OK, one more post before I head out to my parents' house for turkey with all the fixin's. I just came across this excellent interview with Andrew Marlowe, the creator of my favorite tv show, Castle, on the futoncritic's website. It's from a few weeks back when the second season premiered, but I didn't know about it til now. It just summarizes the show very well, and points out all of the things I love about it. I'd call it a "recruiter interview", to paraphrase a term from vidding. ;-) Anyway, read it if you love Castle; read it if you don't love Castle and I just dare you not to be intrigued enough to tune in sometime to ABC on Monday night at 10pm EST. :-) (Only one more ep til holiday break, sadly....but YAY for a full 22 ep season!!)

I'm shuttin' up now.

Forgot to put this in my last post: we got our first sprinkling of snow today, early in the morning. It was coming down pretty fast and furious; this is our farm lawn jockey with a dusting, and it covered the grass.

And this my neighbor's lawn, covered in leaves, now getting covered in snow.


But by the time an hour or so went by, the snow had melted. So it was the pretty kind that looks good falling down but doesn't hang around to bother you. :-) I do like a little snow for getting me in the holiday mood.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Turkey Day! Our celebrating was postponed a day, because my mom was recovering from intestinal flu. :-( I'm taking this morning to catch up my LJ readers on stuff that's been going on with me, little things that sometimes I send to Twitter or Facebook but just never get around to posting properly here. Plus I've uploaded a bunch of new photos to Flickr lately that I wanted to share.

Speaking of illness, I had a nasty fight with a sinus infection for a couple of weeks; my sincere apologies to my coworkers for putting up with my Supreme Sniffleness. Thank heaven for antibiotics or I'd still hab a code in my node. :-)

I went to this year's Kent State Folk Festival Folk Alley Around Town concerts a couple of weeks ago, with my Folk Fest buddies Denny and Loretta. These are fun free concerts in all kinds of establishments around downtown Kent (see last year's entry) and this time I took in four acts. I saw a solo artist named Rockin' Robin, who plays a mean piano keyboard--very ragtime/swing/blues--, a country/alt rock group called Hillbilly Idol who really jam, even when playing a Hank Williams number!, and a zydeco "jam band" called Mo' Mojo, who kind of jammed more than they zydeco'ed:




This is the lead vocalist, playing the squeezebox or concertina or whatever her little accordion is called, having a playoff with the fiddle player. They really played well, and sang well, especially considering the tight space of being crammed in a corner at Ray's Place Upstairs (an excellent longtime Kent restaurant/bar). It's gotta be tough to concentrate with a waitress crossing a foot in front of you every five minutes! But for every one kickin' zydeco number they played, which I adore, they'd do a really long other kind of song that showcased each individual instrument, like jazz does its solos, and that just didn't appeal to me as much. But I have to admit that I only caught the first 45 minutes of their gig (before heading out to end the night with Chuck Keiper's solo singer/guitar act), so maybe they settled into more straight zydeco after that. I'd seen Chuck Keiper perform for the first time last year and I really like his music. And Denny and Loretta have a personal connection to him so they always catch his concerts. He's like a cross between Billy Joel and James Taylor, channelling Harry Chapin.

I posted several horse photos to Flickr, candids I shot whenever some of our horses were out in the paddocks in the nice weather. This is Lady G and Little G, a mother-and-foal pair of Gypsy Vanner horses we have boarding with us:



Not the best shot and they're not cleaned up for a show, but you can see the sizes and all the lovely feathering on their feet. More about the breed is available here, although it puts my paltry photos to shame. (I can't wait for spring, when I can see them at shows, I hope, and all fancied up and clean!) It's fun having a foal to feed; she is very sweet and curious and wants attention, and I love it when the horses want to see me and not just immediately stick their noses in their buckets. We've also had some not-so-good horse stuff going on lately; one of our boarders colicked from a bad batch of worming medicine, and so he had a rough couple of days. He's much better now and is gradually getting back up to his usual grain allotment. And another of our horses had to have a growth removed from her neck, poor dear (it was done right here on the farm; they tranked her for it, so she didn't have to be vanned to a vet). She's anxious to eat normally again too but we've got to keep her off hay so that she doesn't stretch her neck and pull out her stitches. (Already had to redo them once.) She's rather flighty and skittish--she's afraid of a hay bag hanging in the stall! So we couldn't use that; a normal horse would step right up to it and eat (you don't want them putting their heads down coz of the stitches), but she's so afraid that she stands as far back as she can and stretches her neck to the utmost so that she can lip some hay out of it from a "safe" range. That's just as bad as eating from the ground, for convalescence purposes. So hand-feeding and buckets is what we're doing with her, hopefully not for long.

