Shop till you drop...

... from heat exhaustion.

I just got back from spending a large chunk of my hard earned fair paycheck on decking my kid out in the latest styles for the upcoming school year.
It was 108 in the parking lot of the first store. It was 70 at my house when we left. It stayed around 99 for hours in the late afternoon. At 7:30 at night when we could be persuaded to leave the A/C in the motel room for dinner, it was still 95.

Today we made one stop back to the main store of destruction and then beat feet for home.

School clothes are procured and he's set. Unless his teacher makes demands as to "stuff" he'll need. Then we'll hit K-Mart.

For those 3 people waiting with bated (baited) breath for a lively update about fair. Don't hold your breath. I like most of you and I hear oxygen deprivation causes brain damage. (Which could explain many many things with me.)
Here's what you'll hear from me.

• It's over.
• There were no major complaints that were out of the ordinary.
• The usual bitchers are still bitches or rather, bitchers.
• The only major meltdown was had by parents, not children.
• It's safe to say I'm safely out of the middle of any relationships where I was was too firmly planted. Insert sigh of relief.
• Things pulled together nicely, even if rough at the start and in the middle.
• All's well that ends well.

Oh how you've missed me

I know you, my three loyal readers, have missed me.

Didn't even notice I've been gone had ya?

Ah well. I'm only here to mention I'm not dead. Fair.Is.Almost.Over. Two more days of playing nice. Then it's back to the regular day to day crap.

More when it's over, of course by then it will be a fleeting memory.

Someone else on my bloglist posted a funny story about hardboiled eggs and I couldn't help but remember this tid bit from my youth.

There arn't many of these, so you may want to take notes, this one is about my dad.

So it was Easter and we were at the grandmonsters house. This is my dads mom. She always hid eggs for us kids, some real dyed eggs, some plastic with money and change in them. She hid (or maybe had the uncles hid, I was too young to pay attention to that) eggs at different levels. Really hard eggs to find had more money.... Get the idea?

Ok, so fast forward to the end of the egg race. Sitting in the kitchen are about 50 dozen hard boiled eggs. Easter threw up on the counters. My cousin, being 14 or 15 and determined to outdo his uncle Craig (my dad) is sitting there trying to crack eggs on his forehead.
Imagine.
Smack, OUCH, Smack, OUCH, smack, OUCH, Crack.
My dad picks up an egg and says, with all the machoism he can, "It's like this...." Smack, Crack...... SLIME.
There sits my dad, egg dripping off his nose and chin, while we all roll around laughing. He's starting to seethe.
My grandmother looks over, hands him a towel, and says... "Oh I thought I didn't get one dozen boiled."
All remaining eggs were cracked in a bowl. More like 3 dozen she didn't boil. I do think that was the last year she hid eggs.

I totally lost it with my son today.

Gut wrenching fear will do that to a girl.

The story went like this.

Greg gets told to do something to which he stomps and pouts while doing. I tell him, NO POUTING, suck it up.

We go on with working. I look up, he's gone.
This is no big deal really, in the fact that he's grown up on these fairgrounds and probably knows the nooks and cracks better than anyone. I holler for him. No answer. I wait about 10 minutes, he could be out of ear shot, or trying to get down from the I-Beams, whatever. I call again. Nothing.

Ok, maybe the bathroom. Ashlee and I split up and each take a bathroom. Nothing. I start yelling outside, No answer.
This. This is nothing like my kid. Wander off, wander around? Yeah. Not answer? Never. I jump in my rig and start hauling ass around the grounds, running up to the office and asking Susan to page him to the barn. The call goes out like this "Greg your mama wants you back to the rabbit barn, um, now!"
I swing back into the barn to see if he's heard the page, as the words "Is greg..." came out of my mouth I spotted him. I boil out of my car yelling "Where the FUCK have you been?" It went on from there and I'm really sure the F work poured out many many times. Luckily he's really used to that. Stress and fear tend to boil the F word out of my mouth ALOT.

