State Fair Baby Pigs feeding

So tiny and wobbly and cute!

State Fair Baby Pig!

Here's a piggie from the new more spacious Miracle of Birth Center. Evidently they have sharp little toothies, just like puppies! Isn't he cute?

Largest Potato

Well, yes, it's big. Not very pretty, though. Looks like it's trying to get up. To escape. This reminds me, I'm hungry, I have to go now. More Fair pictures latuh.

Bead Lampshade

Holy crackers! This looks like a lot of work. I like the color combinations and the waves on the bottom, those are cool.

Bead Bib?

I don't know that this is really a wearable as they've displayed it (it looks like a bib) but it's really neato, all made of beads and a lovely landscape with forced perspective.

Dairy Princess posing

Here's one of the princesses posing. Notice she's wearing mittens? It's cold in there! Otherwise the butter would melt, duh.

Butter Head being carved

Here we are, back at the Fair, with the butter sculpture. This time I caught the sculptor and the model in action. J. says this one looks like she's picking her nose--"Here, you got some noogie on your nose, let me get that."

Weinermobile!

Isn't it cool?? This was at the MN State Fair and you could get a Weinie Whistle if you stood in front of a bunch of people and sang the Oscar Meyer Weiner song into a microphone. Um, no, I didn't do it. I wanted a whistle, but I wasn't really into the whole public humiliation thing. I don't do karoke either...

I Voted

Sheesh, I just went and voted, at 2 in the afternoon, and I was ballot #133. Puh-thetic. It was like a ghost town.

Butter Sculpture!

You've been waiting for it, I know, my photos from the Minnesota State Fair. Let's start with the butter sculptures. Isn't this amazing? Here we have one of the dairy princesses, in butter. At the end of the Fair, she'll get to take home her head and eat it. I love it.

Marnie Nixon - Bet You Know Her Voice

I just listened to one of my fave podcasts, NPR Pop Culture, and heard about this woman Marnie Nixon. She was the voice behind Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and the list goes on. Aw, I thought that really was Deborah Kerr. More illusions shattered. Like the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. But not as bad as Santa Claus.

Mystery novels and stuff

I just finished reading this mystery novel called The Lake of Dead Languages and although I liked the setting and the treatment of water and frozen lake ice as a sort of character in itself, the book as a whole wasn't that great. I hate that. I really wanted to find a new (to me) mystery writer that I like as much as Deborah Crombie but it's tough. The pace was too slow and ponderous in this book, and I guessed the villian not even a quarter of the way through the book. Not that that is the only satisfaction of a mystery, but it just wasn't worth the long wait for the reveal. Mysteries are tricky that way, you want to feel that the author has neither underestimated nor overestimated you as a reader.

I'm going to try another new author now, of a book called Dead Sit Round in A Ring. I think I found these particular books by looking at this great database called NoveList that I have access to through the library. I can't seem to find a general link to it, otherwise I'd put it in here, because it's quite useful. It's really designed more for librarians than general readers, but if you're a bibliphile, you probably would like it. It's just for fiction books, hence the name, and it's kind of like that feature on Amazon.com that says "Customers who bought items like this also bought..." only it's actually based on critical reading instead of sales.

Maybe I should try writing a mystery. I've considered it before. It seems to hard, though, to get everything just right, enough clues but not too many, something deeper than just whodunit...

My essay on working at the library just got published this week in the Minneapolis Observer, but you can't read it online, you have to buy the paper version. I've shared it with a few people at work so far and they liked it very much. S. said she felt exactly how I do when she first started, thrilled to be at work every day. Now she's not as giddy, but she still really likes it. One of the librarians read my essay and said having 26 books out at once is nothing, that she has piles all over her house. So now I'm thinking it's only people who don't work at the library who think 26 is a lot. There is an actual limit of how many items you can have out at one time--100.