Well, that train left the station without me aboard.
I had been planning to take the Portage County Farm Tour but it turns out that it was held on Saturday instead of Sunday and my schedule was all wrapped around the Aurora Band show, Thunder Over Aurora, so it was a setback to open the Record on Sunday and see that I had missed the whole thing. Too bad. Those tours are really quite enjoyable and one gets to learn a lot of stuff when going on them.
The Mackenzie Creamery was a big “draw” as far as I was concerned; the cheese they make is amazing and the goats which are part of the operation are always a hoot. I like goats; they are characters, they have personalities. You can’t go to the fair and go through the sheep and goat barn without seeing(and hearing) at least one of them with feet up on the rails of its enclosure, looking around, and giving a loud and raucous “Baaaah” to express whatever it is that goats think about all of the rest of us. I understand that the billygoats have some disgusting personal habits and the bad rap that they have concerning body odor is often well-deserved, but the creamery itself was clean enough to perform surgery in when I saw it on the last tour. The possibility of exotically-flavored cheese samples may have entered into the desire to go there again.
Then there was a stop at the Sand Hill Stables, which I’ve been itching to get a look at for quite some time– the demos by the farrier(They’re the ones that work at shoeing horses, not blacksmiths) would have been instructive, I’m sure, my feet being what they are ,tours of Beckwith Orchards, Inc, that venerable fruit emporium in Franklin Twp, Brugmann Farms on Frost Rd. in Mantua(They’re not all about sand &gravel), and Lazy B, an apiary ( a place where bees are kept; a collection of hives or colonies of bees kept for their honey)on Ryder Rd. in Hiram Twp.—we all ought to know more about bees and what we can do for them, since they’ve been having a rough time lately, what with the “colony collapse disorder” and the profligate use of insecticides in agriculture and shrinking areas of wildflowers—or flowers of any kind—for them to forage for food. The little buzzers have been having a time of it and we should pay attention because a very high percentage of the crops that we raise to eat depend upon the honeybee (genus : Apis ) and their cousins(seven species, 44 subspecies) of all sorts for pollination. And I missed it all! Bummer! Watch for it next fall; there aren’t that many farms/agricultural enterprises in Portage County any more. We should support them whenever we can; that’s what the Farm Bureau is all about doing in organizing these tours.
Which leads me to think that I’m going to actually get down to learning how to do things with my new phone…like keeping a calendar. I have a calendar at home with space to write things in, which I try to do religiously(I’ve been excommunicated a few times) but if I don’t scribble a note somewhere when I’m out and about, then transfer it to the calendar when I get home, It’s anybody’s guess whether I’ll remember or not. Notes on the grocery list are just not very reliable. My brilliant plan for getting this phone thing accomplished is to take it to the next QuizMasters practice and have the kids instruct me on everything from calendar set-up to weather aps. Heck, I could probably take it to the sixth-grade girls’ volleyball practice and get the same kind of help. Ditto for the car; it does things I haven’t even discovered yet.
Missed World Pet Day on Sunday but the pets here are doing pretty well anyhow, except one of the original trio is heading for that last Big Lap in the Sky. There’s only one cure for old.
I did go to the Thunder Over Aurora band show, which was fine and loud, as usual. The official T-shirt this year was designed by a member of the Aurora flagline, utilizing caricatures of the mascots of the participating schools—NDCL Lions, Southeast Pirates, Riverside Beavers(Riverside Regiment), Jackson Polar Bears(the Purple Army), the Garfield G-Men and the Aurora Greenmen . There were the inevitable redundancies, two different bands playing the same tune, but the arrangements and instrumentations were so different that sometimes you could hardly tell. Choreography abounds–on the flaglines and dance corps, by the instrumentalists, among majorettes(The Purple Army had a much-awarded feature twirler, she was really good)—everybody is “tripping the light fantastic” at the least provocation. Calls to mind a line from an ancient ’40’s tune : “It must be jelly, ‘cuz jam don’t shake like that.” Or maybe “Shake a Tailfeather” from the ‘60’s (It got into the Disney film “Chicken Little in 2005, as well); there were plenty of shakos on the field. There was—as occasionally happens at large gatherings–a little lost boy at intermission, a young sprout just sort of dripping tears, not sobbing yet but clearly in danger of heading that way. A kind young woman—she had a light green hoodie, so I assumed that she was an Auroran got him to the concession stand and the guys there relayed a call to somewhere to help find Mom ; everybody was very reassuring so the little fellow didn’t lose it, even after Mom did appear. Actually, by that time, she was probably more likely to be teary than he. And , Finally, I think that I shall prod our athletic director (Look out, Mr. Pfleger) to find an equipment sponsor which will provide an “OFFICIAL golf cart” for big events at our school. Those Greenmen have all the cool stuff…and the event was very well organized. Thank you, Booster Parents!
Oh, and I saw T-shirts : Fear God. Love Your Neighbor. Hunt Ducks…. Eclectic Genres…What does this mean?