The same day I came home to the colicky horse, I had heard that my friend Chris' beautiful Siberian Husky Zack died suddenly! That was quite a shock for all of us who knew him. He was only 6 years old! We learned that he had an enlarged heart, a genetic defect, so he really did have a bigger-than-normal heart. He was really sweet, VERY energetic and always tremendously happy to see people. Other dogs, not so much, but he was a people-pleaser for sure. I got to take him on a few walks, sadly not as many as I would have liked because of my schedule, but it was always an adventure. This is my last photo of him, slobbering al over my car after a hike. This was just a couple of weeks before he left to go over the Rainbow Bridge. We had a long romp in the woods, and he never tired out, he was rarin' for more! That's how I'll always remember him. R.I.P. Zack.



And in the category of nature photos I am so surprised I was able to shoot: this was taken on my parents' porch this past summer, and it's just so cool, I've rarely ever SEEN hummingbirds in flight, let alone been able to catch one! So, flights of fancy to everyone and that's it for now. Your very scatterbrained blogger, Christina.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Sad and scary day today, petwise. Goldie is fine, but my friend's dog died suddenly for no reason and one of our horses is sick. Not good!

Long day over, with entertaining discussions at Newbery-hopefuls book group meeting. We all liked all 3 books for a change.

This weekend was a blast! Very busy though. I took a vacation day on Friday so that I could attend the annual literacy conference of OCIRA (Ohio Council of the International Reading Association), where we presented the 2008 Buckeye Children's Book Awards to three authors. I'm on the BCBA Council, as a representative from the OLC (Ohio Library Council--are you keeping up with all of these acronyms? :-) and I'd never been to the reading teachers' conference before. It was held at Youngstown State University, about 45 minutes away. First major hurdle: getting there! I'd mapquested the directions (or maybe it was yahoo maps or google maps, because I use all three indiscriminately), and was following them merrily along. I noticed when I got off the freeway that I was in my mom's old neighborhood, in fact it was also my old neighborhood from when I was a preschooler, when we lived a few streets down from my grandmother. So I took a quick detour just to drive by my grandma's old house--hadn't been there in a long long time, since before my grandmother passed away, in 1991 I think it was. That was a sweet nostalgic moment. But then I continued to follow the mapquest directions, and they took me to some residential street! Not a college campus at all. Oh dear! Luckily I had a state map with me, which had a decent blowup of Youngstown, because I might have lived there as a kid but I sure didn't know my way around the rest of the city. I was over 15 minutes out of my way! Totally off! I have never been so furious at an online map site before. I know they can be off, but usually by one or two streets. This sent me to an entirely different address in a different part of town, but said on the directions that it was the Kilcawley Center at YSU. Go figure!! Thank heavens I had actually left an hour early, having planned to walk around campus a little. Sheesh. So I got there just in time to hear the keynote address by Cynthia Lord, author of the Newbery Honor-winning, Schneider family award-winning, and now, Buckeye Children's Book Award-winning novel, Rules.


Her talk was wonderful, and so touching, many of us were wiping away tears. She talked about how to write a book about something close to your heart--in this case, raising her son with autism and how it affects his sister--and how that is different from writing entirely made-up fiction. If you haven't read her book, please do, it is funny and heartwarming and just a great story. And she talked about winning the Newbery Honor, and how as exciting as that was, winning the Buckeye award made her cry, because it is an honor bestowed by children (the books are nominated as well as voted on by kids all across Ohio). She was just wonderful to meet and to hear speak.

That was the only thing I did at the first day of the conference; I drove home right after. I stopped briefly in Newton Falls to drop off a book with my friend Chrissy at her library and have a quick visit, and that turned out to be an expensive little detour because in my hurry to get back to the horses I passed a car a little too fast and got a speeding ticket. Ouch! I was NOT meant to be in a car that day, methinks...). On Saturday I got up earlier than the usual oh-dark-thirty (4am this time) to be able to feed horses and still get back to YSU in time to help at the conference registration table. This time I knew right where I was going! I did some gofering and prize-stickering for the staff, and then I hosted authors/illustrators Mark Newgarden and Megan Montague Cash for their breakout session and to lunch and to see their Buckeye award acceptance speech. They gave a funny talk with a slide show all about their home/office, which is a cool brownstone in Brooklyn, how they created Bow Wow Bugs a Bug, the wordless picture book that won the award, and a "few words about wordless books." This being a literacy conference, they were quite well prepared, and had a funny "Top Ten Uses for Wordless Books" list as well as a more serious list of ways to use wordless books in the classroom and why visual literacy is so important for reading development.

