Once a Year, Every Year...

Every August (for a very long time) the Indiana State Fair rolls around.  And, its a good thing to go to the Fair.  For all kinds of reasons.

• Displays by all kinds of people, from 4H members to adults to senior citizens.  Paintings, home-made clothing, photographs of Indiana scenery, pies, cakes, cookies...and on and on.
• The small band that plays just outside the Home and Family Arts Building every day...great Central and South American indigenous music.
• Animals. (I especially like the tradition as you enter the Cattle Barn from the State Fair Blvd...some kids have a large black spider rigged to a nearly invisible line that they drop in your face as you enter...especially if you have kids with you.)  Sheep and cows and horses and goats and rabbits and chickens, and pigs...always some very large, huge, boar just laying there doing what a boar of that size would do: nothing (but getting bigger, maybe).
• The watermelon-seed spitting contest.  My friend, Steve, and I used to enter that thing every year...back when the Fair was an annual event for us to attend together.
• The Midway...

• Fair Food!  Great corn-on-the-cob.  Indiana Pork Producers pork chops.  Indiana Dairy Association milk shakes.  Something deep-fried...something different every year: deep fried oreo cookies, deep fried pepsi-cola, deep fried snickers bar, deep fried ice cream, and this year: deep fried Girl Scout cookies.  A doughnut burger.  An elephant ear.  What's not to like?
• Your kids.  Take your kids to the Fair.  I used to take my boys.  I used to take my grandkids.  Now I take my daughter.  Its a wonderful tradition.
• Friends.  I cannot remember ever attending the Indiana State Fair and not running into someone (or several someones) I knew.

The weather will be hot...most likely very humid, too.  But, go anyway.  Its the Indiana State Fair, for cryin-out-loud!  And it only comes once a year.  Thankfully, its every year.