The Boys of Summer

Dear Jenny,
Thanks for letting your boys come for a visit this weekend.

Remember the last time they came to Burley? Bentley was so little, Max was learning to talk (and to moo), and Jonah's bones were still in that squishy, gelatinous stage.

Remember the last time they toured Becky's dairy? Well, they found it even more impressive this time around. Bentley used his fingers to flash the peace sign instead of plugging his nose.

Apparently, wearing a cowboy hat makes you immune to the smell of cow poop.

Jonah still spent a good deal of time with his finger up his nose, but I don't think that was smell related.

I think you will be happy to know that we took good care of your sons. We didn't put them in any dangerous situations. We certainly didn't let their three and two year old cousins take them on an unsupervised tour of the dairy.

When we took them to the fair for lunch, we made sure that they only tried the most nourishing dishes.

And we most certainly didn't let them go on any of those rides that you hate.

You know, the rides that you think are so deadly dangerous? The rides that make me sick just to look at their horrible spinning? The rides that are up so high your fearful-of-heights-mother

starts sobbing at the sight of? Yeah. We didn't let them go on any of those. And no little roller coasters either.

Instead, we took them to the educational exhibits and made sure they stayed hydrated with all sorts of vitamin filled heath drinks.

I'm sure that you will be pleased to know that we didn't spend their designated rest time engaged in any dangerous activities, the kind of activities that might require the services of a professional life-saver, for example. No sir-ee. None of that stuff for us. I mean, what kind of babysitters would we be if we... I don't know... maybe allowed one of your sons to be frequently tossed through the air at high speeds? We would never do anything that reckless. Especially not over and over again.

But if we had taken them swimming in a pool where there was no lifeguard on duty, we might have been a little confused by Maxwell's conflicting personalities. One minute he would be helping Jonah get to the side when his little bro had gotten in over his head...

... and the next he would be doing his best to drown his other brother. You might want to have the school counselor visit with him next week.

And while you are at it, you might want to make an appointment for Jonah too. The only thing he enjoyed more than cuddling with Dam-ma was watching Max try to wrestle Bent into a watery grave. If we would have taken them swimming, that is.
You should be happy to know that we made sure to avoid doing anything that might feed their newly acquired Hero Clix addiction. We most certainly didn't let Warren hook them up with a billion new game thingys. No enablers here.

When we went back to the fair that night, we didn't even consider taking your beautiful, cultured young gentlemen into those animal barns that you have issues with.

They didn't get close to any animals that were big enough to peck them, bite them, or kick them in the head.

We made darn sure that we didn't do anything that would encourage Bentley's fascination with the professional music business. We only let him stop and stare admiringly at drummers for 45 minutes each day. And when he said they were awesome, we didn't verbally agree with him.

We did take the boys to the rodeo, but they were too busy eating popcorn and cotton candy to feel any distress about possible animal cruelty. They weren't even distressed about wearing the bandannas for tough enough to wear pink night.

The only thing that did seem to distress them was the deep fried oreos. They apparently need a little more junk food experience before attempting to tackle something that advanced.

They liked to press the fence during the bronc riding and steer wrestling. They really loved it when the action got up close and personal. Jonah ended up with a face full of dirt after a particularly buckish bronc came by, but 45 seconds on Grandma's lap and a bag of purple cotton candy made it all better.

I think that you will be happy to hear that, out of all of the animal-related experiences they had over the last two days, one of their favorites was walking their beloved bat-eared-rat-dog. But don't worry about them rewriting "Smoke on the Water" lyrics to sound something like "Chloe the rat dog... peed on her walk". I would never have allowed or encouraged such a thing.

So, dearest older sister, I think we can all agree that this little outing was a success. So much, in fact, that Ruby should be able to join us for next year's fair and rodeo. Thanks again for letting us borrow them for 32 hours.

Love, Me

P.S. If they do happen to start singing about canine urinary functions, I would appreciate it if you would assume they made up the song in their primary class. Thanks!

Fair Play

Well... fair week has come and gone, leaving behind a bunch of tired but happy country folks in its wake.

But I couldn't let the past week pass on without extolling the many virtues of our cute little county fair just one more time.


One of my favorite parts of fair week is getting so see the various and sundry 4-H projects that my former and current kidlets worked so hard on. From giant sugar beets, to hand sewn clothing, to baked goods, to heifers, to pigs, to tractor maintenance, I am constantly amazed at their skills and talents.


And it would be near blasphemous to write a post about the fair without mentioning all of the delicious fair food. Corn dogs, cheeseburgers, corn on the cob, scones, funnel cakes, and the all-important maple bars taste better during fair week than during any other time of the year.

