State Fair

I'm wondering: am I too old to join 4-H?

We went to the State Fair Sunday.  I'd never been before, and I loved every corn-dog-and-cow-manure- scented minute of it.... especially the animal barns. 

Just look at these faces.

                                                     So pink and squeaky.

I wanted to lay down in the straw
with this little guy.

Day-old  twin lambs with their mama!

(The other one ignored me when I asked him nicely
 to get in the picture).
 I could just hug the stuffin' out of them.

We have chickens at home, but none this lovely.

 I could stand for an hour admiring the pattern God painted on this hen's feathers...

                                 ... and the texture of these. 

So soft! I poked my fingers through the bars to touch until

 her next-door neighbor gave me
The Evil Eye:

We wandered happily around the midway twice to look at the rides. Tony can't ride the ones that go 'round and 'round like the Tilt-A-Whirl (He calls it the Hurl-A-Whirl) and I can't handle the ones that leave you dangling in the air, like the Ferris Wheel.  Against my better judgment, I reluctantly agreed to ride the Sky Tram across the park and at the end, Tony had to use his pocketknife to pry my deathgrip-hands

 off the safety bars....it was a trauma.

I did want to get zipped into one of these waterballs -- doesn't it look FUN? -- but for some reason, it's just for folks under a certain weight limit.(I'm not telling what that limit was and how far off I was from qualifying, but even if I hadn't inhaled so much cotton candy, I wasn't remotely close.)

I believe I may change careers and become a carnival barker. The folks running this booth

were raking in the cash hand-over-fist.  But who WOULDN't love

a giant yellow banana-with-dreadlocks pillow?

We ate snowcones and admired prize-winning pickles and a prom dress made out of duct tape

 and saw a  horse named Tony at the pony rides.

We thought he looked tired and depressed.  Human Tony was kind of bummed about Tony the Pony ....

...but he cheered right up when he saw this humongous toilet in a display outhouse.

I didn't eat anything deep-fried and I didn't win the big banana pillow (although we tried!)

and my pig of choice  didn't win the pig races, 

but there's always next year.  We're going again.  

 But I'm not riding the sky tram.