My First Corndog

A Summer Vacation Essay, With Pictures.

Since I last wrote, not much has happened at the lab (although my boss did take me to see Del Valle park, which was beautiful). However, my family has been having lots of adventures at home.

They went to the zoo, and saw lots of animals.

They even rode in the SkyRide, which for my mother is quite an achievement.

They rode the BART into San Francisco, and walked along the Embarcadero.

Yesterday, we went to the county fair. It was my first real fair, and although I didn’t go on any of the rides, I still had lots of fun.

There was soft serve ice cream

and a pirate

and a container of corks––luckily I had my handy-dandy TI-83 to calculate exactly how many were in there...

Then we went into the exhibition hall, where people were selling hats, and purses, and Shamwow!s––excuse me, Shamtastic!s.

Oh, also bathtubs and Sillybandz––we bought some pirate ones. Because we’re bad-ass like that.

There was also a competition hall, with the various entries and prizes of contests like baking (including this ‘decorated potato’?),

quilting,

calligraphy,

and... table setting?

It was actually really cool; they had settings for holidays like Cinco de Mayo, as well as various books and bands. I neglected to photograph the Jonas Brothers one, but I did manage to document one of the multiple Twilight ones.

We also went to see the small animals exhibit. Chickens interest me a lot more than bunnies, so that’s what my pictures are of, but rest assured there were plenty of floppy-eared Peter Cottontails.

These chickens are called ‘Silkies,’ and they really do look like they have fur.

I neglected to take pictures of the vendor who, while selling my mother a hat, refused to believe her (Japanese) last name, and upon being presented with me as ‘proof,’ asked me “日本語を話しますか” (Do you speak Japanese?), to which my mother proudly replied “Kanoko-wa Cottia des” (That baby’s name is Cottia––for proof of exactly how ‘Japanese’ I am, just think about the fact that I don’t know the kanji/hiragana/whatever for either of those sentences, and had to resort to Google), but rest assured that the incident occured.

Today, we’re relaxing and recovering from the travails of Friday. We'll be going to see the fireworks later today (CA laws concerning fireworks are much stricter than back home, in a large part due to fire hazards, but we're going to go see the big ones), but that's about it in terms of exertion. Hope you have a good 4th.