One of my other favorite aspects of the "county fair experience" is that no matter when you go, you always end up seeing 75 to 80% of all of the people you have ever met in your life. They are working in booths or showing animals or just walking around enjoying the unique ambiance created by dirt, manure, and fried food residue. Everywhere you look, friends and neighbors are visiting and getting caught up on everything that has happened in each other's lives since last year's fair.

Lets see... 4-H, fair food, long-lost friends... it feels like I have forgotten to mention something.

Oh, wait.

There is also that little rodeo thingy going on that week.

I guess I should probably mention that too, not that I am all that in to that sort of thing.

Cowboys. Sigh. Real ones. Double Sigh.

And now that the carnival rides have been hauled away, the stables mucked out, the 4-H pigs baconized, and the food booths boarded up, the time has come for me to think back on all of the many wonderful fair and/or manure related experiences of the past week and select my favorite; the memory that I will carry with me until next year's fair week rolls around.

Huuuummmmmm..... I wonder what it will be.....

Drum roll please......

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.....

.....

.....

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.....

.....

Kylie spray painting her heifer!

Where would someone come up with the idea to spruce up their showcow, preshow with a can of black spray paint? Only in a town where people of different religious beliefs, political persuasions, and socioeconomic backgrounds are all united in heart and spirit once a year in betting on GPS-tracked horse poop.

Have I mentioned lately that I love it here? Cuase I do.

Thank goodness fair week '10 is only 257 days away.

I can't wait!

Road Apple Roulette

Yesterday was one of my most favorite days of the entire year: Fair Parade Day.


I love the fair parade for several reasons.



It is always a blast to see my former and current kidlets strutin' their stuff as cheerleaders, marching band members, junior miss royalty, and giant dancing vegetables. I was especially proud of this year's dancing taco. See Jalena, I told you that the skills you learned in 8th grade commications class would take you far in life!

The parade is also a time to star-gaze at our local celebrities, like my friend and fellow brancher Jill who waved at her adoring fans from her seat on the cosmetology school float. Elizabeth and Chloe were also on hand to sign autographs, but poor Jessica and Allison spent most of there time trying to avoid the pesky paparazzi.

Of course, the parade itself was pretty cool too.

Some of the floats were fun...

Others were informative...

And one of my favorites was built by loving hands to promote a very worthy cause .

The parade is such a big deal round these parts that the roving concession and souvenir folks even show up. During the course of the parade you could purchase bottled water, soda pop, goofy hats, flags, and.....rabbits.

Never seen a rabbit concession at a parade before? Then you are missing out, my friend. Them rabbits is good eatin'.

Aside from the soon-to-be-bbq-ed rabbits, everyone who attended the parade had a grand old time. Except for this little piggy, who got all dressed up in his fancy hat to show the 4-H kids what is going to happen to their project pigs after the auction on Saturday.

But the highlight of the parade was the many, many horses that participated. The town's equestrian residents played a vital role in the 4-H fund raiser... Road Apple Roulette.

What was that?

You've never heard of road apple roulette before?

Let me explain...

No, wait.

I think I should let our local newspaper explain. Here is an excerpt from last week's paper:

Road apple roulette comes to Burley
By Damon Hunzeker
Times-News writer
BURLEY - The roads of Burley will soon be riddled with manure. The second annual Road Apple Roulette, a fundraiser by the Burley Rotary Club, will be held during the Cassia County Fair parade. The event is kind of like gambling - but with horse droppings, thus the euphemism "road apple."

Rotarians will map out the parade route by GPS into 10,600, 6-foot-by-6-foot squares. Tickets representing the squares are available for $5 or five for $20 at local Mr. Gas stores, as well as a booth outside Wal-Mart. If a horse drops in your square, you win a prize.

Efforts have been taken to prevent rigging the game by people who understand the rudiments of equestrian defecation.

I'm sorry, but I loved that last sentence so much that I just have to put it in again...Efforts have been taken to prevent rigging the game by people who understand the rudiments of equestrian defecation.

Why have those efforts been taken, you ask? Well.... "You can't pick the square. They're randomly selected by a computer," Paul Lyons, the current Rotary president said. "We thought of doing it the other way, but the horse people tell us it happens when the horses get nervous or when they're tired at the end." The "horse people," he said, could purchase tickets that represent squares at the end of the route or, worse, somehow make the horses nervous when they approach certain squares.

Really.


So this is how it works.

The horses walk the parade route and....well....poop along the way. A group of dedicated people then walk behind the horses spray painting circles around the poop piles so that the poop can then be removed from the street.
Then come the gentlemen with the GPS gear who record the exact latitude and longitude of each circle so that the head honchos can determine who ended up with winning squares.