The topper, the point where he's lucky to be ALIVE? Was where I'm ranting about carnies and weirdo horsemen and why the FUCK would you wander off without at least giving me a direction to send the bloodhounds. And regardless of how old you THINK you are, YOU. ARE. A. CHILD. (I told you it went on and on) Anyway, the topper was when I said, "DO NOT leave this barn!" HE ROLLED HIS EYES AT ME!
Rolling eyes!?
I spun back around and He.Knew.
"Did you just ROLL YOUR EYES AT ME?" (feel free to add as many four letter cuss words in there as you'd like, you still may not come close to as many as I used)
*Note to child, who some day may actually read this dribble. NEVER LET ME SEE YOU ROLL YOUR EYES. So amateur. Bet he'll never make that mistake again.
He sat in the car the rest of the day. He also took a much needed nap. He needed one. Hell, I need one.
I went back to him after I wasn't seeing red and asked him if he could even fathom why I was sooooooo angry. He said no. I explained. How would he feel if he turned around and couldn't find me anywhere? And I didn't answer when he called and he couldn't find my car?
Answers: Scared, worried, mad.
Lesson learned. Fear subsided.

Where was he you ask? Asleep on a park bench.
I'm getting him a homing device. Is GPS legal embedded on a human?

Things you hope your granny never hears you say

Holy hell. No that wasn't one.

I clipped my yearling today. First, that's like nailing jello to the wall.
Second, I tried to do this while milking.
Why would I do this to myself, after getting up at 2 am?

Well, when you run things on a generator you combine as many chores as you can. And I have to get these goats clipped.

So here I am trying to clip this squiggly squirmy KICKING bitch, all the while trying not to suck the teats off the milkers.
I'm sure the phrase "Nasty Skank" And "Scum sucking Whore" fell from my lips more than once. "Kick my face and I'll break that fucking leg" was uttered a few times too. Funny, as much as she hated getting her legs clipped, when I prepared for the BIG fight, clipping her face, she LOVED that. In fact she fell asleep with her chin in my hand.

Aren't you glad I love my goats?

I have a funny about taking my mother to the China Buffet (all you can eat Chinese) but I'm too tired. I'm just hoping I don't forget any of it.

Duh!

I totally started to write this as a comment on another journal then thought, Yo, dumbass, try updating your own blog. *forehead smack* Oh yeah DUH!

So I'm pretty mind numb today. It's taking me try after try to type simple words. Other than that, I'm ok. It's going to be a really long week and I think I'm really glad Sarah is confident pulling a trailer. She may do some driving so I can nap if I don't sleep better on Wednesday night.

We fully enclosed one end of my barn. It's the end the rich houses can see so that makes me happy. We through some feed to the pony next door too, she's a little thin and they don't feed her. Don't go all PETA crazy folks, she's on 2 acres of grass that's up to her belly. She's 40 though, and this time of year that grass isn't good for much, less considering her age.
We also put up the fiberglass down the one long side that isn't a goat pen. The rest will have to wait until after fair. I'm too tired to care.

Bill is adding vents to my trailer today so we can put goats in what used to be the tack area. 2 butterfly vents in the front and a large 30"x6" louvered one for between that area and the main "big" goat area.

I have to fully unload the trailer this week and then start reloading it. I think I'll have him unload while I set up for milk test in the morning.

We had a horrible start to milk test yesterday. Computer trouble, paired with Bill's non-knowledge of how to use a computer made for a tricky first 40 minutes. All the while we're moving cows and he's falling farther and farther behind. It cleared up, then it was cow problems, one after another. Bill says he saw a cow miss kicking me in the back my mere inches. I told him "What I don't see, doesn't bother me, what I see, now that's different." This after a cow missed my kneecaps by inches. Should I add to this they are milking 560 cows at the rate of 88 per hour, in a flat barn. That's really moving and everything on my body hurts today.
Tomorrow morning I work in a barn set up exactly the same way, only many many many less cows. 270 I think.

Tomorrow I'll be at the fair again. After I pack milk to ship after I milk test in the morning.