Indiana State Fair

Beef, Lamb and Chicken, oh my!!!!

August is State Fair season all around the USA. Nothing better than fresh buttered corn on the cob on a stick, hand dipped corn dogs (my passion!!), deep fried ANYTHING (literally), pork tenderloin sandwiches the size of manhole covers, huge BBQ'd turkey legs, funnel cakes, salt water taffy, it just goes on and on........all that wonderful stuff that is really bad for you that is OK to eat because it's the state fair for goodness sake! Our next favorite thing after the food is having a look at all of the wonderful farm animals (makes us want to buy some land in the country and have a farm every time we see them). We've been in Indiana now for 10 years and had never been to the state fair, so our friend Bob took me on a whirlwind extravaganza of our fair in Indianapolis. He has been going for over 60 years, so I couldn't have had a better guide. I've taken lots of photos to share with you, so lets get to it!

(Note: Many of you may have seen news reports of the tragedy that took place at our state fair during a storm at the Sugarland music concert. This took place the day after we were at the fair. We pause here to remember those who were lost and injured during the tragic event. Reminds us to live and enjoy every day of our lives as if it were our last! Hopefully the fun of our day will shine through.)

The animals are always my favorite things to see at any fair. Poultry is always extremely entertaining as chickens can be so funny looking and have ridiculous things atop their heads.

This turkey was very excited about the females in the pen next door. He had himself puffed up in full display for quite some time.

Of course when he turned around he had a face only a mother could love. A very impressive beast indeed. Could feed at least 15! :o)

It was really quite twisted that just outside the different animal barns, they had the animal prepared to be eaten. Here is a heap of fabulous roasted turkey legs. Who could resist one along with a piece of grilled corn. Can you say dark meat? YUM!

Here are my favorite chickens. Non-bearded White Crested Black Polish. This is the hen. These are the same chickens I used to play with as a child at one of my relative's farms in Kansas. There is a famous story in our family about me in the chicken coup with the hens when I was about 6 years old. My mother tells it best. All I can say is it involves me and about 100 hens and lots and lots of chicken poop. Next time you see me or my mom in person, ask us to tell it. :o) Rowan and I have decided these are the chickens we will get for our own coup we will build in the backyard. We want our own fresh eggs so plan to get at least 4 hens next spring. Stay tuned for all of that fun being posted here then.

This is the rooster that goes with the hen. Perfectly ridiculous plume makes him especially wonderful. 

This is a Silkie Bantam Hen. We may get a couple of these as well. Would make a nice pair of slippers, dontcha think! :o)

The weather was just perfect for our day at the fair. Not a cloud in the sky and about 82 degrees.

We took a whirl through the 4H building to check out the veggies, fruit, baked goods, etc. The entries from the little kids are so simple and sweet. Here is a cantaloupe made into a face that won 2nd place.

This was almost embarrassing. It was titled 'Donald and Daisy Duck and their Twins'. Hmmmmmmm.
I know our minds are in the gutter :o)

These pumpkin's are huge. Notice the size of the boy compared to the pumpkin.

This is one of the strangest competitions I have ever seen. It's all about creating a topical scene using canned goods. Extremely bizarre and found only in the mid-west.

Tomato sauce and canned pumpkin? Who knew!!

Plum tomatoes, baked beans, canned tuna, marshmallows for smoke, etc to make the space shuttle. Crazy!!

We figured this must be the paper plate competition. What makes one a blue ribbon winner? :o)

I must tell you we were hysterical at this point. We had to leave the building we were laughing so hard.

We decided to return to the animal barns. Here is a new litter of pigs. This made us instantly hungry so we dashed out to get, what else, but corn dogs!!!

YUM! YUM! YUM!!

Did I say YUM? This is my favorite thing to eat on the planet. I will eat them any time I find them and I usually have more than one, as I did here, and they were good. The best corn dog I have ever eaten (and I have had MANY) can be found in Santa Cruz California on The Boardwalk at Surf City Grill (across from the merry-go-round) Hands down the best hand dipped dogs made fresh right infront of you.

Check out the foot long ones on the left. Heaven!

Bob decided to have a polish sausage after the first corn dog. 

A joy to watch him eat it. YUM!

OK, so we couldn't stop looking for more food once we started eating. Most of what we came across was just frightening. We started to ask ourselves,what CAN'T be deep fried. A mid west delicacy is the deep fried pork tenderloin sandwich. They pound the geez out of a piece of tenderloin to make it the size of a manhole cover and then bread it and deep fry it. The grease must run down your arm to make it a really good one. I can't eat them, but almost every homegrown Hoosier does. YIKES!

We had to make a mad dash back into an animal barn to save our arteries. 

Here is the most beautiful Jersey milk cow I have ever seen. We stopped the young man to talk to him about his beautiful girl and he said she is the state wide grand champion winner for the last 2 years. She weighs over 1200 lbs and you can see she stands as tall as the young man who is nearly 6 ft tall.

Of course they had some calves too. 

Look how this bull is actually square and twice as thick as a female. 

