or straight down it. So yes, we are sunburned, shin-splinted and full of mosquito bites, but, hey, we have pictures - and we all know that it's ALL about getting great pictures.

Mt. Rainier is well known for spectacular wildflower displays and, in this, it did not disappoint. And all that 'full sun' meant there were no clouds or rain to obscure all that incredible mountain.

So I'm going to post some pictures over the next few days - just because I can't resist sharing! (You already knew that.)