Here I am with Mark and Megan, wearing my Bow Wow shirt. We had a great time, it was cool to meet them and they were very friendly and have a nifty sense of humor. They were totally up for clowning around with the decor, taking turns in photos like this:


We had some tense moments with technology screwups for their presentation, entailing a lot of running around for the right projector cords and things with YSU staff, but it worked out fine, and I was glad to be of help. Their Buckeye "acceptance speech" was a wordless slide show with animations, and it was adorable! And hilarious! Bow Wow the dog wakes up as the doorbell rings, learns he has won an award. Then he takes off running through the streets, flies in an airplane, runs across the deserts and past the Eiffel Tower and around the world (which is hilarious because he "lives" in NYC), then at the podium he catches a bone thrown to him!

Then he runs back home, where he falls asleep dreaming of Ohio--which changes shape into a heart. Awwww. So cute.


I also got to hear keynote (non-awards) presentations by:

Diane DeGroat, who writes and illustrates the "Gilbert the opossum" series of pictures books--Roses are Pink, Your Feet Stink! etc, very cute!--as well as illustrating hundreds of other books over the years. She gave a very funny slide show of her life story, with animations and views of her studio, etc. Her website is full of fun stuff. She's had a long varied career in book illustration and does great work. And the other guest of honor that day was

Bruce Langton, another children's book illustrator (I first saw his work in B Is For Buckeyes, a state history alphabet book, and he's done several in the series, like H is For Hoosier or something like that) who started out as a commercial artist and a fantastic wildlife artist. Check out his website to see the phenomenal wildlife art, so realistic and beautiful. Wowsers. Wolves, elephants, lions, just gorgeous. He talked about how he entered "duck stamp" competitions over and over again, trying to win one to get recognition. Man, can he ever paint a pretty duck! :-)

It was a wonderful day. But, it didn't end there! I said goodbye to Mark and Megan after getting my book autographed (they did a really nice color pencil illustration in it, instead of the usual black Sharpie, boy did I feel privileged!), and raced home to put on my vampirella costume and go to the Warped Corps Halloween party. This is our annual shindig of food and merriment. I don't have a photo of me in costume, but this is what it looked like last year when I wore it to a vampire author visit:

(I didn't paint my face white at this party.)

We had some cool characters show up at our party:

This is Karen and Charlie as Storm and Gambit. Even their dog Velvet got into the act:

We play a lot of silly scifi games at our parties, and the main event is the Crossword Puzzle game, created and hosted by the devious Charlie.

There are over a hundred words to figure out; we divide into two teams and it's a team effort to try to figure out what words are meant by the obscure clever punny clues Charlie comes up with. Teams earn points for every letter in a word when it's guessed. We like to say you have to figure out Charlie's brain in order to figure out the clues. And it helps if you know a lot of scifi shows and comics. (For example: "What happens when a rock pile meets a black bear?" Four letters. Even with "second letter E, last letter S" it took us a while to come up with BENS. For Ben Grimm "The Thing" and Gentle Ben. That is just an easier example!) It's a lot of fun to play, and amazingly enough, this year's version ended in a tie! First time ever that we can think of. So that was a long day, til well past midnight.


Just to wrap up the weekend, on Sunday morning after horses I went back to bed for four hours--partying is exhausting! ;-) then did a ton of walking around neighborhoods in Kent, doing a "lit drop" with a friend all afternoon. We handed out literature and notepads for our friend Becky Doherty who is running for Portage County municipal judge. It was a beautiful fall day, sunny, warm, perfect for walking. And we happened to be in the neighborhood of other friends of mine, so we had a lovely break at their house, met their cat, etc. Great timing, as they had just returned from a bike ride. We ended the day with dinner at our new local Jimmy John's--has any of you ever eaten at this 'gourmet sandwich' shop? They have franchises all over the place, I'm learning, but this was our first time to eat there. I'd never heard of them before. Well, let me tell you, I will happily eat there again, any time! Delicious! And they have this cool low-carb item called an "unwich," which is any of their sandwiches wrapped in giant iceberg lettuce leaves instead of a bun. Clever idea, not only for dieters but for celiacs (gluten allergic folks). Mmm mmm good. Ciao for now!

