weird

My perception may be skewed

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We went to the Oregon Country Fair on Saturday, and we had a great time, but this was one of those events that had been over-hyped to us.

You HAVE to go.

You’ve never see ANYthing like it.

It’s where all the weird in Oregon goes to let their freak flags fly.

It’s SO WEIRD.

You have to see it to understand.

Yeah, not so much.  I mean, it’s a little weird, but it’s barely weirder than a renaissance festival, and that’s basically what it is, minus the renaissance trappings.  More hippie than history.  It’s a giant arts/music/crafts festival out in a permanent location in the woods.  I mean GIANT – this place was enormous and easy to get lost in.  There’s a ton of handmade stuff, lots of fair food, music everywhere, and people dressed as anything you can imagine: themselves (like us), fairy-type stuff (lots of headbands with horns, flower crowns, masks, face-painting), people on stilts (we saw a group dressed up as characters from the Wizard of Oz all on stilts), a couple of hippie marching bands (tie-dye shirts and flowers), and a few topless women and men wearing barely anything, which I suppose is what people were trying to tell us when they kept saying how weird it is.

It wasn’t that weird, and it’s an alcohol- and drug-free zone, so it wasn’t likely to get crazy, either.

I liked it very much – I don’t mean to sound like it wasn’t a really good time or that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy all the people watching, but it makes me wonder about everyone else’s definition of weird.  Or maybe it’s my own definition I should worry about.

Where else in the country would you find this?

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I was just going through my pictures, and I can’t believe I haven’t shared this one with you yet.

In case you don’t believe your eyes, yes, that is a bus with a boat on top of it, parked at the corner of 7th and Oak (I think) in downtown Eugene, not far from where we live.  Maybe the boat is just sitting on top of the bus, but I like to think it’s been incorporated into the structure of the bus, that from inside the bus, you can climb up into the boat, and hang out as you trundle along the road.  Like the top deck of a double-decker tour bus.

I might not lack the imagination to come up with the idea of mounting a boat on top of a bus (given the right circumstances), but I sure as hell lack the…guts? chutzpah? weird-ass ambition?…to actually do it.

The date on the picture is April 1st – could this have been an elaborate April Fool’s joke?  I  haven’t seen the bus since then, but who goes to that much trouble?

People are strange, but I salute you, person whose dream it was to attach a boat to the roof of a bus!  Sail on!

Authors, authors, everywhere

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I met ANOTHER actual published author today.  I met her months ago, actually, but I found out she’s an author today.  She works (or maybe volunteers for riding time?) at the farm, so I see her once or twice a week.  We exchange hellos, we know each other’s name, but we haven’t said more than a few words to each other before today.  She seems shy.  Today, she was walking with me as I took Tigger to the indoor arena, and she mentioned going somewhere for book research.  Book research?  I pounced.  A little.  Nicely.

Turns out she wrote three historical romance novels for Harlequin in the early 2000s, at least one of which did pretty darn well.  She said she’s had writer’s block for a decade (writing stopped being fun and became stressful instead), and she wants to branch out of romance.

Anyway, I’m super curious, and I will be reading the first of her books soon.  By Tuesday, I expect to have a signed copy of Beauchamp Besieged by Elaine Knighton.  Exciting!

Offputting

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We went into every gift shop in each of the three Disney parks we visited.  That’s not an exaggeration – we went into every single one.  For the most part, they carry the same stuff.  Ride gift shops had some ride-specific toys and shirts, and the other shops had some park-specific stuff, but mostly they were the same.  The World Showcase shops in Epcot had the most variation, and it was there I saw the most disturbing thing.

We were in fake Mexico, in the fake market inside.  I leaned forward to look at an anklet, and then threw myself backwards when I got a closer look at the mannequin ankle it was displayed on.  (I may have overreacted a bit, but it took me by surprise.)

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It’s unnerving, right?  Is it a heeled shoe with toes?  A bare foot with a built-in heel?  Makes me shudder just thinking about it.  Someone miscalculated with this one.