Weekend Plans Post: Doing the Fair
Going out to the State Fair here is always a lovely little capstone to the summer.
Wander around, see some cows and goats and chickens and ducks and rabbits and horses.
Get some grilled corn on the cob and some bacon wrapped jalapeños and some fresh-squeezed lemonade and maybe a slopper. Walk through the midway and boggle at the stuff that you would have thought was fun 20 years ago.
Walk through the exhibit hall and check out the quilts, the cross-stitch, and the mixed media.
I’m always vaguely irritated at the food exhibits. Three plates of cookies. All behind glass. One has a blue ribbon. One has a red ribbon. One has a white ribbon. But *WHY*? Seriously, I need to sign up as judge one of these years.
Wander through the modern art exhibit and see a gorgeous oil painting still life next to an infuriating experimental piece that is nothing but oil paints dripping through a grating and then put up on the wall.
Then grab some cotton candy and wander back to your parking spot and drive home.
There’s always some concerts that might be worth checking out. This year, we had Lady A, Lil Jon, and Pat Benatar. Years past gave us ZZ Top and Kansas and The Beach Boys. Where, outside of Vegas, are you going to see those guys?
Well, Maribou and I went this week and we got our lemonade and our fair food and wandered around and how it felt like stuff had firmly established itself in “back to normal”.
You should check out your State Fair. Seriously, you’ll have a ball.
Now, as for the next few days, we get to do stuff like enjoy a 4-day weekend with friends and family and, if we’re lucky, some time to putter around by ourselves as well.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is the Colorado State Fair! Photo taken by the author.)
Rehab! No, not THAT kind of rehab. I underwent a procedure to fix a hernia and I’m at home not moving around very well and recuperating, which means lots of reading and TV and Baldur’s Gate 3 in my very comfy office chair. I hope to be up and about again by Saturday. Maybe Sunday.
Being home today afforded me the opportunity to watch the Champions League draw live, which I hardly ever get to do. After failing to qualify for the competition these past six years, Arsenal got drawn in group B with Sevilla (Spain), PSV Eindhoven (Netherlands), and RC Lens (France). It’s a group from which they should advance…or could get it all wrong and finish third and find themselves in the (shudder) Europa League again.Report
Oh, and Starfield came out yesterday.
So I guess I’m doing that all weekend too.Report
Started it last night. Will be playing all weekend. I’m an unapologetic fan of Bethesda’s rpg’s and I’m digging it so far, except for the standard early feeling of “I have no powers yet and there’s too much to do,” which fades with some more play time.Report
I am entirely lost in Book of Hours.Report
It’s good, then? I’ve spent 3 minutes with it because it made me say “I should play Cultist Simulator again” and then I played that for a few hours and then it was bedtime.Report
Very slightly spoilerish:
A) It’s enormously lower stakes than cultist simulator. In the former you’re an ambitious aspirant seeking to accrue power and storm the gates of the heavens itself with hidden lore and relics of power. In Book of Hours you’re not quite a state functionary but you’re basically an NGO employee and, while you deal in hidden lore and relics of power your goal is to catalogue and store them, and occasionally helpfully reference them for various visitors.
B) It’s deliciously charming and clunkily obtuse. It has that same “discover the mechanic” element as Cultist Simulator but you’re also basically inheriting the sprawling estate that is a legacy of what can only be described as a long line of occult hoarders. The estate is huge, every room is packed full of… stuff… and all the stuff can be examined to get, at a minimum, juicy fun tidbits of lore and, sometimes, powerful repeatable game mechanic elements.
C) The game will treat you best if you act like a librarian. You will want to maintain a spreadsheet. You will want to organize the clutter. I have a room full of food I offer guests to buff them up. I have a room full of drink for the same. I have a room for my tools of power. I have a room for fishin, candles. I have a room for MY KITTY (he purrs)!
D) The mechanic is very square around the edges. You zoom and scroll back and forth over the board occasionally looking for things you need. It’s best to think of it as a bit like RPing. You are this odd hermit scholar who runs, wild haired, back and forth through your sprawling, stuff filled estate looking for that exact rock or candle or what have you to take back to your endless pouring over odd tomes. You occasionally emerge from seclusion to do odd jobs or lure visitors to your house to deck them out in odds and ends and then send them into a room to shoo spectral snakes out the window so you have more room to keep your books.
I think it’s brilliant. The music is nice and the sound effects are good- especially the ambient weather (which is, itself, an important mechanic). If you like Cultist Simulator you’ll find this both less gruelling but also much more “work” than the original. And if you liked the CS world building then you’ll LOVE the world building here. 5/5 strongly recommended.Report
I’ll probably end up diving into that one, but I need to finish up Baldur’s Gate EE first. I have returned to Candlekeep (and I still have the TotSC content to play through), so I am too close to the end to get distracted by something like Starfield.
