I need to get more accomplished

I’m in a phase where I need to get Lanternfish ready to publish. If everything goes according to plan, that will be in November. I’m also pushing Good Liniment for sometime this winter.

In the mean time, I need to write about nine blog posts. I have two of them. I also need a good topic for Story Empire. I feel like I’m getting close to an idea, but it needs more work.

Reading and writing have to go out the window this weekend. As soon as I finish all that, I need to be thinking about some way of promoting Lanternfish and how that’s going to look.

November seems like a long ways away, but it will be here before I know it.

Old What’s Her Face and I had date night early this evening. We went to the fair and ate food that’s bad for us. It isn’t as hot as most years, but involves a lot of walking to even get out of the parking lot. I took a few photos and can share those.

Pumpkins seem like they’re off a couple of hundred pounds this year. I still like to see them. I’m an Autumn kind of guy and it makes me look forward to the season.

This one is a different variety. They’re flatter and have deeper grooves in them. I really need to look up the name. This is because I have a character who has something like this for a head in a future story. Not a main character, but it’s nice to be accurate whenever possible.

This one is also a pumpkin. I have no reason to share it other than it’s weird enough that some of you might be interested. Looks like it’s covered with peanut shells.

Lots of cute floppy bunnies.

Many varieties of chickens.

And one golden pheasant.

Basically we each grabbed a prickly pear lemonade to walk around with, scoped out the food vendors, then walked through the exhibits. We didn’t even look for the pigs and such this year.

I ate a(n) gyro as big as my head, and we split a bag of churros. That’s about it. The concerts are lousy this year, and we aren’t carnival age any more.

Gyro poses an interesting question. Since it’s pronounced eero, I prefer to put “an” before it. Since it’s spelled with a consonant, it looks like it should be an “a.” It’s a blog post, so who cares. I’ll be careful not to put them in any of my fiction.

Lazy Day

Today was all about playing catchup. The guest toilet is all reinstalled and functional. Some of the furniture is in place, and even the dogs are settling in well. Changes freak Otto out, but Frankie was fine from the first moments.

Last night, we went back to the fair. My brother-in-law and his wife were here, and the attraction was the Trace Adkins concert. This time we left in time to actually eat.

Pizza in a cone, what a great idea. It was fair quality, but with some effort, I have a hunch this could be great. I’m tempted to revisit this when I wake up Tituba this winter to use a sourdough crust. Just have to figure out how to bake it vertically somehow.

I also had an elephant ear. These are similar to what we used to call scones in my family. I skipped the honey and whatnot, because – beard.

My brother-in-law and I had multiple opportunities to sample the various beers on tap. The best one I had was Sam Adams’ Octoberfest.

We also went to see a gigantic pumpkin at seven-hundred and some-odd pounds. Hobbits could live in this thing, I swear. They also had some watermelons that could host quite a party if given the chance.

I always walk through the poultry barn, which also includes bunnies. The sampling wasn’t quite as impressive this year. None of the huge bunnies were there, but a couple of gigantic black roosters were pretty incredible.

The main attraction was this:

We had better seats than last night. If the truth be told, Adkins put on a better show than Joan Jett. She included a lot of music that nobody ever heard before. Adkins only included hit after hit. To give Joan credit, she got rained out and returned after they spent an hour squeegeeing the stage dry. It’s hard for me to admit, but that’s how I’m calling it.

Today, my wife and the in-laws decided to go shopping. Surprisingly, this was more for them than my wife. (When does that ever happen?) Being the lazy bum I am, I decided to stay home.

This allowed me to work the radio interviews forward a bit. I have a bunch of data floating around in cyberspace about these, but nothing lined up for Thursday. I got thirty applicants when I asked for guests. I sent all of them a questionnaire. I tried to send out the initial shticks four at a time, because I just couldn’t do thirty all at once. Some of them went silent when they got the questionnaire. Some went silent after getting the shtick (When I’d already invested some effort in them.) I have more to get to, and some of this situation is of my own creation. There are some who returned the questionnaire, but I haven’t done the next phase. I will, I just couldn’t do them all at once.

Right now, it is what it is. There may, or may not, be a guest post on Thursday. I will probably work up a couple of more tomorrow, but I like them to feel fresh and not like a chore.

I used some of my time to add about 1800 words to The Hat too. Today was all about planting data that would payoff disaster later. At this rate, I should hit the midpoint disaster somewhere around 20K words. If you extend out, that brings this in at about 40K. I think that qualifies as a novella. We’ll see how it all goes. I know I have some white page syndrome going on and can address some of that in edits.

