Spring Fling

I'm still spinning too.


Last night was our rural school's Spring Fling. You might think of it as a convention of all things farmish. The local Grange, Rebecca Lodge and school district join forces every year here and throw a party. We're a little fun-deprived in the country, evidently, because everyone between birth and 90 in a 10-mile radius shows up to eat chili dogs and root beer floats, to get their faces painted with butterflies and go "fishing" for two-liter sodas and plastic ladybug rings.

Mayberry meets Mitford in this rife-with-raffles soiree. Grandpas rig the "jailhouse" for locking up errant teenage boys. Two tickets or ten minutes in the brig to cool off. Grandmas fight over all the babies. The teachers take turns in a dunk tank and the kindergarteners get to push the button, bypassing any need for good aim with a softball. The fifth- and sixth-graders put on a radio play: The Lasagna Massacre. A local massage therapist set up for five-minute massages for five bucks... to benefit the school of course. I was disappointed that this year she put the nix on back-to-back massages, but it was okay, because I could have easily blown all the kids' carnival ticket money in the shoulder-tension releasing department. For the good of the school.

Here are my three big girls, plus KL's daughter, visiting from Katie's Calamities:


But I know you're asking yourself why I might have shoulder tension in the midst of all this hilarity. I'm so glad you asked! It's because I am FARMGIRL (hear me roar). Yesterday before the Spring Fling, the EGE had other engagements (aka his little brother's season-ending baseball game). We also needed six-foot-tall fence pickets and eight-foot wiggle board (doesn't that sound exotic?) from the home improvement store.

What to do? No manly help is readily available. The Suburban will not hold the lumber, at least not while holding the children and myself too. Need the lumber. Have no man labor. Oh my.

Well, friends, you are reading the post of a girl who can drive the treacherous twisty back country roads with a 3,000-pound horse trailer hitched up to the Suburban by the most innocent-looking two-inch ball of steel. AND then this girl can shop the lumberyard. AND THEN she's more than able to drive home without losing any lumber or the horse trailer OR her sweet disposition!

The nice men at the lumberyard did help me a lot. But they looked at me a little weird when I was taking pictures for my blog. Unfortunately, the pictures didn't turn out, because I'm trying to figure out this loaner camera. Never mind, I can bring home the lumber and... um... build it into a fence. (Shave and a haircut... two bits.)

Sarah was super impressed that we were in and out of the hardware store in only 15 minutes. I made her promise to tell Daddy how efficient I was. Then I made all the girls be silent the whole way home because I might have been sweating the curves just a little.

And after all that, we made it home just in time to brush everyone's hair and twiddle our thumbs while waiting for the EGE to race home from the baseball game. Grandma came over and we all walked up to the school.

Did I mention the petting zoo? Out here in the boondocks, the petting zoo is not composed of farm animals. Nope, no miniature goats and rabbits for these country children, because they're all tired of feeding those animals at home. Our petting zoo boasted a 50-year-old escaping tortoise, a lemur, some creepy reptilian things and not enough hand sanitizer.





Non sequitur du jour:

This one's for all the Lyle fans:

That’s Right, I’m Not From Texas

I love me some Lyle Lovett. I am known amongst my farm- and city-folk friends alike as a Lyle, um, lover. One time I spent my wedding anniversary with Lyle. (Hush. It was not so much an outdoor ampitheater as a singing stroll through the park. Lyle was serenading me.) My husband is understanding like that. Plus it’s in our pre-nups. Lyle and me, we’re like THAT.


But my friend Barb over at So, The Thing Is… she loves her some Lyle too. She can even put Lyle into her blog somehow. She’s amazing. Or maybe Lyle likes her better than me and loans her his best music videos exclusively because his poetic nature is perfectly in tune with her poetic day-to-day life. (What’s that? You can download songs online? With video?)

And then, my friend Ei, she's in love with Lyle too. I'm not sure whether she's from Texas because she's a cyberfriend (first I typed cyberfiend. I have a problem typing too fast.), but she loves Lyle a lot (maybe more than I) and she's available. She doesn't have to exercise any prenups to stroll through the park with the big-haired cowboy crooner.

So basically, it's like an episode of The Bachelor, where Lyle has to choose between all these lovely ladies. I think I got kicked off on the first rose ceremony. But until I was a blogger I thought it was just me an' Lyle, alone in the world.

Speaking of my husband Fabio, he corrected me on two counts over the weekend. Maybe more than that, but only two come to mind immediately. Because I’m forgetful.

(one) Tom Clancy was not an attorney. He was a financial adviser. Even better! A financial adviser turns popular spy-thriller novelist. Surely if I can surreptitiously borrow WiFi all the while having no clue what WiFi stands for, and subsequently zoom out of the neighborhood undetected, passing a “Shotz” coffee stand that says “FREE WIFI” in red neon letters – surely if I am stealthy enough to pull off such a Saturday out-of-state mission, I could easily sneak in and out of a government building with high-tech secret documents, photograph them, and then replace them with cleverly doctored fake-o documents to throw off the competition spies, all the while safeguarding my infant and pre-schooler in the double jogger. Wait, they already did that movie. I think it was called “Mrs. Doubtfire.”

(two) I’m not from Texas. I had forgotten.

My husband, Fabio, moonlights as an engineer. You may know him as EGE, or the Eng-Gun-Ear. (It’s a dumb inside joke among the pocket-protector set.) His first job – aside from that little margarine thing – is fact repository. Within moments of reading my last post, he was advising me that I had fact errors. So now he has a new side job. As my fact checker. Because he remembers all sorts of things like what Tom Clancy's pre-published career was. And he still has room for lots of baseball stats and stuff. He must be pretty smart.

But I'm not buttering him up for a new camera or anything.

***
Oh, for crying out loud. I am editing this later in the day to say:
I can't even get a correction right. My dear husband didn't say financial adviser, he said insurance salesman. The risks of insurance sales must have translated quite nicely into spy novels.

But I'm still not from Texas. Dang.

***