I Love the Midway

You can buy the coolest stuff on the midway at the Washington County Fair.  Take this chimp salt and pepper set.  Please.

I preferred the rattlesnake. This would be a good gift for someone who has to limit his sodium intake.

I'm suffering a little non-buyer's remorse here. But I was in Look mode, not Buy mode.  Dang!! That's pretty awesome.  Ssssss!

This guy was carving a bear holding a Welcome sign. I got the feeling he had carved a few thousand of those bears. 

Watch those Bloomin' Onions, hon. They'll gitcha. I oughta know.

I was glad to see my friend Lard in a jar. I use a lot of lard in the winter for my Zick Dough.  Remember the baby turkey chicks we found wandering lost in our yard? The family who canned this lard is the one that took the chicks and successfully raised them with a bronze heirloom hen. I usually recognize most of the names on the tags at the Washington County Fair. They're my kind of folks.

There was much more to see on the midway, which will come in later posts, but we needed to find some crafts and flower arrangements.

I always look for the snake gourd arrangement. This one reminds me of a ruddy duck. 

I also like to look for the flower arrangement in the collection that seems to have the least to do with flowers. This one will do nicely.

And then there are the hapless scarecrows. This lady, with hair of real metal shavings from a lathe, is by far my favorite ever. But I find a new favorite every year. I really like that dress!

Her pals were pretty keen, too.

So Shila and I are hearing all this stuff about swine flu being passed around at Ohio county fairs. And before we go we make a pact with each other not to hang out around any hogs. 

So we shoot quickly and go at the spotted Poland China babies, who were fighting savagely over teat rights. I would not want a pig mad at me, not even a baby Poland China.

And then while I'm absorbed in photographing the guy carving a bear with a torch Shila comes hurrying over saying, "Julie. There's something here you have to see."

Indeed. A woman with a pig clamped between her thighs. I do need to see that.

It's a five-pound "teacup" Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, 11 months old. Named Lucy. This lady runs a concession called "Chase's Racing Pigs." It's a hand-built self-contained course of obstacles and water hazards.  She and her husband are carpenters by trade, doing kitchen renovations in the off season when they aren't going fair to fair. And little pigs run around the course while people root for them for a small fee.  Lucy is the mascot, her owner explained, because she "isn't right. She's underweight and she has respiratory problems, I know that for a fact, because you can hear her breathing."

Oh.

Kisses, anyone?