State Fair Happenings – Last weekend, The Wife and I stopped in at the State Fair. The nice thing about getting into the State Fair is that I just have to find the deputy on duty, show him my CCL, and he waves me through. We went through the winners of the various arts and crafts. There were some neat things people had created. We also had a long conversation on whether Lego pieces should count if it’s just putting together a kit versus creating something completely new using Legos as a medium.

We went through Cracker Country. The house they used for showing life in the late 1800s was ringed with a fence. Milton had done a mischief on the house. The rest of the place was fine, and we enjoyed going through the buildings. The Wife picked up some wood utensils, including something for her crochet.

We went through the “Artisan Marketplace”, which I tend to call Etsy Hall. Lots of gourmet doggie food booths. Lots of other booths. We ended up picking up some wax melts because we are always on the lookout for new and interesting scents.

On our way to Expo Hall, we decided to stop in at a food stand offering boba tea. For the love of all that’s holy, do not get boba tea at the state fair. The tea itself wasn’t bad, but the boba was… well, how to describe it? Stale, flat jelly might be the closest.

Expo Hall was about what I expected. I tend to refer to it as MLM Hall, as that tends to be most of the vendors. Nothing really caught our fancy, so we left empty-handed. It was a pleasant way to spend the morning.

Co-Pilot Happenings – For my fantasy novel, one of the things I’ve been experimenting with is using flavor texts to tell the backstory. On a lark, I put one block of flavor text and asked it to rewrite it in a particular style. Damn. That LLM put out a really good bit of flavor text. I think I’ll keep using it for the flavor texts.

Court Happenings – We had to go to court this week. For anonymity sake, I will not explain why. So why bring it up? Well, let’s just say getting through security was interesting. They had me half-unpack my carry bag because their detector had trouble with all the little pouches. Then it flagged on the small pair of trauma shears I keep in my bag. The deputy took one look at it and just waved me on. After our business was conducted, a fee had to be paid – which was in another part of the court complex. At that point The Wife just told me to wait outside instead of having to deal with me trying to get through another security checkpoint.

Clean Out Happenings – Over the weekend we finally got the tubs of Christmas decorations over to storage. We also did some cleaning out of the master closet. Finally, we assembled a pair of those Ikea shoe storage cabinets. Damn, that ended up giving us a lot of space back.