On the bright side, detour led me right past my grandma's old house. Hadn't been there in years. Nostalgic moment.

Yesterday I learned the hard way not to trust Mapquest. Got sent 15 minutes out of my way to opposite side of Youngstown for conference.

I am heartily fed up with stranger whose bank acct number is 1 digit away from mine. Stop accidentally using MY account number already!!

A fun book I recently read--goes along with my new favorite tv show, "Castle." Great little mystery, fast-paced cops-on-the-street action, witty banter, hot sex, not at all like the usual YA books I'm always reading. This one is for grownups! :-D

Thanks to michygeary of the Castle LJ Community for the art.

I am not looking forward to first snow of the season tonight. I have trouble w/ seasonal transitions. Luckily we get Indian Summer nxt wk.

Just found this really cool video on the main page of the MS150 website: and it was made by one of my teammates! I had no idea. It's really great, it's part slideshow and part video, with a nifty song as the soundtrack. If you want an idea of what the ride is like, this rider's-eye view comes pretty close. (Ignore the occasional candid shot of me looking like a total doofus; I wasn't awake yet and EVERYONE was snapping photos so you kind of got used to ignoring them unless they called out your name.) Enjoy!

Oh how I wish I'd known about this sooner, I so would have tried to drive down there for it! But this is cool news anyway, I had no idea there was a Secretariat movie in the making. Neato!

Disney's Secretariat filmmakers offer "70's Happening" at Churchill Downs

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Well, this weekend has turned out very well, despite a change of plans. I was looking forward to hosting my friend Pat for the weekend, from Kentucky. She planned to drive up and spend the night here so we could hang out, and go to see Neil Gaiman together on Sunday. But right in the middle of putting finishing touches on my apt cleaning/furniture rearranging/massive dusting work, I got a phone call from her that she wasn't going to be able to come after all. She tried, and got halfway here, but she hadn't been able to rent a car with cruise control (really busy time in her town this weekend, nearly all the cars rented out!), and so she was having serious back problems. We both agreed that was not a good thing, and I didn't want her to be miserable while she was here and have an even more painful drive home. So, no company after all. But now I have a sparkling apt for when my sister comes to visit later this month. I may just go live in a motel for a week to make sure it stays clean. :-)

Oh--side note on all that cleaning, I had to postpone some of it because for the second time in a week, a squirrel died on our transformer and the power went out! This time we even saw the swan dive of the poor departed thing--my neighbor glanced up and saw it fall off! The electrical company worker who came out to fix it said it's quite common this time of year with young squirrels--I think they're teenage squirrels, born in the spring and out on their own now, reckless, daring, totally ignoring mama squirrel's advice to never ever run on those big gray things on poles...The power guy couldn't put up an animal guard because he couldn't get his truck in to the right spot, but we are supposed to have a crew coming soon to do that--"and I'll have them replace the whole transformer too, it's antiquated," he said. Gee! THAT inspires confidence! Maybe it wasn't entirely the rodent's fault!

