A day at the fair...

I recently had a great day bonding with my daughter. We went to the state fair, something we always did as a family, so I was glad she still wanted to go when it was just she and I. I like all the diverse things the fair has to offer, farm animals, flowers, vegetables, fine arts, photography, arts and crafts, vendors selling crazy thing you know nobody really needs. We saw it all... except the giant pumpkins... they moved then this year, and we never found them. Darn.

I'm always fascinated by how they treat the "arts". Quilts and needle work are with the baked goods in the "home arts" building. Paintings and bronzes are the "fine arts". Photography has it's own exhibit, and then there's the "creative arts" which encompasses everything else. This is my favorite exhibit, because it is so absurdly diverse, and such a prime example of the art vs craft argument. Things like stained glass, pottery, woodworking, and jewelry making which can be pretty darn fine art, are displayed right alongside kids diaramas, silk flower arrangements and plastic canvas needlework. Art and kitsch all lumped together,it's kind of sad in a way. This years plastic canvas showpiece was a huge castle sized for Barbie dolls, complete with opulent room fulls of plastic canvas doll furniture. All under glass like fine art.

We checked out all the animals. I love the bunnies, and this year Sarah was in to the cows. Maybe she's her grandfathers girl. He studied animal hubandry, ans worked in the beef industry (If you shopped at Kroger in the '70s and '80s he bought your beef). While other kids dads may have had bowling or golf trophies, my dad had dresser full of cow trophies. Maybe Sarah gets her cow love from him. The cows seemed to love her too, they could probably tell she's a vegetarian! (So maybe she's not that much like PopPop)

And last but not least there were the rides! I have to admit that at first I didn't want to spend the $20+ each to get ride passes, then Sarah pointed out that next year she would be at college so this may be our last fair together. So ride passes it was and ride we did. We rode most everything, to the point we were both a little sick. We rode the most wild one: two arms with cages on the ends that flip you upside down both backward and forwards as the arms spin around. As we aproached the on ramp I had to remind Sarah - "You realize that some high school drop out, with missing teeth, who got drunk last night, put this ride together", but it didn't stop her from wanting to ride. We tossed forward and backwards and spun upside down and just laughed and laughed. The highlight of course was the tilt-a-whirl... We've always been tilt-a-whirl gals. I think we rode 7 times, 5 of them back to back rides! I don't know if the smiling carnie was more amused by how we'd run down the exit ramp then get right back on, or amused that 48 year old woman was racing on and off the ride. A good time was had by all!

I'm back... I hope

The other day I came home from work and this is how I found my two favorite critters, Daisy and Oreo. Kind of begs the question "What were they doing all day that seem so very worn out?" I certainly don't have any idea!

I can kind of relate to how they appear to be feeling... I have not been feeling at all ambitious since returning from my vacation. I've also been plagued by computer problems... My poor laptop had been acting squirrely for a while, squirrely enough that I wrote all my files and pictures to Cd's at the end of July. Not sure what the problem is... a recalcitrant virus that I can't find and conquer?, a badly bogged down windows OS?, some fried hardware, possibly due to a frayed power cord not replaced soon enough? It finally became a terminal issue, a computer booting to the "blue screen of death", regardless of safe mode or any other trick I could think of. I decided to bite the bullet and and restore my computer back to factory condition. I figured if I had a virus problem or OS problem this should fix it. So after using the Thinkpad recovery program to backdoor my way to hard drive to back up any remaining files I hit the magic nuke and rebuild button.

All good so far, until I realized I couldn't connect to my wireless nework, which had been set up by a now exhusband who apparently never wrote down the passwords. After hours of fretting and being sure I'd never get back on the internet again, I finally got brave and hit the reset button on the router. It's amazing what a big problem your mind can make of something that you don't know how to fix. By some miracle I managed to get everything back up and working and connected in just a few minutes... I guess I didn't need to torture myself with worry after all.

But sadly, after all that and reinstalling some programs, the squirrely problems are back. Some times the computer will work fine for an hour other times it bluescreens every five minutes. The probability of a crash is correlated with how much you have done since your last save: the more you've typed the more apt the computer is to crash before you hit the save button or send the email.

And if that's not bad enough I also had 3 computers terminally crash at work this month...a mother board, a hard disk controller, a power supply. Just try finding parts for a 15 year old computer that runs old but important equipment! UGH! I'm getting kind of sick of computer hell!!! And now I guess I should be thinking about replacing my laptop... double ugh! Can someone please send some good computer karma my way!