Monday, September 15, 2008

Top 10 Reasons Why I Love Going to the County Fair

10. The wide range of people -- I can always feel better about myself by the mere act of people watching. I don't mean that to sound petty, but honestly -- the diversity of characters there are both awesome and frightening.

9. Different forms of entertainment -- Saturday's entertainment event for us featured a hypnotist. Cinnamon and Linda got me "volunteered" to be one of the victims *ahem* participants. However, I've seen one of these guys at Six Flags before, so I wasn't thrilled about the possibility of being made (more of a) fool of in front of a bunch of strangers. I couldn't ever fully relax enough to be "put under," so he dismissed me after a few minutes, where I rejoined Cim and Linda and laughed heartily at the people who did remain on stage. The good thing was he didn't make any of them do anything too foolish or outlandish, so it would've been okay for me to stay up there, I suppose, except for when he made them dance to the "Big Butts" song.

8. Fair Food. This year's new deep-fried-on-a-stick menu item was pop-tarts. We were too full to try one, but it looked good, along with deep fried Oreos, Snickers, frog legs and Twinkies. The most obnoxious thing I ate was a Texas Sausage Sandwich. It lived up to its name since it was, indeed, roughly the size of Texas.

7. The animals. All sorts of farm animals that we city kids don't get to see that often are on display at the fair, including chickens, sheep with little baby sheeplings, cows, horses and other cows with HUGE horns. Cute, but all very smelly. The best thing about wandering around looking at the animals is that you can totally toot all you want and no one will know it came from you. I'm just sayin'. If you wanted to help contribute to the earth's methane layer, that's the place to do it.

6. The many wonderful purchasing opportunities of items that you can only find at the fair. Of course, they only WORK at the fair at the time of demonstration, but they're so fabulous and the sales people are so compelling, who can resist items such as:

5. The Turbie Twist Towel. . My hair's fine enough that it doesn't actually need the turbie, but it came with a great partnering product -- a towel with elastic and buttons that's GUARANTEED to not fall down! This is good news for neighbors (Cim) and roommates (Linda) so they don't have to be subjected to any sort of wandering towel mishaps in the future.

4. All sorts of smelly (good smelly) soapy and lotiony things, like a huge jar of pure shea butter for only $10. Good news for my cuticles!

3. This fantastic hair removal product: . Sure, I've already got little pricklies on my legs, but who cares? I bought it at THE FAIR.

2. There was some sort of detoxifying ionic foot bath that people were paying $30-$40 (depending on if you brought a friend) for. You soak your feet in this solution while you get charged with ions through your wrist (I don't know, okay?) for 30 minutes, and then the water turns all sorts of different colors, and depending on what color it turns tells you what's wrong with you. Tempting though it was, I didn't want to part with thirty bucks (even with Cim throwing in two) just so they could look at my nasty foot water and tell me there's something wrong with my intestines and get me to spend who knows how much more on their product to do your own nasty ionic foot baths at home. We passed on that one.

1. Bungee jumping. ! Ack! Yes, I went bungee jumping at the fair. It was so thrillifying that it deserves its own entry, complete with video as proof, so another entry is forthcoming. For now, back to work!

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

That Thing You Do

Remember that great TV show, "Third Rock from the Sun"? One of the funniest moments was was when Dick and Mary were in bed together lamenting the fact that the excitement was gone from their sex life. Dick thought maybe they should just move on since they knew everything there was to know about each other. Just then, Mary pooted in bed, and Dick got very excited.


"Mary, did you just...FART? Why, that's marvelous!" and their romance continued because they realized there was still lots of things they didn't know about each other.


The other day I was teasing my BFF about the fact that she's never tooted in front of me. She's very proper (some may even say prim, but I know her better than that), so that's pretty much an unthinkable thing to do in her book. It took her years before she could even do that in front of her husband! She's also a clogger. Dancer. That will actually play into th estory a little later.


I was laughing telling her about being at work the other day and grateful that no one else was in the restroom since, well, nature called and the bear had to go in the woods. Or something like that. At any rate, I was in the restroom and it was a little...well, the smell was evidence of what I had just done. As I was flushing the toilet, I was making plans to go grab the spray off the counter and try to cover up the smell so the next person didn't have to deal with it. I had just grabbed the spray and spritzed it in the stall, when in walked someone from my team.


Now there's no disguising what I've been doing. I can't even pretend innocence by wrinkling my nose and waving my hand in front of my face in a "Can you believe what the person before just did? Sheesh!" sort of a way. She's on my TEAM, for crying in the night, and I've been caught red, er, spray-handed. So I just smiled weakly and said, "Hi, Liz," before walking out.


My BFF was totally cracking up, because honestly, who doesn't love a good story where the embarassing thing has happened to someone else?


Then, between giggles so it made it a little hard to understand, she said something along the lines of, "Oh this one time (somethinggigglesnortgiggle) clogging..." And I nodded emphatically in agreement and said, "Oh, I KNOW! Isn't that the WORST? It's all clogged and you have to call building maintenance because even though you don't want to admit it was YOU you can't really leave it there for the next person and it won't flush and go down and you're just praying it WILL eventually so it doesn't overflow..." then tapered off because I realized she was laughing again, only this time more AT me than in agreement.


And she said, "Well, yeah, that's never quite happened to me. What I was trying to say was, this one time when I was CLOGGING, I had to go to the bathroom...."


"Oh, yeah, I totally knew that's where you were going with that. That other thing I was just talking about? I've only ever heard about it from other people -- it's never actually happened to ME."


...Yeah right.