So, on Sunday I went with to see Neil Gaiman. Wow. What a great guy! I'd seen him once before at San Diego Comic Con, but he was only talking about his movies at the time, Stardust and Coraline, and anyway that was with 6,000 complete strangers. Not exactly up close and personal. This time, it was a really nice event. The Cleveland Public Library brought him in as part of their Writers and Readers Series of lectures (later this year they'll have Kareem Abdul Jabbar--interesting choice of author). He gave a very nice talk, first reading aloud from his newest children's book, Odd and the Frost Giants (hilarious! he did different voices for the Norse gods trapped in animals' bodies and it was so cool), then taking questions ("And I'll be giving the answers," he said). He told us about his next project, a nonfiction book on China and The Journey West by some monk, or something like that, I'm afraid I didn't get it stuck in my head properly (but you can read all about it on Neil's blog and twitter feed and so forth, the man is all over the internet) but it sounds really neat. He's been several times to China. He also talked about how he's going to buy pie for everyone on the staff at HarperCollins because his book The Graveyard Book (have you read it yet? Very cool! You need to right now!) has been on the bestseller lists for 53 straight weeks. He got some questions from kids, which was very cute--"what's your favorite color?" and you know, he said he's never been asked that before. Sure sounded like he really meant it. He said green--and that if he's not stopped he tends to paint walls in rooms apple green, which makes him happy but makes other people wonder "are they meant to be that way?" Talked about weird things people do at signings, like asking him to sign body parts (someone here asked if he remembered signing the bottom of a girl's foot in Portland), or having him sign their arm then running out to a tattoo parlor and getting the autograph tattooed on! Authors who inspired him were C.S. Lewis, Tolkien (funny story about winning a writing prize as a kid and asking for Return of the King as his book prize--because he had read the first two over and over again but his library didn't have a copy of the third one and he was dying to find out if it ended well!), Harlan Ellison and Roger Zelazny. Talked about doing audiobooks--he is quite an acomplished narrator. He loves telling stories in all forms, and the "second best thing about parenting" has been that he got to read stories aloud to his kids every night. When the last one got too old for it, he had to turn to audiobook narrating to satifsy the urge. He said he had a bit of a cold and was a little hoarse, but he sounded great to us. He ended with a reading from The Graveyard Book and then we lined up for autographs. I hadn't even expected him to sign, since I knew there would be a lot of people in attendance, and nothing was mentioned on the library's website about signing. But I had brought my Graveyard Book just in case.

Well, library staff were totally blown away by the response; about 50 or more people were there by 11am, and he wasn't speaking until 2pm. By the midafternoon apparently over 1,000 people came, but many had to be turned away because there just wasn't room. The auditorium seats 615 people, and then they filled up an "overflow room" with another couple hundred, and had his speech piped in there. I was so glad I'd known to come early, even though we were later than I'd planned and got nearly the last seats in the main auditorium. When he first came up to the mic to talk to us he said he had just been in to see the folks in the overflow room, to show he was really there, and hoped to have their questions brought in. So about halfway through, he was notified by a staffer and he looked up to see a few people at the door. He addressed himself to the overflow folks: "I am meeting with your representatives now!" and took a few questions from them. It was funny, and reminded me of the first couple of seasons of The Ellen Show where she had the Riffraff Room full of overflow crowds.

Unfortunately this huge response meant they didn't handle the autographing part quite as well as I would have hoped. The lady in charge asked by a show of hands "who was here before 11am?" and then said that those with their hands up would get to be first in line. It was totally on the honor system--now you know that twice as many people were in that part of the line as had actually come early. Neil requested that people with kids form a separate line, and that was great, they got to meet him first too which I totally applaud. But the rest of us were told they'd call us by section; guess what? we looked around and hardly anyone had stayed in their seats! Everyone piled out to queue up in the hall. It would have been so much better if they had had numbers to hand out at the door as we arrived, to give us some kind of order for the line. So Dianah (hklbry) and I were nearly at the end of the line because we hadn't jumped into right away. Di didn't need his autograph, she already had one, but she was a saint for keeping me company. We tweeted our status and talked to total strangers, it was rather like a sci fi con by the end of the THREE AND A HALF HOURS we waited. After the first 45 minutes of no movement, with me beginning to dread ever getting back in to even take a closeup photo of him never mind the autograph, the line suddenly began moving very quickly, and we wondered what was up--well, they were having everyone come in and sit down, and handing us a numbered post-it note at the door. (Finally, some organization!). Then my friend Rollie from CPL would call out numbers in batches of ten. I was 308. Oh my. I saw a couple of friends there; Julie wore this really nifty outfit she'd made for a horror movie premiere, and I thought she fit in perfectly well to the Gaiman world. What do you think? :-)



We gradually trickled down to see him. It was cool to see the variety of folks there to see him, and from farflung places. Several from the Carolinas, Pittsburgh, one guy from Atlanta (the library director had asked where out of towners were from, and upon hearing Atlanta he called the guy down to the stage and gave him a front row chair all by himself!) One Case Western Reserve Univ. student was announced as needing a ride back to campus if anyone was willing: and he got a volunteer. There was a busload of students from Oberlin College there, and after so long their bus had to leave, but several wanted to stay to get an autograph if anyone was willing to give them a ride back. (Another announcement made, but I don't think they got any takers. They did line up for a nice group photo with Neil, and we saw him asking all of them their names. Very friendly guy.)

OK, you know I eventually got there, here's the photographic evidence above and below.