This made us hungry again. Nothing like a REALLY fresh steak sandwich. YUM!
How many of these do you think can be made from that bull? :o)

Or, you could always have a french toast burger. I don't know about you, but that combo is just WRONG!

I had to take some photos of the outrageous selection of deep fried items along the food concessions. It is truly CRAZY and frightening. How exactly does one deep fry kool-aide or a stick of butter? BUTTER?????? Yes butter! Frightening, just frightening!!

This is my next favorite food vendor after the corn dogs. I have never seen lamb offered at a fair before. YUMMY, YUMMY, YUMMY!!!

This potato thing was really fun to watch. This guy was using a hand drill with a special end that would curly-cue a whole potato in about 10 seconds.

Each one of these bowls holds a whole potato curled out in one long piece.

It gets popped into the deep fryer (of course) and comes out like this. Bob and I devoured this one.

As we ate the excellent plate of potato wonderfulness, we noticed this couple sitting across from us. That is all it took for us to end our eating frenzy. :o)

Back to the animal barns. Here are a couple of my relatives :o) (my name IS Jenni)

A baby lamb. Will taste really good with some mint sauce in about 10 months :o)

This one is getting ready for the showing competition.

If we had more land, I would definitely have at least one goat. The best lawn mowers around.

Bob and I had just a fabulous time at the fair. If you have a chance to go to your state or county fair, I would recommend it. The kids who raise most of these animals and compete in the competitions really need the support of their communities. A much more productive thing to do than sitting around playing video games and watching TV and getting fat.

Monster Storm

Don't know how many of you have been through a real perfect storm in your lives, but we had that experience on our drive home from Chicago (this one is different from the tornadic winds that came through our neighborhood in May - see Destruction and Construction post in May). We watched the lightening in the distant clouds for about 60 miles as we headed by car southeast out of Chicago. We kept wondering if we would actually miss the storm or go through it. Well...............here are the videos. Hang on to your hats as this is the biggest gully washer we have ever been through in our lives...........and in a car, on the highway, at night!!!!!!! We just kept hoping a big tornado wouldn't come down to really wreck our evening as we were out in the middle of nowhere in the DARK!! Auntie Em!!!!!

As we headed towards the storm from just south east of Chicago.

So, this is when it starts to get REALLY scary. We haven't been driving at night in one this scary since moving to the midwest over 10 years ago.




We both gave a huge sigh of relief once we came out the other side of this storm. It took a total of about 30 minutes from entry to exit of the really bad stuff, even though we watched it for at least 1 hour before we even entered it. The car radio finally told us there had been over 3 inches of rain in less than an hour and we were right in the middle of it. 4 more inches were expected throughout the night! There were flash flood warnings for exactly where we were. Good thing we were up on the highway and not on a surface road or we would be under water in this flat farmland. Never a dull moment here in the Land of Oz!

Late summer fun coming next..........if we survive this weather :o)

Chicago

Who doesn't love Chicago. Fabulous food, fabulous people, fabulous views, fabulous architecture, fabulous art and science, fabulous shopping. We just recently made a road trip there so Rowan could discuss science at a conference and I could go out and see some at a museum.

We were lodged at the Chicago O'hare Airport Hilton. A very nice hotel, but right across the street from terminal 2 in the airport. The conference was being held at this hotel, so there we were.  I loved spending one morning looking out of the window of our 10th floor window,  drinking my coffee and imagining where all the airplanes were taking all those people as I watched the planes take off from the main runway. I also got to watch a tremendous thunderstorm pass through the airport, and close it down for over an hour. Rowan absorbed science for 2 days while I hung out with our good friends Ed and Cristen. The whole time I was there, I kept asking myself........how will we all survive without Oprah????? :o)

On to the photos.

As we traveled north by car through miles of very flat farmland in Indiana, we came across this huge wind farm just southeast of Chicago in Benton County, Indiana. There were hundreds of windmills along a roughly 10 mile stretch of corn fields. This is the largest windmill farm I have seen in Indiana. Go here for a cool video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STZATr4Fhtg
I grew up just outside of the Altamont Pass Wind farm in northern California, still hosting the largest concentrations of wind turbines in the world. Go here to learn about that wind farm: http://www.eoearth.org/article/Altamont_Pass,_California  Here is the Indiana farm.

 It is so refreshing to see that folks around the country are coming to their senses and taking advantage of green energy like this.

Once we arrived in the greater Chicago area, we made our way around the city and out to the Chicago O'hare Airport - a city itself! One morning I was treated to a tremendous thunderstorm rolling through the airport. Watching it roll in from the 10th floor windows in our room was pretty cool. It is amazing how quickly they can close down an airport. Notice the lights of an airplane in the sky (on the left). The plane is trying to skirt the storm and squeak in for a landing before everything is shut down. I bet that was an exciting landing for the passengers!

Notice the scary funnels at the back of this cloud. I was nearly looking straight at them from the 10th floor windows. YIKES!

This photo is taken in the same spot as the first one in this series. Notice how the runways have completely disappeared. The rain was in sheets!

