Every year we say we are going to go to the fair and see the bullriding competition. This year we finally made it. We went early, visited our friends who were showing their llamas in open class, had a look at the goats, sheep, chickens, rabbits and cows, looked at the exhibits in the fiber sections, avoided a clown, ate deep fried dinner while watching teen-age boys showing off to teenage girls by doing back-flips off of a garbage can, and finally settled down at the grandstand with some roasted cashews and a bag of carmel corn to watch the big event…

When the ambulance showed up, and parked with it’s doors open and ready, we knew we were in for a show!

The bulls are HUGE, and some of them are quite angry! Even after they had disposed of their rider they ran around looking for someone else to rough up – maybe a clown or one of the ropers in the ring. It was great watching the guys scurry up onto the fence as the bulls came by looking for someone to ‘hook up’ with 🙂

As the evening wore on it got dark, and the lights from the midway were beautiful. The weather was perfect and despite the clouds it was a warm summer night.

Afterwards we walked the midway and enjoyed the whirling lights and watched the people staggering off of the rides. There is a ride called the slingshot that shoots people on a bungie cord high into the air – like ten stories or something – it’s insane!

And there are the regular tame rides like the giant ferris wheel. I’d love to see how they set it up and take it down. It doesn’t seem possible that in a week this will be a big empty parking lot for another year. I’m glad we took the time to go enjoy the fair(usually I just do the 4H stuff and go home) we had a great time!

We brought home a deck of cards from our trip to Vegas a year or so ago, and left them on the table in the front room where Barclay discovered then. Once he’d devoured one card, the deck was ruined, so there was nothing to do but leave them there, and he regularly steals another one to chew up, or he’ll fetch one so he has something in his mouth to greet us at the door when we come home.

Oh, a 2, you’ll never win with that one…

Happy boy!

Are these Noctilucent clouds?

I’ve read about these clouds several times in the astronomy related newsletters I subscribe to, and I think this evening we got a rare showing of them! I walked outside to play with the dogs and I looked out at the sunset and saw these beautiful, whispy, ice-blue clouds in the East.

Sunset was already pretty much over and the stars were already out in force, yet these clouds were brightly lit. Whatever they were, they were beautiful, with incredible texture. I wish I had had a tripod handy (and my old camera) so I could have gotten a longer exposure. As it was I tried some different setting on my little point & shoot to try and capture these strange night-time clouds.

Last night I stepped out the back door after dusk to do something, I don’t remember what, and I was surprised when a big bird flew out of the cherry tree, which is about 30ft off the back deck. I immediately recognized it as an owl because it was BIG, much bigger than the crows who usually hang out there, and it made no noise flying. It flew across the backyard and landed in one of the fir trees along our back property line. These are young fir trees, maybe only 20ft tall, so they barely held his weight. I got a good look at his sillouette against the darkening sky. Then I looked down and noticed Mouse was stalking towards him! What an idiot! Not only was he 20ft up in a tree, but he was bigger than she is! He decided he was getting too much attention and took off and silently flapped across the pasture and dissapeared into the darkness. We have seen a few owls, and occasionally heard them, but this was the most interesting encounter yet!

Big Red, seen here with one of her chicks this spring, has disappeared. I last saw her on the 5th I think, she showed up in the afternoon when I put some scratch out for everyone. But I haven’t seen her since then. She is one of my ‘wandering’ chickens, who knows how to get out of the orchard and wander around the yard. Egg production has been down for a few weeks so I suspected someone was not laying their eggs in the henhouse to be picked up. Now I’m pretty sure it was her. So unless she wandered over to the neighbors and got eaten by their dog, or got picked up by a hawk, she is probably hunkered down over a hidden clutch of eggs somewhere. I guess if she shows back up at the end of the month with chicks we’ll know for sure!

Wednesday night I was sick as a dog for no particular reason. Dave and I pretty much ate the same things yesterday, with just a couple exceptions. He was fine, but I sure got it. It felt like a big hand grabbed me in the middle and squeezed, I got cramps, and all sorts of other unpleasant things happened. I have not been that sick since I was a little kid! And of course today I am just sore all over. Bleech!

Update on Saturday: Thanx for the concern. All better now, but I still don’t know what caused it. I suspect some oranges I bought, as I ate one without washing it. I thought that would be ok, because you don’t eat the peel, but if it had anything on the outside it would have got on my hands and on the part I ate. I juiced a couple yesterday morning and they had a funny chemical taste, so I threw them away. I have a feeling there was something wrong with that batch.

Yesterday was hot and the air was still. As I was driving home I passed a big meadow along the road, full of dry, yellow grass and ringed with fir trees at the far edge. My eye was caught by a glimpse of something brown against the dark green trees: a large hawk, floating lazily over the field in big swooping circles. As I got closer I realized there was a boy at the edge of the field, clearing weeds along the road. He had a wheelbarrow full of weeds he’d already cut down, and was taking a break, leaning on the handle of his pitchfork with his hat tipped back, also watching the hawk.

Scenes like this are one reason I love living out in the country.

Another beautiful sunny weekend (our weekend is mid-week) when we should be out camping and hiking, working on the boat, fishing, or doing other fun stuff, and instead we are weed-whacking, cutting down blackberry vines, mowing, and digging up our patch of invasive bamboo. And repairing that damned rider mower again!

We have been talking lately about getting a smaller place where we don’t have three acres to maintain. I’m ready to go now!

A few years ago I was into Geocaching, the online GPS treasure hunt game. I would still be if my GPS hadn’t become outdated. I’ll get a new one someday and do it again. One of the fun side games is Travel Bugs. Travel Bugs are things you put in the cache with a special number/tag on them, and you usually give them a goal, and they get picked up and passed along, and logged along the way, and it’s fun to see where they go. I’ve done four of them.

Sharky was a stuffed shark. I think I found him in a cache, and thought it was hilarious. After he hung around a while I decided to send him travelling. In April 2002 I put a tag on him and sent him on his way.

My goal was to send him from the NW, all the way to my friend Heather and her son Brandon in Godfrey Illinois. They were finding Geocaches out their way, so we picked a cache they knew they could find in a hurry when he showed up, and made that his goal. We dropped him off in Washougal, WA, as I recall. As you can see from the map above, sending something by Geocache is not exactly the most direct way of getting something from point A to point B.

Along the way people posted pictures of his adventures:

He hung out poolside at some resort on the east coast.

And someone took him to a petshop to visit the other sharks!

A year and a half later, in October 2003 he landed in the Piasa Bird cache near Alton, IL (the the Piasa bird is an interesting story in itself if you google it). Heather and Brandon went and picked him up and took him home. What a fun little adventure we had! Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the other Travel Bugs who didn’t have quite as successful a journey 🙂

Copper had to go back out with his siblings. Barclay just couldn’t handle a chicken in the house, and I couldn’t handle puttng up with him (Barclay) for more than one day!