Fair

The county fair is back in town and actually has been going on since last Friday.  When we first moved out to our house we thought the fair was really cool.  They had some interesting and entertaining things and they even gave people on our street free tickets as a little thank you for putting up with the noise and lights the fair brings every night.

Well a couple years ago the fair decided they no longer wanted to be generous and did away with the free passes for the surrounding neighborhood.  Coincidentally the quality of the stuff in the fair went downhill as well.  Other than the animal exhibits and the good tasting food that was bad for you, there was really nothing at the fair that was of any interest.  Plus by the time you paid for parking and two passes to get in the door you already dropped 20 bucks.  I think the last time we went we spent maybe an hour total before we left, pretty pathetic.  Last year we didn’t even bother to go.

Well Michell and Parker are coming out to our house Saturday and we are going to go to the fair.  They have a couple things that seem somewhat interesting like an aquarium, shark tank and sand sculpture displays.  There are a few thrill rides I may do.  The one that I really want to try has two long towers with a cage in the middle attached to either tower by an elastic band.  It gets pulled to the ground, you get in and then they release, sending you skyward like you are in a giant slingshot.  The fair added two giant chaser lights that light up the night sky as the beams of light move around.  Each night when I take Nicki out for walks I spend a few moments watching the columns of light dance around.  Sometimes they extend all the way out to our property.  It looks cool.

While Ali went to the gym after work last night I went to the local Home Depot to do more mental prep for the sprinkler project.  The first thing I stumbled upon was a book that covered anything you could imagine about installing sprinklers.  It looked great and I almost bought it.  However the 19 dollar price tag gave me pause and then I realized that if I looked up the book on half.com I probably could get it much cheaper.  (I bought it off half for $2.86 that night)  I found my little flags to mark where each sprinkler head would go.  The rest of the time I looked at sprinklers, pvc pipe and fittings.

This is going to cost more than my original calculations I think.  The little fittings seem cheap enough, a little less than a dollar each, but when you start adding up just how many will be needed, it will be a lot of dollar bills.   Even though I have a drawing made up, there are still many uncertainties in my head on the details.  Should I use one inch pipe all the way to the end of each circuit, should I reduce to 3/4 as it gets further away?  How should the sprinklers be positioned so they aren’t spraying the sides of the house to prevent staining, should I use solid connections to the pvc or use flexible “funny” pipe?   Unfortunately, a lot of these answers will only come to me in the heat of the project through trial and error.  I have no doubt that it will all come together, eventually, but the road there will without a doubt be a bit bumpy.

Anna Nicole Smith died.  I was surprised, yet I wasn’t.  She always was a mess and I am 99% sure it was a drug overdose.  It’s funny when I used to watch her reality show when she was all fat and a mess, you got to focus on her whacked out personality.  After she went on the diet and got her looks back I had a hard time getting past how much of a loser she came off as on the show.  It just seemed like such a shocking transformation that it was almost unbelievable.  The worst part of the situation is the 5 month old baby that no longer has a mother, not that Anna would have excelled in that duty. Hmmm maybe the kid actually is better off now.   

I actually recently heard from the famous Gnome blog commentor extrordinare from a couple years back.  He used to be commenting on my posts almost daily.  He also used to have a lot of slow time at work that allowed him to do so.  He got moved to a new position that was much busier and I also think I pissed him off along the way a bit.  Welll anyway, he is alive and well and who knows, we may actually see his smart ass comments popping in there now and then.