Auntie Em!!! Sure glad we weren't trying to fly anywhere today :o)

Believe it or not, once the storm passed, our dear friends Ed and Cristen drove from Oak Park through flooded streets to come and get me for a day of fun at the Museum of Science and Industry: http://www.msichicago.org/
I had never been there so was very excited to go and learn some new stuff. An added bonus is that I will be there with Ed. He is the most hilarious man and keeps me in constant bent over laughter no matter where we go.
When we entered the museum from the parking garage, this is the first thing we saw. Yes, it is the ass of a real giraffe. The exposed ass, muscles, organs, the whole works, with no skin on. It is one of the Bodies exhibits (see the museum website above to learn more about this exhibit) and if you have never seen this traveling Bodies show, it is a must! You can learn way more than you ever imagined about how bodies of all sorts are put together.

 You can imagine how we burst into laughter when we looked up and this is the first thing we saw. We laughed for 15 minutes. Here is Ed and his poor hysterical wife Cristen below the rumpus maximus. Ed looks like Moses, don'tcha think? Or maybe Osama Ed Laden? Santa? Maybe could be in the band ZZ Top? A Rabbi? The possibilities are endless :o) So how does one seriously pose below something like this! Just one of those moments in life you can't pass up.

After we regained our strength from our laughing fit, we made our way further into the museum. If we continue to laugh like this as we go along, we will have to crawl out of here.

They have whole airplanes in the aviation section of the museum. 

 We went on a little coal mine adventure too. They take you way down in the ground by elevator below the museum. When the doors open you are literally in a coal mine. Coal is a huge industry here in Illinois (and the region) so they really talked up the clean coal thing (yeah, right! clean coal. Hmmmm). They explained in great detail what it takes to run a coal mine and how the coal is used to benefit our lives. Here is our guide, who is also a stand up comic in his night job.

 Our guide with Ed. Another benefit of going somewhere with Ed is he is always asking questions and engaging people in interesting conversations. We stayed back at the end of the tour and learned more about our comic. He was a very funny guy.

A photo from the recycling exhibits.  Nuff said. 

The weather exhibits were just fantastic. I took this cool movie of the avalanche dynamics piece. Really cool to watch it happen.

Here is a clip of the science tornado. A horrifying reality in these parts.

We made our way over to the most incredible train set landscape I have ever seen. The exhibit took up one whole end of a huge exhibit hall. The trains ran all around and through the city of Chicago, out through the Great Plains and on to Seattle and the great Northwest. There were some amazing details that I captured in pictures and video.

The Chicago city scape

Here is a video of the train coming into the city of Chicago. This whole thing really brought me back to when I was a kid and we used to set up my brothers Lionel train set and play with it for hours on end. This of course being the ultra deluxe model of that!

So here is a detail in the landscape that is just hysterical. Cristen pointed out these things to me as she is a native Chicagoan and has been here a bazillion times. Notice the bear and it's cub scaring the poop out of this family. The family running away and the child right in front of the mother bear raising it's hands in fear. This little scene was in the rocky mountains. Hilarious!

 Here is a lumber mill in the rocky mountains. Notice the trailers and cabins in the foreground. Clothes hanging to dry on the clothesline and everything.

 And the train finally gets to Seattle.

The wacky science magic throughout the museum is so great. Here Cristen is causing the falling bubbles to fall down her arm and miss the child. This is all projected on a screen and somehow a person can control where the bubbles go by moving their body through them. Crazy!

 We came upon a whole section of the museum on the circus (many traveling circuses have come from these parts).  Silly, I know. But we had to. Cristen and I had such a laugh looking at ourselves in the crazy mirrors that turn your body into crazy shapes, that we almost had to be rescued by medics. We laughed so hard we cried and sprained our bellies. It was FABULOUS!

 There is an entire submarine in the museum. It is a U-505 German sub from WWII captured by the Americans. Go here for the details on the history: http://www.msichicago.org/whats-here/exhibits/u-505/

It is an amazing story.

 Here are the guys who were on the American ship USS Chatelain who captured the German sub. Too cute!

 The Apollo 8 command module. Launched Dec. 21, 1968, Splashdown Dec. 27, 1968.

I remember watching this happen on TV when I was a kid.

Inside the Imax theatre where we saw a chilling movie on storm chasers chasing tornado's around the Midwest. Uplifting (pun intended!) :o)

 The Chicago skyline. I love this city.

Ed & Cristen's house in Oak Park (a burb of Chicago just west of downtown) is in the district famous for it's large concentration of Frank Lloyd Wright homes/buildings. Wright's studio is here and we toured it a few years ago. There are also many homes in the neighborhood designed by him. A worthwhile trip if you enjoy architecture.

Ed & Cristen's castle.

Ed & Rowan in their front yard.

This plaque is laid in the cement walkway as you enter the path up to Ed's house. Yes, it is true. Be prepared to laugh your ass off if you go through the front door.

 Believe it or not, I have known this man since the late 1980's. We used to travel the same trade show circuit as sales reps back in our past lifetime. The most fun I had in my life mainly because of running into this man who made me laugh constantly as I traveled. How we ended up living a short drive from each other later in our lives is simply fate. :o)

The perfect storm post is next...........and it is a doozie!