Tomorrow is going to be kind of a bust on new fiction. I have some other things to do, so spare moments are better dedicated to more interviews. I’m off Monday and have high hopes.

Off to the Fair

Sometimes you just have to walk away from the keyboard. My imagination is a pretty fun place, but it needs fertilizer to keep growing. (No manure jokes. Yeah you in the back row, I see you.)

Old What’s Her Face* and I went to the Western Idaho Fair today. It used to be the Idaho State Fair, but commercialism killed that romantic title. The carnival folks and vendors find it more profitable to have multiple fairs all over the state. I concede that Idaho is huge, and someone from the Wyoming or Canadian border isn’t likely to drive to Boise for a Saturday at the fair. Therefore; several fairs in various locations.

I like the idea of someone growing the biggest pumpkin in the state. It’s fun to compete for something that is the best in the state, but those days are gone.

We started our day here. The home of deep fried foods, beer, and sweets.

A quarter mile of sugar, cholesterol, and alcohol

We both grabbed a prickly pear lemon aid. This is fresh squeezed with a shot of syrup from the cactus fruit. It’s on our must list every year.

My wife started off with one of her favorites, a Navajo taco. It wasn’t made the right way and she threw it away. These things are awesome, but they don’t lend themselves to commercial shortcuts. If you don’t use a yeast raised fried scone to start with, you might as well give up. She replaced it with a Greek chicken pita, and said it was wonderful.

I opted for a standard Greek gyro, and a Basque chorizo. Mine was wonderful too, and the restauranteur who runs the Greek cart can expect a visit from us to his downtown place very soon. Basque chorizos are one of my favorites, they’re also hard to screw up. The Basque community is large in the part of Nevada where I grew up and these things are a staple. Fortunately for me there is a large Basque community in Boise.

We stopped at a wild animal display. There were quite a few wild cats like tigers and servals. As a western boy, I liked the bobcat. This place charges money for portraits with a select few of the animals. We watched as someone tried to get a picture with a lion cub. The cub was naughty and they finally gave up. He was so busy they couldn’t get him posed. They opted for a very busy skunk instead, and it was easier to hand the skunk something shiny and he held still for a split second.

They indicated they were an animal rescue organization and all the money raised went into the care of animals in need. You never really know, but the lion cub and skunk were pretty happy.

We checked out the standard exhibits. I loved an action photo of a great horned owl. It won second place to another owl photo that I didn’t think was as good. The biggest pumpkin was 206 pounds. This is kind of disappointing since they get near 1000 pounds elsewhere. I chock it up to too many fairs. A competition of five is less intense than one with fifty entrants.

I won a photo ribbon myself once, in Nevada. This was back when cameras used something called film.

It was cool that they have a brewing competition these days. There were dozens and dozens of entrants. Home brewing has really taken off. It doesn’t make for much of a display, since it’s a rack of brown bottles with ribbons on some.

Someone had a large display of carnivorous plants that made me jealous. My last one died this summer.

My wife thinks I’m an idiot, but I like to walk through the small animal barn. This is where young farmers get their start. I just like the animals and took a few pictures for the blog.

I took the bunny photos for Lisa**. She would appreciate them, since she has one called Bunny.

I always like the poultry. There weren’t any turkeys today, but some of the ducks were pretty. The chickens always steal the show and so I took some pictures for you.

This huge black rooster was pretty friendly

I think a yard full of these would be pretty fun to watch while enjoying a cup of tea and a book. There were tons of rabbits and chickens. Many of them were in covered cages and photos weren’t possible.

We didn’t pay to see the giant hog or the tiny horse. We’d visited them in previous years. We stopped off to watch some lady loggers from Maine. They threw axes and chopped logs. It was fun watching them run on a floating log. Then it was one more mediocre brown ale and time to go home.

It’s another statement of the times when Idaho has to import loggers to put on a show. I’ll leave it there and avoid a political tantrum.

The fair is spread over several weeks. They bring in free concerts and there is a huge carnival. Some years the concerts are pretty good. I asked my wife if she wanted to come back to see The Doobie Brothers. She said, “No. Do you want to see The Doobie Brothers?”

I said, “Already have, in 1979. Paid eight bucks. It was a pretty good show.”

* This isn’t my wife’s real name.

** Lisa is the main character in Wild Concept. She lives at the writing cabin these days and helps me around the place. She’s a robot and has her own pet rabbit.