Sweet sweet guy, I am so glad I was able to be there. He's at the Toledo Library today, but not doing signings, his hand is very sore! (He'd mentioned at one point sometimes needing to grab frozen veggies to ice his hand, and sure enough, Dianah saw some under his table!) Thank you thank you Mr. Gaiman for your patience yesterday, you made a lot of people happy.

Just checking to see if this function is functioning again.

I had a good day today visiting our middle school, booktalking a bunch of great teen books to 7th and 8th graders of varying degrees of enthusiasm and attentiveness. :-) This was the first of my new monthly visits to the school. Hoping to become a more regular presence there than my previous annual visits in spring for summer booktalks. It was gratifying to be greeted by several students during the course of the day, "Hey I know you!" or "You came here last year!" so at least I'm a semi-familiar face.

Last weekend my niece had her sixth birthday party: so cute! She's lost her first tooth, that is quite the big milestone.




I uploaded a bunch of photos from a trip I took last year to Breyerfest--I'd forgotten that I never uploaded the rest of them, nor blogged about the other cool things I saw and did on the trip. Argh argh, too many photos, not enough time. The Gypsy/circus stunt riders were amazing:

They did all kinds of riding tricks on horses that galloped around the ring, like moving themselves from one side of the horse to the other, from in the saddle, all the way under the horse and back up again in a circle--as the horse never faltered. It was incredibly exciting to watch. So were the demonstrations of various breeds at the Horse Park, such as this Friesian:

Click on the photo for more photos of gypsy riders upside down and all over the place.

And as I walked around the horse park I came across a lone Great Blue Heron, who was enjoying the pond life. I am just fascinated by these birds, and I always love a chance to get a close up of one.




That's it for now--looking forward to a visit by an out-of-state friend this weekend, and getting to see author Neil Gaiman in person! Woo-hoo!

Time for another weekend report: this one involves balloons and yet another parade! It was the annual Ravenna Balloon AFair weekend, and I had a nice time photographing balloons as they launched from literally my front yard (very large field on the farm). We had gorgeous sunny skies and 80 degrees on Saturday, with overflowing crowds coming to see the launch. Sunday, however, was a different story. After waiting as long as they dared, they cancelled the launch, because we had a lot of sinister clouds overhead and there was a storm nearby headed our way. It was a shame. There was still the whole carnival thing to have fun with, though, for the crowd.
Something new this year for me, was getting to see the balloon afair parade from the inside, so to speak: I walked in it with others who are supporting our friend Becky in her judicial quest. We handed out candy--no literature drops allowed in this parade, because we had a booth set up for later--and had to make do with humans and a cool car, no adorable dogs this time.

These cute pugs-in-balloons were part of the "Pugs in Paradise" unit in the parade. The parade theme was "Paradise in the Sky", and so there were a lot of floats with puffy clouds and heaven or tropical paradise or similar designs. My favorite, after the cute pugs and the very nice storybook float done by the local library, was this:

which used the movie "UP" as its theme. Here is a better view of the characters on the front of the float:

I mean, I thought this float was head and shoulders above all the others in terms of execution and quality. Very nice. It was sponsored by a group that helps disabled folks live independently, so it was a very appropriate theme too. (And one guy walking with them kept reminding us loudly, "It was MY idea! It's from the movie UP!" He was so sweet.)
In between walking the parade route (twice, because of course, again I didn't plan for return transportation) and seeing the evening balloon launch, I also entertained some kids at the fair downtown for an hour; I had been asked to perform my balloon animal-twisting skills again. That's fun, but also stressful being a street performer, when you can conceivably have hundreds of kids swarming around you. I prefer small parties to the neverending stream of passersby. You hardly get a break. And unfortunately, my balloons were old, so they popped very frequently, before I could finish making the item. Talk about frustrating! These poor kids probably thought balloon twisting was quite hazardous, since they popped 4 out of 5 times. I was disgusted with myself. I didn't have much advance notice of the job, but I could still have gone out and bought new balloons. I had no idea they'd gotten that bad, they looked fine at first glance. Anyway, it was a quick hour for some quick cash. Now Becky wants me to make balloons at one of her events! Oh dear, I am regressing into my college days when I was a Party Animal. I guess it's nice to know that skills I learned back then are still handy, but I hadn't ever intended to really use them again, just the occasional balloon for my niece and her friends. We shall see.
I'll close with some more balloon images; not much to say about them, they speak for themselves.



