Week 57 - Buses

The first county fair for Hannah continues this week with the cattle shows, and two livestock sales. Now that the weather is starting to cool off, we get to dress her up in fun little sweatshirts like the owl at right (I think it looks a bit more like a dinosaur...) Not many babies can say that they were already at 2 livestock shows before they were even 3 months old. But not many are progeny of these parents. A long time ago, people started calling us the "power couple" in the 4-H circles. I'm not so sure about that, nor do I think that A. B. Graham would approve of that designation for anyone. But I do think that 4-H will have a strong influence on our little girl's life, like it has for both of us. Heck, it's the whole reason my wife and I are even together or met each other in the first place. And I am grateful that I was led down this road to this lifestyle. I have lifelong friendships of depth and quality that some people will never experience in their lives.

My home base as a county fair photographer.

This week was also our baby's 3 month birthday!

This week was also Hannah's 3-month birthday. It is absolutely unbelievable to me that so much time has passed already; every day is such a treasure and I try not to think about how we will never get to rewind this experience. Instead, I focus on capturing the memories and holding on to them so I will remember in my older age when my wife and I are sitting out drinking tea on some porch. And she is growing so fast! Hannah was able to sit up (sort of) long enough to get the picture taken this time, and while we got lots of smiles and giggles out of her (she is always such a happy baby), I kind of like the serious picture for a change. She exhibits such diversity of emotion and personality for a baby that it surprises me often. We will need all of God's loving support - she is going to be a spunky child, just like her mother.

This week we dressed up to support MSU over those Irish.

A pretty good view of the game, so long as it was this side of the 50.

This weekend was my first and possibly only game at the Horseshoe. I wasn't going to go because it was essentially against a highschool team, but my wife insisted that we go and enjoy the good seats that my long years of strife in grad school has earned in credit hour rank. Plus, I had to go to work on campus anyhow with the fermenters running and me bound and desperate to wrap up this trial. So we went, visited with my wife's dad and sister, and had a nice brunch with them before going in to the game. There was a pretty good crowd turn out for the game, and a special halftime show recognizing our local school for the blind with a braille script march. Oh, and we dominated the competition - 'nough said. The Urban revolution has certainly been exciting. Let's just hope that we will still be rocking when we play real teams.

A few observations that I would like to make with pictures, but before you get a bad impression I want to be clear. I really enjoyed going to the game and the view was right down by the turf and personal. Plus, it's great to get out and enjoy a sporting event with my football-crazy wife. She sure does love her Buckeyes. And she knows far more than I ever could about the stadium, the band traditions, the "superfans" like Buck-I-Man/Guy (who is super obnoxious and entitled) and the rules and flow to the game itself.

Not sure who dressed the cheer team... but great view when the team was on our end.

And then there were the perv Indians in the row in front of us. Always standing to take pictures, shooting a hundred awkward photos of the cheerleaders in weird positions, and then spending lots of time looking at them on their phones.

More of the same. Dominative play, bad cheering, and a complete rout.

Tried to get a picture of the team scoring on our endzone. Instead you can see a ref getting run over near the 3 yd. line.

As we say in EL: "A BEAUTIFUL DAY FOR FOOTBALL!"

Not chronological, but the band entrance is always so impressive and exciting.

Favorite part of this spot. Singing the "Carmen Ohio" after a victory with my wife.

As the county fair wrapped up, I made the journey up to the dirt track with the family to celebrate what has become a sort of red neck/white trash tradition. And does it ever bring the best out of the locals! Schoolbus races basically work in a figure eight pattern and can be simply put as a race to get a set number of laps completed without wrecking your bus beyond repair. It's like the greatest game of "chicken" ever, with the big time consequences of flipping, rolling, burning, crunching or ejecting each time you come around and try to get past the other guys. And man does the crowd love some good old bus crunching. In the past couple of years, we have expanded entries to pickup trucks, and I capture a few videos of this to share with you. Just scroll through for the full experience.

You can see the buses skidding around the tractor tires. Earplugs optional.

This is one of the vans on my way out - all dinged up from being the skidder and skiddee.

You can see the guys scrambling round and round. And you thought NASCAR was redneck.

More of the same experience. Round and round she goes - when the truck blows, nobody knows. But we'll all wait around and see, just hoping. It just gets so much better when the rain starts drowning us and the trucks are sliding uncontrollably to where it's faster to drive in reverse once you're spun.

