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Oct. 20th, 2007 09:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I had outings today. Outing #1 was to the book sale at the Altoona library. There was a line. It was crowded. I didn't believe Heather when she said it would be crowded and have a line prior to opening, but it met criteria on both fronts. I expect that the only reason that there wasn't any shoving was that it was a book sale. Heather bought more books than I did, but I did pick up a couple that were interesting. Despite being a childfree outing, we did not engage in either beer or hookers... just literature. I also worked on my HoHI on the trip to Altoona and back.
The other outing was to the Pumpkin Festival at OBV. For that outing, we picked up the kid and took her, reason being that the whole POINT of the Pumpkin Festival Outing was to take the kid and get pictures of her doing assorted kid things. (While not the intent of the outing, I also managed to clock the kid upside the head with my heavy, metal DSLR camera. She cried. I felt bad, but not as bad as I'd've felt if the camera had been injured.)
We did several things of Tess-interest at the Pumpkin Festival. None of them involved pumpkins. Item of Interest The First: Petting Zoo. The petting zoo did not have pumpkins. It had rather a lot of baby goats, some adult goats, a jersey calf, a sheep, a piggiewig, two chickens, and a bunny. Tess liked the goat and the piggiewig. I took a shitload of pictures but it turns out that when you are trying to take pictures of a toddler AND keep her from being ovverun by livestock, your pictures look like shit. While trying to drag Tess toward the exit, I clocked her in the head with my camera. It's a heavy, big camera and it hangs around my neck so that I can't drop it. When I bend over, it swings around like a pendulum of doom at temple height for a toddler. I trust that you are all able to draw the picture of that incident from here on out. The reason, I should point out, that *I* was trying to drag the toddler out of the petting zoo was that her mother had abandoned us both to go sit in the stroller, away from the goat slobber. (It is a large and sturdy stroller of great durability and my cousin Heather is about forty or fifty pounds lighter than I am.)
After the petting zoo, there were tears, proving the parental saying that everything fun will end in tears. Following that auspicious beginning, we went to the Balloon Animal Man. (He was a real man, not a man made of balloon animals. He *made* balloon animals and other items balloonish in construction.) The Balloon Animal Man made Tess a hat of balloons that lasted until she took it off and dropped it into the wind. I took pictures of the balloon hat, some of which actually came out OK. That was lucky, because when the wind got ahold of the balloon hat, it scudded the hat along the grass until the balloons popped onetwothreefourfive, justlike that. Heather chased after the balloon hat in, as it turned out, a futile attempt to save it.


We went into the strange little hut covered in grass mats. I'm not sure what that was about but Tess liked it. I took pictures there but only got one that I really liked. (I take an awful lot of bad pictures. For the PF outing, the shutter closed a hundred and fifty times.)

Tess sat on the bench outside the strange little hut. I took pictures there, too, and got one I liked. Interestingly, irfanview's shrink-to-fit algorhithm makes aliasing on Tess's coveralls. The aliasing isn't really there in the pictures, just in the irfanview shrunk-to-fit versions.

Then we went to the corn maze. The corn maze was four dollars each for adults. We figured that the corn maze, which was quite a walk from the other activities, would have a staffer there to take our money, but no staffer we found when we got there. We did the corn maze anyway, then, because we are hopelessly honest, we walked the quite-a-walk back and waited in line to give our eight bucks (Tess was free) to the counter lady for going through the corn maze. It was probably worth it. In going through the corn maze, Tess would trip and fall, go to have her hands brushed off by her mom, and take off again. That was pretty much how she went through the corn maze but she looked to be having a good time anyway.
About to fall:

Brushing off hands:

Off and running:

Then we went home. I thought that we encountered surprisingly few pumpkins for a Pumpkin Festival outing. They might as well have called it the Radish Celebration for all that it had to do with pumpkins.
The other outing was to the Pumpkin Festival at OBV. For that outing, we picked up the kid and took her, reason being that the whole POINT of the Pumpkin Festival Outing was to take the kid and get pictures of her doing assorted kid things. (While not the intent of the outing, I also managed to clock the kid upside the head with my heavy, metal DSLR camera. She cried. I felt bad, but not as bad as I'd've felt if the camera had been injured.)
We did several things of Tess-interest at the Pumpkin Festival. None of them involved pumpkins. Item of Interest The First: Petting Zoo. The petting zoo did not have pumpkins. It had rather a lot of baby goats, some adult goats, a jersey calf, a sheep, a piggiewig, two chickens, and a bunny. Tess liked the goat and the piggiewig. I took a shitload of pictures but it turns out that when you are trying to take pictures of a toddler AND keep her from being ovverun by livestock, your pictures look like shit. While trying to drag Tess toward the exit, I clocked her in the head with my camera. It's a heavy, big camera and it hangs around my neck so that I can't drop it. When I bend over, it swings around like a pendulum of doom at temple height for a toddler. I trust that you are all able to draw the picture of that incident from here on out. The reason, I should point out, that *I* was trying to drag the toddler out of the petting zoo was that her mother had abandoned us both to go sit in the stroller, away from the goat slobber. (It is a large and sturdy stroller of great durability and my cousin Heather is about forty or fifty pounds lighter than I am.)
After the petting zoo, there were tears, proving the parental saying that everything fun will end in tears. Following that auspicious beginning, we went to the Balloon Animal Man. (He was a real man, not a man made of balloon animals. He *made* balloon animals and other items balloonish in construction.) The Balloon Animal Man made Tess a hat of balloons that lasted until she took it off and dropped it into the wind. I took pictures of the balloon hat, some of which actually came out OK. That was lucky, because when the wind got ahold of the balloon hat, it scudded the hat along the grass until the balloons popped onetwothreefourfive, justlike that. Heather chased after the balloon hat in, as it turned out, a futile attempt to save it.


We went into the strange little hut covered in grass mats. I'm not sure what that was about but Tess liked it. I took pictures there but only got one that I really liked. (I take an awful lot of bad pictures. For the PF outing, the shutter closed a hundred and fifty times.)

Tess sat on the bench outside the strange little hut. I took pictures there, too, and got one I liked. Interestingly, irfanview's shrink-to-fit algorhithm makes aliasing on Tess's coveralls. The aliasing isn't really there in the pictures, just in the irfanview shrunk-to-fit versions.

Then we went to the corn maze. The corn maze was four dollars each for adults. We figured that the corn maze, which was quite a walk from the other activities, would have a staffer there to take our money, but no staffer we found when we got there. We did the corn maze anyway, then, because we are hopelessly honest, we walked the quite-a-walk back and waited in line to give our eight bucks (Tess was free) to the counter lady for going through the corn maze. It was probably worth it. In going through the corn maze, Tess would trip and fall, go to have her hands brushed off by her mom, and take off again. That was pretty much how she went through the corn maze but she looked to be having a good time anyway.
About to fall:

Brushing off hands:

Off and running:

Then we went home. I thought that we encountered surprisingly few pumpkins for a Pumpkin Festival outing. They might as well have called it the Radish Celebration for all that it had to do with pumpkins.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-21 06:57 pm (UTC)Just sayin'.