3 posts tagged “friends”

Well my weekend in Portland and Seattle (which incidently is called the Emerald City) was fab-u-lous. I got to see some good friends of mine (all of whom migrated out of California and moved north...hmm) and I took in a lot of northwestern culture and also enjoyed watching Wicked (my second time seeing it). There are just so many stories to tell about my adventures that I don't even know where to start! I'll probably add more photos into a collection later as my friends send their photos to me, but for now I'll leave you with a shot of us outside the theatre before the show.

 

 

Over the weekend I mostly lounged around the house watching old movies and scarfing gratuitous amounts of popcorn and ice cream, but I did manage to make it out to the California State Fair, which is a tradition for me. My very close friend Allen was in town this weekend (he lives out of state now...something about CA being too expensive? whatever!) and so we got the gang together for breakfast and a trip to the State Fair on Sunday. There isn't anything really that special about going to the state fair, but I think it is more of a nostalgia thing for me because I always went every year as a kid.

We arrived hungry with out mouths watering for fair food. I went for my usual jumbo corndog and later we bought a fresh lemonade from a girl who was so rude she looked as though she had a lemon shoved up her ass. Fair food is really a lot of fun though as my husband bought his obligatory fried snickers bar and was interviewed by the local news station about it. (Later I heard that he did indeed make the news but they cut him down to say, "It's gooey on the inside and crunchy on the outside") Oh honey, I hope you didn't waste your 15 minutes of fame with that.

We also went through and looked at the commerical exhibits and Allen spent buko-bucks on a new belt with a shiny new belt buckle (my, my how leaving CA ruins one's fashion sense). Another ooh and ahh contraption was the salsa maker that two of my friends just HAD to buy while we were there. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer to chop my ingredients with a chef's knife - it is quite soothing to do all that chopping.

Then we went down to see the county exhibits where each county in the state had a little booth to market themselves to everyone else. Nothing too exciting ever to be seen here, but we did find a wooden cow that you could 'milk' water out of. We stood there for a minute watching this little kid squeezing the udders for a moment before he told us very seriously, "It isn't REALLY milk, it is just water!" After which Allen exclaimed, "WHAT? What kind of cow is this?"

No trip to the fair is complete without a ride on some of the shady looking carnival rides, so that's where we went next. I'm not sure what got into me, but I rode the Zipper with Allen and as soon as the attendant locked us in there we both started to wonder, "What the hell are we thinking?!" Several minutes and several screamed curse words later, we were safely back on the ground pondering a ride on the low-key log ride.

Another one of my favorite reasons to visit the fair is to see the hypnotist show with Terry Stokes. I always fail the suggestability test, so I'm guessing that I can't be hypnotized (or maybe I just don't want to make a fool of myself?) It was a good show and there was this kid that he had believing that everytime he got touched by the hypnotist, he would start bleeding and the only thing that could stop it was a bandaid. By the end of the show this kid had bandaids all over his face, but the reaction when he thought he was getting cut was priceless...he was really screaming like a little girl. Another highlight of the show was a guy named Phil who the hypnotist told had to call all the people in his cell phone address book and tell them his name was now Cindy and the reason was because it's a pretty name. Haha - he'll probably have some esplainin' to do when he talks to those folks again!

Our last stop before we left was the wine gardens. Usually it is decorated all pretty, but I've never really noticed a definate theme. Well this year the theme was Hollywood movies and the gardens turned out to be a pleasant surprise. They had a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory garden, complete with a chocolate stream, the Emerald City with a yellow brick road (that pretty much made my night), a Kong Jungle with all the creatures to go along with it and a few more well loved movie scenes.

Anyway, I guess I can't really say that summer is entirely over since here in Sacramento summer lasts until about the end of October and then we have a week of fall and then we go straight into what we call winter. Summer is over in the sense that all the kids are going back to school (more traffic for me in the mornings) and my husband is back for his Junior year of college after taking a hiatus since last December. It is always a challenge when one or both of us are in school and working but he's on the downhill slope and so I'm pretty excited for him to be more than half-way done.

Wow. I've just realized my neighborhood has grown to over 60 people. Granted, about half of those were people I gave starter invites to (including close friends), but the rest of you are people who I either added because I liked what you were saying on your blog, or you added me because you liked what I was saying on my blog. Either way, I'm quite pleased with everyone I've met on here thus far. You are all AWESOME!

Over the next couple of weeks, I am going to start adding neighbors into my friends group if I feel like we are really clicking and I want to share some of my friends only posts with you. Don't take offense if I don't put you over there right away though, most everything here is public, and it is mostly that I want to give a nod to those who I consider to be people I connect with the most.

Also, please let me know if you added me to your neighborhood and I haven't reciprocated. It isn't quite easy to see who has you mutually listed yet.

In other slightly related news, I'm having a hard time getting my current friends excited about Vox. A few have joined up, and I am incredibly happy about that, but is anyone else having difficulty getting people to start "yet another blog"? I have an account to pretty much everything under the sun: LJ, Myspace, Facebook, Blogger, Yahoo 360, Flickr, Photobucket, and more that I probably don't even recall signing up for. I guess my point is that Vox looks like something that will satisfy the needs of all those various internet media.

I like Vox because I can do EVERYTHING and MORE on this one little page than what I can do on all those many pages spread out there in cyberland. It's a real time saver, but now if I could only quit wasting my time trying to convince everyone I know to just come over and give it a try.