And all the meanwhile, these folks behind us are screaming and cheering like banshees on heroine. Let it never be said that they lack an enthusiasm for life. Just loving it.

Week 56 - Fairtime

It's a bit tough to see it in this picture on the right, but this is the first time that Hannah has petted Betsy without the poor, confused puppy shying away from her. Now, of course the little girl didn't know she had touched the dog, she just felt the change in texture behind her. And, of course, Betsy had no idea it was Hannah who was touching her head. She just was comfortable in her place between Mom and Dad, and didn't mind whatever was going on behind her. But with comfort and decreased fear will come a growing love for her new human.

Speaking of Betsy, it's been a while since I shared any fun nuggets of life from her end. She has been happily enjoying the changes that come along with fall. Pernicious squirrels, falling leaves, the last bullfrog hurrah, and pre-hibernation varmits obsessed with eating and unaware of her approach. And then there's the frisky sheep. For those of you non-oviners, most sheep come into breeding season in the fall with the shorter days and cooling weather, similar to deer. This leads to some antics on the part of the sheep that I will not elaborate, and a protective attitude of the sheep towards their family which Betsy finds immensely entertaining. She chases and barks, then runs away, then hops through the gate and circles around behind the boss ewe. Very funny to watch, if you're not a sheep.

Another habit we've picked up in the last few weeks has been the consumption of sheep feed. The video doesn't quite do Betsy's attraction for molasses and cereal grains justice, but it's the only one I've gotten so far.

The fermenters are once again back in full swing. Of course they had to die at the end of this week, but we will start up again next week. As mad as it makes me, it does give me the opportunity to spend a bit more time working with the family at the fair, which I am grateful for. My wife and I volunteer a lot at the fair and without the extra time, it would have been even harder to take care of Hannah amidst all the chaos. It's just frustrating that the fermenters have died so many times in a row - this one due to a blocked buffer drip which killed the buffer supply and allowed the pH to rapidly decline to ~5.4 from 6.4 in 1 hour. Very severe, and listed as DOA.

My wife teaching our 4-Her how to shear a sheep for show.

So the fair started informally on Friday of this week, when we brought in the market lamb that a 4-H member has been keeping at our house all this spring and summer. "Chester" looked pretty good in my opinion, a bit light on the weight for a fall show, but he was a good lamb with some natural muscle and good structure for moving about freely. More impressive was our 4-H'er's hard work and willingness to dive right in to things she was just learning about for the first time. This summer she learned to feed, water, catch, walk, shear, clip, fit and show. Not bad for a first-timer. She embodies what the 4-H experience is really all about, and even though she didn't win in the show on Sunday, she did get a 5th place in showmanship (a test of your ability to handle your lamb) and her great work ethic is enough to be proud of on its own.

Me with my "oversize load".

I had my own competitions to enter in, none of them having to do with the live stock side of the fair. Instead, I have been entering in the photo contest for about 8 years now, and this was also my second year in the gardening contests. I was shooting for tallest sunflower since I noticed them take off towards the sun back in June and thought I had a pretty competitive stalk. So I entered and waited for the day and then had the realization that there was not a snowball's chance in July of getting the darn thing up to the fairground unscathed. We didn't own a truck or trailer, and the rest of the family was far too busy to help. So I did what any other person would do - shoved it into my '99 Corolla. Toyota should use me as the next spokesperson for roominess. It wasn't pretty, but I did get the head down in the passenger side on the floor and then run the stalks out through the window. Sure, they bounced and waved a bit, and sure, I had to go in to work first like this, but American ingenuity and stick-to-it-ness triumphs again.

For all that work, I later found out that I was a good 5-6 feet shy of the tallest sunflowers, and dead last for the largest head. Must have been a good year for the pros. But there were a few small victories on the day. My habanero peppers won first place, and my heirloom oxhart tomatoes that I started on the front porch in April with free seeds from the county extension office ended up winning both first place and best in class for all tomatoes at the fair!

Photograph was also a success. Not just because the pictures did pretty well, but more importantly because we have settled into just taking pictures that we like for ourselves, and the judges have been in some agreement over the past few years. I will close the rest of the blog out with a few of the best pictures, showcasing the wonder of this great world we live in. If you want to see more of them, check out my photo album (my wife hasn't created one yet) on Picasaweb, and remember, I reserve all rights on these photos.

