Surreptitious with the camera

The Renaissance Festival was pretty fun, and it didn't rain--which was a nice surprise. (Silly weather forecasters.) At times, the sun was even out. It was darned cold though and even with four layers I was chilly the entire day. Since my camera has a nifty little flip-screen, I can sometimes easily take pictures of people without their knowledge, since I can aim the camera without looking in the direction of the aiming, which allowed me to take some fun shots, such as the one of the baby eating the pretzel at right. He was so into his pretzel. I actually took about five pictures of him. He cracked me up.

I also took this shot of a man singing loudly. It was loud all around when he was singing, so I couldn't hear the words to his song, but he was pretty into it, whatever it was. This, kids, is where a degree in liberal arts will land you if you don't watch it. Riding around wearing a scarf under a toga and singing a song at the top of you voice with only one random person with a camera paying any attention to you...

Sad, really. But funny.

I didn't get to see much of the belly dancers, sadly, due to our little group always being in the wrong place at the wrong time and them being on the other side of the festival grounds. Maybe they were avoiding us. I did briefly get to see the chick balancing a sword on top of her head and gyrating and sliding and sexying her way across the mud (and there was a lot of mud), but it was over all too briefly. Alas.

Speaking of mud, this guy was having himself a jolly old time. At this Renaissance festival they have what's called a theater in the ground, and there are "mud shows" on and off throughout the day. We were treated to a very sloppy, slippery, sloopy goodgey messy rendition of Beowulf, in which many audience members were covered in mud. Thankfully our group was far enough back in the seats that we didn't get any on us, but this also meant that we were unable to see a lot of the action in the actual mud pit. Which was a sacrifice I was willing enough to make. At one point this dude to the right here walked out into the audience and sat down next to a teenaged girl and slopped his arm around her shoulders and covered her back and her very long black hair with goops of globby mud. Fortunately for her, she was a good sport about it, and the other girls she was with made lots of fun of her even as they were very glad they weren't the ones with blurbs of cold mud running down their Renaissance festival finery.

We also saw some neat trampoline tricks--they had one of those nifty whatsits that you hook into and jump about twenty feet into the air with, and you can flip all around and fling and fly about in the cold air. I didn't do it because it cost extra dollars and they only let you do it for about two minutes. While I was there I also purchased this nifty-o chalice to the left here, which has a nice big bowl to it so I can drink oodles of hot tea, which I have been doing nonstop for about two weeks now. I like my tea out of a big-ass cup, because it always seems to concentrated to me in a regular-sized mug, and this thing is perfect--it holds about two mugs' worth of hot water. Got it for a bargain, too--marked down to $10 from $16, so I was pleased. I drank two tumblers of orange spice herbal tea out of it last night. Delicous.

In the evening last night M and I went over to my parents' place. My dad was gone for the weekend at his deacon class thingie, but my mom and their three dogs were there. My middle brother, the one who married the crazy girl, was there with his wife and their two dogs, so between all them and our three, there were eight dogs in the yard. We had a fire out in the back and the dogs ran about working out their dominance issues. My other brother stopped by to show us his latest purchase. This brother is more into Halloween than anyone I know, so look forward to some cool pictures the day after Halloween. He goes over to my parents' house every year and turns the backyard into a haunted yard and terrorizes small children and even punkish teenagers. He has this giant rat thing on a string that he yanks to make it move, and rigs up this man made out of stuffed overalls and a jack-o-lantern to fall out of a tree, and builds all these enormous scarecrows modeled after the ones from that Sleepy Hollow movie with Johnny Depp, and a fog machine and strobe lights and black lights and all sorts of stuff.

Okay. On that note...this post has become large and unwieldy, and so I shall leave you with a large and unwieldy picture I took yesterday of SuperNippleBoy doing God knows what. Enjoy!