Funny thing about this balloon, it wasn't part of the Afair. It came gliding overhead while our balloons were still all inflating. It was like the Scout Balloon, sent over from an enemy camp to spy out our numbers and position...

Ta for now!

Over the weekend I set a new personal record for Number of Festivals Attended in One Weekend. On Friday night, my parents and I went to the German Family Society's Oktoberfest, in Brimfield.

The place was very crowded, it's a popular event despite Brimfield being a small town, and you could hardly get close to the main tent where the youth dancers and the "ceremonial keg tapping" were. We had some fantastic food, after standing in line for a good ten minutes--schnitzel, wurst, sauerkraut, kartoffelsalat and beer of course--and even more fantastic desserts: apfel strudel, my favorite! (It was hard to choose among the many tortes and pastries.) It was actually a bit chilly outside, so we came inside for dessert and to listen to the dance band.

I love the little lady on the right, playing her giant harmonica or whatever it is! I even danced a couple of polkas/waltzes with my dad, who was very nice to overlook the many times I stomped on his feet or went left instead of right. I wish they held this more than once a year, because it is a nice time.

The next day, I spent outside in the sunshine at a horse show in Wadsworth, cheering on my friend Sandy (also known as Goldie's Godmother) as she rode Blaze the Appaloosa in several classes.

Here they are going over a jump in the jumping class. She did fantastically well, taking 2 blue ribbons and a couple of other places, and getting a Champion ribbon too!

One of the fun things about horse shows is always the dogs who show up to have fun, and I met a really sweet German Shepherd mix named Annie:

I also talked about good books for 6th graders with Annie's owner, who was looking for new series to read with her daughter. A librarian's work is never done! (grin)

Then on Saturday evening, after taking care of our horses, I stopped by downtown Kent to soak in the Celtic sounds of their first-ever Irish Festival, which was held to raise money in benefit for the Kent Stage, which presents live acoustic music in a restored former movie theater. Now there's some music I really like, even more than German oompah music.

I really enjoyed this group; I'd seen them before at a St. Patrick's Day event but darned if I can remember their name, and I never got around to asking. [Edited: I think they are "Celtic Clan".] Really great singers, plus fiddles and a flute and occasional drums. And the flutist also danced! The cutest dancers were the little kids from the audience who ran around on stage during their performance. There were also trained Irish dancers from a local academy, in their gorgeous sparkly colorful dresses:

It was a shame that the sun was setting as they danced, because the light was dimming and my camera was using a slower and slower shutter speed, so I got some blurs in my action shots. I am always amazed at how the heck they can do this kind of dancing without moving their arms, and to be in perfect sync with each other (sometimes not, they're still learning) and with such stamina! I get tired just watching them! (grin) The other entertainment I saw was a bagpiper, which you'd think would be Scottish but apparently there are a lot of Irish bagpipers--this particular guy is in the Cleveland Police Force's Pipes and Drums group. And finally, after some delay, the main event I had been looking forward to: the Co-Ed Kilted Relay Race! haha! Well, what a disappointment that turned out to be. First, no kilted people showed up, just 4 teams of college kids in jeans. Second, it was the world's shortest relay race, just carry a full cup of water on a tray across the stage area, a whole 30 feet or so. Big whoop. And third, just as they started the race, my darn camera froze up! So I didn't even have a chance to take some interesting photos of the 30 seconds of silliness. Sigh. But despite that it was a nicely attended concert, and I hope they do it again next year; I'd have liked to hear the other musicians I missed. I also ate some Irish food while there, but I was kind of disappointed in that too. A Kent sandwich shop had what they called "corned beef sausages" with "cabbage", but they were too spicy for me and didn't taste like corned beef at all. The cabbage was practically the same sauerkraut I had eaten at the German festival! Not being an expert on Irish food, maybe it's supposed to taste like that, but I have had better corned beef and cabbage.

And finally, on Sunday I walked in a parade! At the Mantua Potato Festival. (All of these places, by the way, for those not familiar with them, are fairly close to where I live; the horse show was the furthest drive, only 45 minutes. If I really want to do a Festival Foray someday I could cover the state, Ohio has so many of them!)

