The fair

Joe told me I have to explain the raw fish comment. We have a strong belief that small business owners, especially ones trying to bring a bit of culture to our white trash small town, should be supported. Even if it’s not really our thing. So a new Japanese restaurant opened recently, and Joe took me to lunch, even though I don’t like fish. Joe had teriyaki beef sushi with eel sauce. I had a Hawaiian sushi roll with tuna, avocado, and mango. The bad news is that I didn’t like it. But the good news is that it wasn’t the raw fish. The real fishy flavor was not the tuna; it was the seaweed paper it was rolled in. So the moral of the story is that if you don’t like seafood, but want to support your local sushi restaurant, ask specifically for it to be wrapped in soy paper (which is mostly tasteless) instead of the seaweed.

The fair was this week, so we spent a few days down there looking at all the exhibits. Some were pretty impressive, but there were a lot that we thought, “Wow, I could do a lot better than that.” I took the kids to the Carnival on Tuesday. AJ is finally tall enough to ride the big kid rides. He and his cousin, Andrew, honestly rode rides as fast as they could until they were ill. It was pretty funny. They both had looks of terror on their faces and held on for dear life the whole ride and then got off and told me how AWESOME it was! Poor Natalie was too short to ride most of the rides by herself, but I think she had fun anyway. Liz snuck on the roller coaster without a ticket, so Natalie could ride on it.











Joe and his coworkers decided to turn Ben’s old Cutlass into a demolition derby car. Here, they don’t just crash into each other until only one car is left standing. They do full-contact racing and such. They made their derby debut on Wednesday night. And the car actually won its heat! In another round, it was doing pretty well until it blew a tire. The car is still running and is really not too much worse for the wear.


Friday night, Joe and I took the kids and just walked around the fair. Oh, and we ate our obligatory Space Burgers. It’s apparently a big deal around here to get hamburger pressed into a circular disk by a sandwich-press. But they are the cheapest thing to eat at the fair.

Sunday, we had dinner over at Joe’s parents’ house to celebrate his nephew’s 20th birthday. All kinds of fun!

We met with AJ’s new principal at Garden Heights this morning. She and the special services people seem very on top of things. We’re very excited to work with them. AJ’s even really excited to go back to school. Especially since he won’t be spending 2 hours on a bus every day.