The thing we had to get to the Saturday after ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger got back home? The Calhoun County Fair. She hasn't missed going in ages. But she hadn't put any photos into competition this year, as our original plan to be away for my family's thing and then her brother's wedding would have left us unable to get there the day they took entrants. (bunnyhugger floated the idea of her parents dropping off a set of photographs but they were anxious about whether they could find the buildings and fill out the cards and all.) And between the travel and Roger's illness and the lack of show entries, and pinball league Wednesday and reading group Thursday and evening rains on Friday, we just forgot about the fair. bunnyhugger remembered only because of an ancient calendar notification that the next day she'd need to pick up her photos.
We decided to go anyway, figuring that three hours at the fair was better than none. This left us with a hurried visit, one where we didn't even get to see all the animal exhibitions. But we got to the ones most urgent to us --- the chickens and turkeys and the many Californian rabbits. Also a couple other rabbits, one of whom had very well chewed up their ribbon for being a good roaster. Also two guinea pigs who, as ever, looked like they weren't sure why they were in this meeting.
The photo gallery was, as usual for Calhoun, threatening to overflow and consume the whole exhibition hall. The winning photographs for various categories all looked like reasonable choices, nothing that seemed like a clear miscarriage of justice. But one of the organizers for the photo exhibition talked with us about the tale of woe they'd had trying to organize it this year. Particularly one of their key people resigned just two weeks or so before the event started, and another had ... I forget if it was a heart attack or a stroke but something serious of that magnitude, that knocks you out of the project. And their spouse had to bow out because of dealing with that. We were shocked to have all that going on all at once against them; made it the more amazing they got it all together and, far as we could tell, in good order.
A small shocker in the rides section: the zipper wasn't there! bunnyhugger takes a picture of its complicated blend of vertical and rotational and linear movements every year for Summer Fun or Last Year's Fair categories. We don't know why it didn't get in but this is going to really tax our feeling that we should ride one at least once. Its movement, in a small cage cabin that's often rotated upside-down, is a challenging one.
We got only a couple tickets, just enough for a few rides like on their Scrambler-like ride or the Merry-Go-Round. (They still have the one that does five rotations per minute, the speed where a carousel starts to get thrilling.) But this would be all we could use: about fifteen minutes before the scheduled end of the night a light mist turned into a serious rain and into an outright heavy rain that had us wishing we had umbrellas. We dodged our way to an elephant ear stand as the very close of the night was wiped out, and we ordered three, figuring to share one and bring the other two to bunnyhugger's parents. They gave us four, something we kind of hoped they might do with it being the end of the last night of the fair, but we didn't figure we should count on. By the time we got the elephant ears the rain had let up enough we could get back to the car, and to bunnyhugger's parents, where we spent two hours or so describing the fair and letting her talk about the trip to her brother.
And that made the close of the 2024 Fair season, as we would know it.
Going to take in a couple more holiday-themed trees decorated at the Potter Park Zoo Wonderland of Lights last year.
Kwanzaa gets a respectable-looking showing here.
All right, Three Kings Day is certainly a thing that we learned in Mexico City is a much bigger thing in Mexico City.
Chinese New Year seems to start earlier every year, doesn't it?
Oh, yes, Bodhi Day is certainly one I ... don't remember hearing about before.
Wikipedia tells me Las Posadas is ``celebrated chiefly in Latin America, El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and by Latin Americans in the United States'', because Wikipedia can only edit by shoving more words into a sentence.
Finally Yule gets some appreciation this December season of decorating trees.
Trivia: Belgian miners would, until after 1900, still take time off at the right season to look after their potato patches. If necessary, this would be done by an annual ``potato strike''. Source: The Age of Capital, 1848 - 1875, Eric Hobsbawm.
Currently Reading: His Majesty's Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine, S C Gwynne.
