S. Worthen | Weblog

Yesterday's Chenonceau pumpkins reminded me of the bigger ones I photographed back in August at the Iowa State Fair. The winner of the fair's biggest pumpkin prize (the one on the right) weighed an impressive 1,323 pounds.

There was not a trick-or-treater to be seen on our street yesterday, but the candy shelves at the grocery store were cleaned out. I feel like I may have had this problem before: the grocery store expects me to be organized and buy candy a day or five in advance of Halloween. At some point earlier, it had put all the small, easily unitable candy on sale at half-price, and the shelves had been cleaned bare. So - all the candy gone, but no trick-or-treaters. Perhaps it's just the abbreviated days and pre-hibernation instincts which are driving local shoppers to stock up on half-price candy?

We went back for another visit to the Iowa State Fair yesterday, along with something like 100,000 other people. This time, in addition to eating fried pickled cucumbers, fried cheese curds, and pineapple juice ice cream, we visited the baby animals. They're in a new, air-conditioned building targeting public education about animal births, so between the cute and the cool, it was jam-packed with fair visitors. There were goat triplets, just two hours old; a litter of piglets born that morning; an ostrich still pecking its way free from its shell; dozens of still-hatching chicks. Videos played on flat-screen televisions overhead of animal births from the previous few days.

Above is a trio of ostrich chicks, a couple of days old.

Other highlights: Realizing that the rabbits hadn't gone on Wednesday, they hadn't arrived yet. Seeing the rabbits. See the largest pumpkin. Admiring the dahlia competition. Seeing the finished sand sculpture in the Cultural Center. Photographing goats. Watch trials for the llama limbo.

Foods on Sticks!

The Iowa State Fair is a fabulous, enormous, decadent, and overwhelming large event, taking place every August in Des Moines, at the fairgrounds. It begins on Wednesday with an enormous parade highlighting some of what the fair has to offer: enormous animals, clowns, commercial advertisements, musical performances, artistic presentations, clowns, antique cars, huge numbers of political candidates, including 2008 presidential ones. Marching bands come from all over to participate; so do dance studios, some showing off hundreds of dancers and tumblers along the parade route.

And then there are foods on sticks. Foods on sticks include some of the ones shown in paper mâché on this float - cotton candy, pork chops, corn dogs, turkey legs - and so many more - fruit kebabs, corn-on-the-cob, toffee apples. Sticks can be built-in to the food in case of turkey legs, chops, and cobs.

Sometime in the next week, we're off to the fair! In the meantime, here are some more pictures from the parade.