Meet Me At the Fair

Or at least that’s what Martha said she was singing last week.

We went to the Washington State Fair, or, as we around here call it, the Fair formerly known as Puyallup. Because it was always the Puyallup Fair. Pronunciation can be found here. The fairgrounds itself has a bit of a shady history, but it’s been the Fair since before time. And to change it up now, AND to remove the cow heads from the entrance. Well, not sure how I feel about that.

Either way we went to the fair. We found the craft displays and started by looking at the collections.

There were quite a few and I am thinking there’s a fine line between “collecting” and “hoarding”. Just saying.

This one reminded me of Laura so I had to take a picture for her.

I mean, where would you keep all this stuff? It’s a lot of cows. Almost even more than I could bear at my home. This is but one example of people’s obsessions collections that were on display.

I think there were some kind of cool ones but of course I didn’t get a picture of them.

We looked at the quilts and knits but were told we couldn’t take a picture. Even though people were taking pictures. Not sure about that. I thought maybe you couldn’t take a picture of the pictures, but supposedly it was throughout the area.

There were also the pies and cakes and all that jazz on display, with, of course, one bite out of each for the tasters. Martha and I decided we could get on board with that job. Cake taster? I was born for it.

We wound our way around to look at animals, which were sort of hard to find AND the cow barn was closed because they were showing. There must have been an unfortunate cow incident in the past to close down the barn to move the cows. That’s what I think.

On our way we stopped to listen to The Konzelman Family (or Brothers, they go by both I think)

 

They were really good and sang 500 Miles. Which we liked and tapped our toes to. The two on the right also did a little tap dancing. And I am a sucker for the tap dance.

We saw some animals, but we missed the small poultry barn, which I found on the map the next day. Sigh.

It’s a tricky place-the fair.

I used to have a goat just like this one. I couldn’t get very good pictures of the long haired cows.

These two were having a little thing going on with their horns.

I heard a joke about cows on NPR Dinnerparty Download-

Why do cows have bells? Because their horns don’t work.

I told it to Laura who said it only got an eye roll and no snorts. Really? What happened to her sense of humor? That is hilarious. And the only joke I will remember for ever.

After the fair, and the milkshake and the Krusty Pup (yeah, they call their corn dogs Krusty Pups. How weird is that?) and the requisite scones (the fair is famous for scones), we had to go to the yarn store. I mean, seriously. We went over to the Yellow House. It’s very cute and I bought some swap stuff.

Saturday I worked in the yard. I cut back the bushes and picked these.

Lovely.

Dave posed for a picture.

Disturbing.

Jack didn’t.

Jack is still getting over the giant raccoon sighting of the morning. I opened the curtain in the bedroom to see a giant raccoon slowly walking up the tree in front of the window. Jack could not believe his eyeballs. So he’s a little tired from that.

I couldn’t get a picture fast enough, but I’m pretty sure the image is burned onto Jack’s retinas.