project 365 #257: ferris wheel 1

project 365 #257: ferris wheel 1
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

On Saturday, I went to the fair with S & J. I also cleaned the house and ran around doing errands and was generally productive. On Sunday, I did, as our friends across the pond like to say, sod all. Although I did watch this lengthy and baffling miniseries/movie called The Fire Next Time about global warming and one family's heartwarming struggles to stay together and wholesome despite weather armaggedon. Which I swear I've seen before and not only that, I have some weird memory of watching it with my mom, and how that's possible, I do not know.

The fair was fun. All three of us were in full geek out photo safari mode - somebody asked S in a confused voice just why she would be taking pictures of a chicken. A chicken pecked my lens, too, but both the chicken and the lens survived just fine. I fed the llamas! Yes, I muscled my way in through hordes of children, put a quarter into the machine and fed the llamas. Llamas have amazingly soft lips. Like, the softest lips ever. Like, nothing on earth is as soft as llama lips and now I have a basis of comparison by which to judge the softness of everything.

We walked through the midway and I went into the freak animal tent, which had a repeating recorded barker going on and on outside "Alive! See Freak Animals - Alive!" And they were, in fact, alive, although not all that freaky except that they were all obese, which, given their proximity to the fair crowd, didn't seem unusual. "This is what Europeans probably think Americans are always like," observed J as we sat down to eat our universally disappointing fair food - never again will I stray from the ways of the Italian sausage sandwich and the blooming onion. No, the steak sandwich from the place with the horns glued on it was gnarly in the extreme, J's chicken "fajita" was probably cat and inedible and the ribbon fries, which are like a weird combination of potato chip and french fry, were stone cold. S had barbecue, which she said was okay. Next year I'm going to take more time picking out my horrible fair dinner and not just lunge for the second booth I see.

So, what else was at the fair? My pictures (there are way too many, I know) are here - about the last half of that set are new ones. There were Christian clowns doing some kind of scary sermon: no photographs; they were just too scary. There were howling kids and happy kids, fat people and thin people and short serious guys in large cowboy hats. There were camel rides, a guy from Texas selling sugar gliders which he said were as smart as a smart dog, rides and booths and the North Carolina Baptist Men doing first aid. It was the fair. And the fair is good.