I didn't buy a square during last years parade, and ended up kicking myself every time I drove down overland and saw the lingering remnants of the spray painted poop circles (they were visible until February or so). So this year I was determined to get in on the fun. I bought one square for myself and one for my dad, who has always been a fan of anything as inappropriate as betting on poop.

The winners will be announced during the first round of rodeo action tonight. But as much as I would enjoying winning, I almost hope I don't. Loosing at an event such as this would open the door for a plethora of puns... none of which I could post on this blog or share with decent, upstanding citizens...

...but they will make for one heck of a fun phone call to my dad later on!

Rodeos and/or Rubies

I don't live all that far from my folks. I am just a mere 1 and 3/4 hour drive away from my childhood home. A home that I try to visit often, especially in the summer. My parents and youngest brother, on the other hand, find it harder to get away from work and church responsibilities, so they only make it to my little town for visits a few times a year. For the last three years, one of those visits has been to attend my county's fair and attend the rodeo. My mom calls the quick 24-hour trip her official "summer vacation".
My sister (whose family has only visited me here once, although her little boys still ask me why my town smells like cow poop) recently went to visit her fabulous husbands family in California. I mention their trip in order to point out a fun contrast between the locations of my sister's summer vacation and my mother's: Here is one of the trolleys my sister's family rode around on their trip to Disneyland (her three boys are in red)... ...and here is the courtesy trolley at our fair (yes, it is a tractor pulling benches with wheels). That really doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the post. I just wanted to point out the differences in lifestyle.
This post is really about the rodeo. My parents, youngest brother Greg, and I went Friday night which was also "Tough Enough to Wear Pink" night. Everyone got into the spirit of the theme...including the 4-H pigs.
Speaking of 4-H, I ran into my friend Melissa who had spent most of the week helping with her sibling's 4-H steers. Melissa is an Ag-Business Major and a genius at all things farm and music related.

We also saw my friend Danielle, our county rodeo queen. She was kind enough to take some time out of her busy pre-rodeo schedule to take another photo with Greg.

I had never been to a rodeo before I moved to my cute little cow town. I went with my brother and his wife's family the first year I moved here and fell in love the whole rodeo experience...especially the Wranger part of that experience. My parents claim that they always WANTED to take my siblings to a rodeo, but couldn't because of my older sister's strong objections to a sport she considers to be near-criminal animal cruelty. Which brings us to yet another contrast...or shall we say "inconsistency". Please remember that my sister, let's call her "Jenny" (because that's her name) objects to rodeos on the basis that they are built on the principal of people having fun watching lesser creatures suffer. Got that? Ok. Now meet my sister's current youngest child. Let's call her Ruby. Cute, isn't she? And sort of fuzzy. And makes strange little noises instead of talking. She has to be fed and cleaned. Does any of this sound familiar? Especially to any of you former 4-H-er's? Well Ruby is also scared of things...many things...most things...things as unscary as cheese can send her into fits of terror. Now, I realize that her mother can't protect Ruby from every scary thing in life (like going through the car wash as in the photo below), but please notice that before comforting the panic-stricken toddler Jenny reached for her camera to capture the moment for her blog. A blog that people read for entertainment. Do you see where I'm going with this?
So Jenny has problems with this (the tied-up cow part, not that cowboy in blue jeans part. Jenny is as pro-boys-in-blue-jeans as any other red blooded American woman, she just prefers it when the person wearing those blue jeans is is eating tofu burgers or vegetarian lasagna) ...


...but she doesn't have a problem with this...putting her 18 month old on a Disney ride that is even scarier than the car wash, then having an accomplice snap photos for a future blog post (A wonderful future blog post, by the way. Really Jenny, it was one of your top ten).

One more time, just as a review:

According to Jenny, THIS is bad...

...but THIS is fine. Hummmmm..... does it make me a super bad person if I admit that I enjoy both? If I had a slide show screen saver made up of photos of both rodeo guys and photos of Ruby screaming in terror I might never turn my computer off.
Maybe someday Jenny will rethink her anti-rodeo stance and bring her kids up to the fair and rodeo to hang out with the "barbarians" in the family. Of course, she would also have to rethink her policy of feeding her kids tofu corn dogs. Things like that can get a mother locked up for child cruelty around these parts.

Oh, and if any of you were wondering why Greg isn't in the family photo below, it was because he was busy. You see, Greg found the new love of his life last night at the fair. No! Not Danielle! She's taken and her cowboy boyfriend could totally take Greg (sure, Greg's 6'2'', but he's a lover, not a fighter) . Greg is now in a committed relationship with the Fair's famous Maple Bars. And dagnabit, if a love like that is wrong, Greg doesn't want to be right.