Tree frog outside our house.

Draft horse team at MSU's plow day.

Tiger at the Columbus Zoo.

My wife took this of Hannah and I at the zoo for our first time.

Week 55 - Sesquicentennial

For those people who know me very well, you should expect based on the title that this blog post will be about the Civil War. But for your sake, I will keep it short. I'm a publicly confessed history buff and I even used my electives in college to take history classes for the fun of it. Hell, if I'd have thought I could get a job with a B.A. in History, I probably would have done it. But I know that my love of the books and the pivotal moments in the course of time would have to take a sideshow to my desire to work, and so history and all it encompasses are just a piece of what makes me an interesting person instead of defining my whole life. Probably for the better because those people that are obsessed with history don't tend to make any lasting positive effect on the current global issues anyway. But I ramble...

This post will serve as the finale to our Labor Day weekend trip, especially since not much of substance has happened at work (just meeting to get parts fixed and ready to start experiments again) and we spent the latter half of the week just putting the house back in shape from the summer (task not yet completed).

Over the past couple of years and for the next couple of years, the historical societies all over the U.S. have been celebrating the sesquicentennial (150 years) of the American Civil War. It's hard for us to imagine a war that terrible happening in our country now, but states fighting each other for the right to control their own legislation instead of the feds is certainly not a stale topic. What is unbelievable to me is the absurd loss of life associated with the war, the dedication that these people had to the struggle, and the ends that we had to go to in order to end it. I won't go so far as to say that the war was about every man being treated right - that was what the 1960s were about (100 years later). No, many people were probably treated worse because of the end of slavery and the poor leadership in the years that followed Lincoln's assassination. But this was a huge turning point in our country as far as both slavery and federal government assertion, the lasting effects of which are prevalent today. And it's a shame that the South let fears about slavery ending get in the way, because that made it so much easier to brand them as the bad guys, even though I often think many of their views on states' rights would have been much more appealing to us today.

But enough debate, what is not debatable is the sacrifice of Americans for this cause, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. And the battlefield of Gettysburg is a great place to consider all of the turmoil, suffering, and sacrifice in preservation and definition of this great nation, and the ideals of democracy which survived the fires. I am so grateful to my wife for helping to make this side-trip to Gettysburg possible. She knew that I wanted to go, and we hadn't been able to because of the birth of our daughter and the busyness of my experiment. I was so happy we could make it. This is the first time I have not been sick or in a total rush when I have been there, and I just want to share a few pictures from that day.

This is the North Carolina monument, looking out towards the Union lines on day 3. T

A close-up of the North Carolina monument.

This is the view out across the area which became known as Pickett's Charge. It is incredible to think of people who had that much courage, to charge (walk) across a mile of open ground, into cannon and musket barrage, in the hopes that your near-certain death or manglement might bring about a better country for your children.

The Virginian demi-god, Robert E. Lee, atop the Virginia memorial. Lee gave everything he had in defense of his home.

Interesting...

Monument for some guys tucked way down in the slope on Little Round Top.

20th Maine Regiment memorial.

Maine "castle" on Little Round Top.

A view down across the battlefield from the height of the Little Round Top. Its prominence was a critical spot of conflict.

More view around from the top.

Well, after the long weekend, we finally had to come home - my least favorite part. The drive was hard, and devious through the hills and we were all pretty tired by the time we got back and found my car once again dead in the driveway. Battery replacement was something that must happen this week. And I took care of it the following day, thanks to the great guys at Advance Auto Parts. I was able to get a good, cheap battery, got some help putting it in (not that I couldn't, but 2 makes it faster) and was on the road to work as if it were any other late morning.

Our little girl was happy to be home again, too.

 The rest of the week flew by as we got into a 4 day work week and caught up around the house. Football was in full swing and we made it down over the weekend to see Mirror Lake, laugh at the similarities between baby Hannah's hair and the crazy fuzzy duck that is always there. Everywhere we go with her, she steals the show with her adorable face and her smiles and laughter. New skill for the week (besides the fact that she traveled awesomely) is that I have been training her to hold her own bottle. It's not that I'm in a huge rush for this, but it definitely helps when I'm trying to get a few things done on the computer as she takes her jolly good time to eat.

Notice the duck's hair.

Notice the baby's hair.

We closed off the week with a volleyball tournament to raise money for the hungry.

3rd place team! I guess I'm getting better over the years.