A group of us walked in front of this great '56 Ford Thunderbird, passing out candy, stickers and notepads for our friend Becky Doherty (in the back of the car) who is campaigning for county judge. We had lots of help:

from our pals Fred, Barney and Clyde (not sure which two are pictured here), who walked or rode along with us. So cute!! They are parade veterans; their owners kind of rent them out for things like this. Whenever they seemed to get a little tired, they'd ride, or we'd get out their purple ball toys for them to chase as they walked. It was quite amusing! We also handed out dog biscuits to dogs along the parade route--Becky is very animal-friendly.

I didn't get to see the whole parade, of course, because I was in it, so before it started I walked around the lineup lot taking pictures of parade units I found interesting or unique. This stagecoach was one of them. There were several "queens", not just the Potato Festival Queen but a Homecoming Court girl in a gown, and "Miss Grapette" from some wine festival. The local sand and gravel company had a (literally) huge presence in the parade:

They had lifters and loaders and even cement trucks. The local haunted house was represented, as was the local giant corn maze (I so want to take Mira to this!), and here are The Floral Hat Ladies as I've dubbed them:

I had a great time, although by the end of the parade and my walk back to McDonald's to meet a friend, I was pretty tired and my ankle was throbbing. But it was great exercise. The original plan was to pick up my friend and together visit the festival food booths, see what was going on, potatowise, but my friend had slipped and fallen on the wet floor at McD's right before I arrived, so we opted to just rest ourselves and chat instead. Plenty of time next year for Potato Festivalling. :-)

A little late, but I did intend to blog about my third and final visit to the Portage County Randolph Fair this summer. (Remember my teaser? "How I Nearly Scared Myself to Death!" That part's coming up next.) This last day I went with my niece Mira, my friends Chrissy and Rick, and their daughter Katie. It was such fun to see the fair with little kids! Although it was a chilly day with a lot of threatening clouds, we never did get any rain on us. Mira was a really good sport, considering that she had already been to another county fair only the day before (I didn't know that until we'd nearly arrived, or I would have asked her if she wanted to do something else instead.).

Mira and Katie got along really well on their first meeting, and soon were holding hands and dancing and sharing cotton candy just like sisters or cousins. So sweet! We had fun looking at all of the animals, like the silly goats


and the cow costume class, which was totally hilarious! There was a CheerCow with her football player:

And Moo-ley Cyrus showed up leading her alter ego, Hannah MOOntana:

There were many costumes just as silly or cuter. (My favorite was the Ice Cream Truck)


But the big event for the girls, besides getting some fun food, was to ride some rides, of course. Now, you may have noticed in my previous posts about the Fair that I did not mention any rides whatsoever, other than my nighttime photos of the lights. There's a reason for that. I do not 'do' rides. I get nauseous just looking at them when they're spinning and dropping and shooting around. Mira loved the bungee bouncy trampoline (my heart was in my throat every time she flew up above my head, grinning her head off) and the spinning dragons (her verdict: "it didn't go fast enough"). She also tackled the giant slide on a burlap sack, which was almost too tall and scary to deter her, but not quite. However, I'm a good auntie and I wanted to make sure Mira had a great time, so after postponing the inevitable for as long as possible--"Mira, do you want to go fishing in this game?" (she did, and they both won princess jewelry, ooh ahh!)--I had to go on a "real" ride with her, the kind you can't go on alone even if you're tall enough. I picked one with the minimal amount of ups and downs and craziness, this spinny thing:


Oh. My. Word. I honestly haven't felt that terrified in years, probably since the last time I was stupid enough to think I could handle one of these things. All it did was go around and slightly up a hill, and then do it backwards, too. Oh dear. Centrifugal force is NOT my friend. I actually had a sore arm the next day, because I held onto that safety bar so hard that I pulled a muscle! I kid you not! I didn't scream, though, and not on purpose; for some reason when I'm terrified apparently I clamp my jaws shut and go nearly comatose. I think there was probably a mental litany of "pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasebeover" going on, too. I don't know what's worse, throwing up on a ride or nearly passing out! Anyway, the kid loved it of course and she was so sweet and protective of me the whole time, because I had tried to warn her that I'm not really good with these things, and wasn't sure how I'd feel. She kept saying "Oh don't worry, this isn't that fast, you'll only get a little dizzy." Sigh. I was never a rides person, but I'm glad she is so fearless.
So, that's about it for the day's highlights. It was a ton of fun to hang out with Chrissy and Rick, as I don't get to see them that often. And of course I adore Katie. There are more photos in the Flickr photoset--which cow costume would you have voted for?