Also, looks like it runs poorly on Steam Deck, which is not surprising, but it will limit how much I play.Report
Not working! No, not THAT kind of not working… One of the nice things about white collar sales from a remote office at a company with strong growth is that the remote working big SVP of NA sales will often use his “All Hands” call two days before a three-day weekend to give us all the FRIDAY off making it a FOUR DAY WEEKEND.
What this means in practice is that I do my morning emails/reports, join the weekly customer status calls, maybe a few more emails, and that proposal that has to get out right away… then stop working at lunch. Which is EXACTLY what everyone in Sales including the big SVP was going to do anyway with a 3-day weekend. Technically it prevents that ‘one guy’ (you know the one: Lumbergh) from scheduling an internal Friday afternoon before a long-weekend meeting… So that’s nice.
Not really complaining, just chuckling at the transparent morale generator… and heck, it works… I’m about three hours and two more meetings away from a guilt-free FOUR DAY WEEKEND.Report
Our corporate owner has a policy of adding an extra day to all the major holidays, and for the Monday holidays it’s always a Friday, so I’m “off” today as well. However, as one who’s responsible for delivery, I have decidedly mixed feelings about it. As it’s a fairly recent development for our division, we tend to forget about it when planning delivery dates, and since our clients generally don’t have the day off we have to scramble to work out coverage and to tell everyone they need to be checking in in case of fire. Plus of course these extra holidays that are foisted on us are not accounted for at budget time when the same corporate overlords are pushing on us to raise our NOI target. There’s a mostly unspoken assumption that folks past a certain level don’t actually take the extra day as a real holiday.Report
Exactly, we could take the day off — heck in sales we can kinda take *any* day off (and we do) — but those meetings don’t set themselves and pipeline doesn’t get created by anyone other than you, and there’s no shift worker to do your proposals when you’re not on the line, so… It’s the benefit and cost of doing sales.. complete freedom to be judged everyday by what you’ve done lately.
But yeah, I feel for all the folks who have other dependencies and deadlines as part of an ongoing business process that doesn’t stop just because the boss wants to go to Catalina for the weekend.Report
Let me know if you have any in house openings. I sit in on the Friday sales call for insight into what my contract priorities should be and occasionally be given a reminder on the importance of flexibility, and ‘getting to yes.’ No such mercy was given, despite the long weekend coming up.Report
Oh, Legal doesn’t report to the Sales VP. [Heh, could you imagine?] Back to work. Have you agreed to the prospect’s unlimited liability request yet? What’s the holdup? Can my Director approve?
Hey, we’re showing openings in London and SF (lovely HQ by the Bay).Report
Heh we are small enough (or really have a small enough client base) our CEO is on these too. As always all discussions on limitations of liability need to be ‘taken offline’.
And as beautiful as the Bay area is I am not sure I am suited, physically, mentally, or spiritually for the conditions I might face there. Oh well.Report
Ok, I know I joked about this before with my new [work] Macbook Pro… but seriously, is there a way to stop Apple Music from randomly opening? It’s not in the Open on Start list.
Google tells me it automatically opens whenever there’s a bluetooth connection? Can this possibly be true? Is my polycom phone speaker activating Apple Music? And it can’t be disabled or uninstalled?Report
I heartily endorse this message. State fairs rock.
The Twin Cities have the largest State Fair in the country. Now, some wags may point out that Texas allegedly has a larger one on paper but I would retort that said fair also is amalgamated with a rodeo and a football game and thus is dirty pool. Texans would, no doubt, disagree (they’d be wrong).
Anyhow, husband and I always go opening day which is a Thursday and has both discounted tickets and smaller crowds than the rest of the fair days. Also the staff is absolutely fresh as are the products and food. Trust me, it’s the best time to go and well worth taking a day off to do so.
The milkshakes at the MN state fair are insane. They taste almost like butter- they’re so rich! Likewise the grilled corn is nuts- the kernels are so big you can sink your teeth into them and barely reach the cob. Where the fish do they get that corn?!?
I’d also strongly recommend the fair coupon book. At our fair it costs 5 bucks and if you use 2 coupons from it (trust me, you will, odds are you’ll use a dozen and turn a fat net gain) you’ll have made that back plus it serves as an impromptu guide around the whole fair.Report
My wife is from MN, we courted in MN, and can confirm that the MN State fair is probably the best State fair.
Everyone I know from MN has at least one MN State fair escapade story. I, however, don’t… so feel like I’m missing something in my life.Report
Hmmm I don’t know that I have an escapade story but I’m an import so I have only had a dozen fairs or so. Younger me didn’t properly appreciate the state fair.
But I heartily approve of your excellent taste in fairs.Report