Beginning of classes

Well, just like that the Delaware County Fair is in the books again. We'll have the carcass show tonight for the few animals which were purchased and slaughtered and that will be the official end for one more year. There's a lot of pictures from the fair showing up on the website, so check them out. Not only are there great photographers entering in the show (including my wife, who won 3rd place!), but it seems there were a lot of good pictures shot by fairgoers and submitted to the site throughout the week.

As we sort through all of Amanda's pictures, mine have been posted to the Picasa album. Suprisingly, Picasa has not been cooperating well with her Google-brother Blogger, so I'll include the link to the album so you can go there straightaway. In the end, only 25 pictures made my cut onto the site, but as I fill up that site I'm trying to weed out some of my less good shots, including a cut yesterday on some pictures which lacked clarity or subject focus and were just on there for sentimental reasons.

I also began a new photo website which I like less, but they tricked me into joining with a contest for the best geocached photos. I'm a sucker for contests like this so hopefully I'll win something, and if not I've at least put in a little ad online for the Delaware County Fair. Yahoo's Flickr is just a little bit too glitchy and gimmicky for me to use it much yet.

Class is started here on campus and so now i have to adjust to a new schedule once again. I have yet to remember that I TA a class in the morning, so luckily it's for my forgiving mother-in-law because I haven't showed up to it on time yet. Coffee gets me through the long days of adjustment and by November my pigs should start coming off trial. Looking through the fog of chaos to the future of lab work and predictable schedules. Well, here's to hoping anyways...

Fall again

Well, it's definitely beginning to look a lot like fall again. The summer plants are dying out and the leaves are becoming more brittle. Tomorrow's high is once again predicted to be down in the low 60s and I love this stuff! I love the cool breeze in the morning, and I love being able to throw on some long sleeves and just wear them all day long without worrying about spiked heats. Fall colors are on the way and that means we needed to clear out our garden to make room for some mums.

I've included a picture today of the pumpkin plant we started at the beginning of the year. It's a perfect example of the shortage of bees and other pollinators, because this plant flowered all summer and went without any fruit. Not because it was sterile, but because I literally never saw anything crawl or fly by until it was already into late August. Luckily, our plants out at the parental unit were more successful. Jacob had a vastly successful planting of sweet corn after the first set was flooded out and our pumpkins are turning a good, solid Halloween orange.

County fair is coming up this coming weekend and I can't wait. Lambs and steers look good and it's a great time to have a fair. Look for me as press staff once again, pit passes and inside track for the horse races!!!

New Hard Drive

Suffice it to say that I am thoroughly and sufficiently frustrated with Best Buy to have almost broken my laptop over their countertop and demand a new laptop replacement. Yet I haven't and I will spend the rest of today struggling with technology and updating everything that was running just fine on my computer beforehand. Thanks a lot, Best Buy.

In other news, Amanda is home this week and you can see the difference the moment you step in the door. The house is much cleaner, due in most part to her efforts. I pitch in where I can, such as freaking the life out of Jensen yesterday as I cleaned his bowl out (gross!) but she has put a lot of time and effort into it and I love the fruits of her labor right now.

The Delaware County Fair is rapidly approaching, as is school, the end of my summer job, the Farm Science Review and my baptism into the psychology of a department that is less accepting of my absence from class and other events. Duly noted.

Finally, I am just putting a little word out there about how wonderful it will be to have my new fitting blades, guards and clippers all happily delivered and housed in a new toolbox before the county fair starts. I'm inordinately excited about this as you can expect and can't wait to use the new blades I got on Katherine and Jacob's steers. I definitely worked miracles already for Jacob's steer but the real challenge will be how effectively we can get Katherine's ready for show on Monday as a group because it's going to take everyone's best efforts to bring this one into being.

315 Closed at Ackerman, etc.

Flavored milk - unhealthy? So says Florida schools who are removing strawberry from the school menu already this year along with soda pop in an effort to fight obesity among children. I'll agree that's a problem we should be concerned with, but is removing milk the answer?


Also, Hogweed and Poison Hemlock are spreading through C. Ohio. I have inserted a picture of the burn that Hogweed causes as well as the appearance the Poison Hemlock plant. Please read both of these articles and learn to distinguish the difference. Eliminate both plants as quickly as possible.

Driving down today to campus was my first day with the 315 route closed because yesterday I was over at the Hippology Contest all day. (Congratulations to the Delaware County Team for their 2nd Place!). So today I headed down and realized just before I got on the highway that I'd forgotten my parking pass. Great. So I turned around and headed back to get the pass. Now, when I say my pass, I really should say Amanda's pass, because she is being gracious enough to share it with me so that we can save money, which especially works well when I don't forget it. Once I had gotten the pass I had to turn around and head back south. 71 S was running pretty smooth for 8 am, but when I tried to get off Weber there was a train. Well, that's just great. Train leaves and suddenly out of nowhere there's a service truck on the tracks. Not so great. So I drive down Silver to get to Hudson cause I'm not going to keep waiting on this. And then, there is this truck trying to back into a place on Silver. Well, if you know that road at all, you know he's go no chance in getting in there easy. So we sat while he tried to back in. Eventually he got in, after holding up everyone, trying 3-4 times and taking the fence in front of him off its posts. Then I still had to get all the way to campus. All told, my trip to OSU today took me 50 minutes. Pathetic.


Facebook continues to be goofy. I can't read any of my messages and my facebook isn't updating at all. I don't know why they haven't fixed it yet, but's been 4 days and this is not cool. I'm currently watching the World Cup on Fifa's Matchcast. It's nice to have it, but it's nothing like ESPN's 360.

No news yet from Tom Izzo, except that there is no news. I'm becoming numb to it all. For better or worse, I want him to make up his mind so that we can figure out where we stand for next year's season.