and it's lucrative too!

Much to our pleasant surprise, our ribbons garnered a total of $78 for us! Wooohooo!

Ribbon Whores

It's official...we have become the County Fair "ribbon whores" that Garrison Keillor makes jokes about on PHC. We knew it was getting bad last summer when we were scrounging around trying to just think of things to enter, but this year I probably crossed a line of sorts in my quest for ribbon domination.

So here's this year's tally: The Reenactor got a PURPLE ribbon (grand prize!) for his bread and butter pickles, which he honestly had forgotten he had even canned last summer. For the record, we cracked open a jar last night and they are DEE-lishus! Apparently the extension homemakers found merit in them too, because they won the grand prize in their division. He also got a red ribbon for his picklelilly (spelling?), a white ribbon for his pickled carrots, and sadly another red ribbon for his spicy dill pickles. The man can't seem to rise above red in this category. And the winning jar of pickles left much to be desired, in our opinion. We're truly mystified as to what exactly the judges are looking for in this category. But he's happy with that purple!

I won a purple for some raspberry muffins I made at the last minute this morning, and a purple for a color photograph of hostas emerging from the ground that T1 and I sort of took together. I also won blue ribbons for cornbread, and gingersnap cookies.

But here's where I might be injecting too much competition into all this. Literally at the last minute before we left the house I rinsed the label off a beer bottle, went outside and stuck a fresh stem of bee balm flowers into it, and entered that in the horticulture division under "wild flowers." Yes, and it won a red ribbon.

HA!

I swear...for those of you who live in this part of the Commonwealth you don't know what you're missing by not seeing what you can concoct to enter in the fair. It is a trip, and gives us huge laughs every year.

weather

We had a storm front go through tonight that produced a bit of thunder and a brief heavy shower, but a half hour later the back side of this storm made for some spectacular cloud watching. I happened to catch a few shots while I was in town.

from Dick

"I do not believe and have never seen any evidence to confirm that [Hussein] was involved in 9/11. We had that reporting for a while, [but] eventually it turned out not to be true," Cheney conceded.

[said at the National Press Club, this week, as reported on CNN]


Yet, if memory serves, that was the whole reason the war was started?