two festivals and a party

Last Saturday, I actually had a full complement of events on the social calendar. It's unusual to know that most of your day is planned out when you wake up, yet you will get no actual work accomplished...but it's a feeling I can live with. Anyway, much was learned.

The first event was a friend's birthday celebration. We all met up at City Park, drank covert drinks (alcohol technically isn't allowed, so rather than bring beer cans, I had a carafe of summer vacations. We then munched on snack food before playing croquet. I'm not sure why croquet, but the game is fine by me...it always puts me in a Heathers kind of mood. So what did I learn at this event?

• I utterly suck at croquet.
  
• When your croquet lawn is at regulation size and no one has played the game before, each game goes on forever.
  
• I wanted to start a movement to take croquet away from the upper class and push it as working class entertainment, but a friend told me "It's not like the upper class are doing much with it anyway."
  

The next event was the McClure Radish festival. McClure OH is apparently the radish capital of the world. I've been trying to go to this festival for years, but something always comes up...so this year, I refused to miss it. What did I learn here?

• When you've been trying to go to something for several years, expectations tend to rise.
  
• When an event charges $6/person admission, expectations rise further.
  
• Unfortunately, an event called a "radish festival" at the "radish capital of the world" should, one would expect, have radishes involved. This, however, is not necessarily the case.
  
• Every festival apparently has to have a tent with beer sales (usually a crappy domestic) bought with tickets rather than cash, some really mediocre band playing a weird pop/polka hybrid, and ugly dancing people. Unfortunately, this was all they had at this one.
  
• The only radishes they had were in trash cans scattered around the tent, and were first come, first served. Whenever these cans would be refilled, there was a pretty funny scrum between old ladies rushing to fill bread bags full of them...I guess they have to live off radishes.
  
• I shouldn't expect much of a festival when I don't even like the celebrated food, but I do anyway.
  
• My life is full of stupid disappointments.
  

(my friend Andy has some cool photos of RadishFest here)

The final event was the Whitehouse Cherry festival. This one puzzled me, because I didn't even know we grew cherries up here, and I'm pretty sure that if we did, they wouldn't be in season yet. But it was still educational.

• There were cherries here...but they were mostly canned, dried, and in desert stuff. So apparently, you definitively don't have to have any of your festival's namesake in a fresh form.
  
• Carnie rides are sometimes powered by old tractors.
  
• You can put together a cover band where no one likes the same kind of music and still be successful. The one at this fest had a guitar player who obviously wanted to be in a death metal band even though they were playing stuff like "Hang On Sloopy."
  
• Metal beer bottles may be practical, but they are still silly.
  

(cherry festival photos again courtesy of Andy)