Any of you monkeys want a banana?

We're home from the fair now...8 whole days of non-stop fun. There were a few moments, such as yesterday morning when the water pressure dropped to somewhere in the neighborhood of 0 psi. It seems a water line had broken near the horse barns, and water had to be shut off for a while. A minor inconvenience in what was otherwise a pretty enjoyable week. A little rain, few biting insects, spending quality time with my guitar AND grandchildren. All in all, it's been a good week. Next weekend is the Wheatland Festival. Nathan and Alex will be there, as well as Alex parents. Milo (Alex's father) plays bass guitar in a band, so I expect he will have an instrument along. There's also an open mic session on Friday and Saturday night that I plan to try. Only two songs, though, so I would probably do "Warts and All" and "Shadows of the Past". It should be fun. It will certainly be the last blast of the summer, so let's make sure it's a good one!

Football is in full swing, with games every Friday for a while...ditto for basketball, except those are twice a week. Basketball season is a bit like track, except longer. We look forward to it, waiting excitedly for the season to start, and then before too long, wait excitedly for it to end. I love watching track; it's my favorite school sport. We've had some very good athletes in our family, with Rose's gene contribution being the primary reason for that (her father was an excellent runner). All my children have participated in track at Pickford. They've had varying levels of success, but all put in a great deal of effort and are better people for the experience. Veronica is the only girl that's stuck with basketball, and by the way things look, she will be a good addition to the team as she moves through high school. I have some film of her in the 5th grade, and even then could tell she would be a good basketball player. It remains to be seen how far she takes it.

The pig is gone now, sold at auction on Saturday. Ronnie received $2.60 a pound on the hoof, which is better than I thought she might get. It was my first time to the auction, and was interested in exactly how it worked. The auctioneer sat in a high chair and "sang" out the bid, and the bid spotters would shout out when a bid was placed. It seemed to work pretty well, except when the animals were a little balky. Laini asked me "Is that a song, Poppa?" when she heard the auctioneeer start the bidding. "Well, it's the auctioneer's song" was my response. She danced for a while and then we went for a walk to find Ronnie, who seemed a bit nervous about how it would go. I think she had visions of not getting a good price for her pig, but that went well. It's a great compliment to the local businesses in our area that they support the 4-H club auctions so generously. A cage of 3 or 4 chickens were selling for over $100, amazingly enough. The Grand Champion steer Was over $3.00 a pound, (all 1200 pounds of him) and the reserve Grand Champion was almost $4.00 a pound (1400 lbs). That's a lot of money! But, it's all for the kids, right?

Work on the site has dropped off a bit, what with all the other stuff going on in the last month. I added a thumbnail slide show to the home page, and got the calendar working again. Next project is to get some new pictures in the album. I have quite a few that Neal has sent, and more that I've taken. I'll be sure to work on that, I promise. I plan to get the "sort by date" option working again, which died when the site was migrated to a new server. It's an interesting technique, and perhaps when it's working again I'll write an article about how it works.