All Dressed Up...

and ended up going no place.

A few of the inanimate objects in my life get named. This does not include stuffed animals, they are not inanimate. The bike I rode for more than 20 years was MagicBike, my first car was L.Y.C. (LittleYellowCar), and my monopod/walking stick is named Stick; perhaps not highly original, but descriptive.

Today Stick was transformed into Staff. I wrapped it in ivy from top to bottom and tied a magpie tail feather up near the top. I put on my motley broomstick skirt, a chamois colored T-shirt and a garland of ivy (to match Stick as Staff) in my hair and hied myself to the Utah Renaissance and Fantasy Faire, dropping the Engineer at the airport on my way (he's headed to China.)

I've been to Renaissance Festivals before in Georgia: http://www.garenfest.com/ and Texas: http://www.texrenfest.com/. These are truly grand and glorious Renaissance festivals. There are entire villages of permanent shoppes, inns, theatres and arenas, trees, flower bowers and hundreds of employees in full if very anachronistic costume and vernacular. Many of the visitors dress too. There are knights in armor jousting, sword fighting and slaying dragons, jongleurs, magicians, wenches, trollops, charlatans and royalty. And always the ladies inspired by Frank Frazetta, strutting by in their chain mail bikinis.

Ready for great photo ops, I took the big camera, its case also decorated with ivy, and high expectations.

Sigh.

What I found was a cow pasture, complete with cow flop and a couple of dozen canvas tents and canopies. There were some tawdry shoppes, a couple of food stands selling roast turkey legs and funnel cakes and two Clydesdales -- oh, sorry -- bold chargers, and not a square inch of shade on a day predicted to reach well into the 90's. Mine was one of the best costumes there.

I came home.

But the good news is that the raised bed garden is progressing slowly but surely. The irrigation has been laid, the poles for the vertical netting in back are pounded in and the first watermelon (sugar babies) and cucumbers have sprouted. When it cools off this evening, I will transplant my seedlings and plant some bean seeds.