Beau Jackson

Well, not really.  We went to a Celtic festival in Buffalo, MO on Saturday.  We brought the wool and spindles and tried to make a little money.  Mostly Allena ended up doing free demos but that’s ok.  We sold a couple of spindles - almost enough to pay for lunch.

I think the problem was that we had authentic Scottish weather.  That is to say…it rained all day.  There were a lot of true-blue Scotsman there, walking about in kilts with swords strapped to their hips and what-not.  However, I think the general population prefers sunny weather for their festivals.

Oh, well…it was fun anyway.   The festival was at the city park which had a play ground.  The girls played in the rain all day and had a fine time.  Dominic had some money burning a hole in his pocket, so he acquired a wooden two-handed broad-sword that he’s been swinging around the yard, slaying imaginary foes.  A boy and a stick…hours of endless playtime.

The unfortunate part in my perspective is that we didn’t get to see the Highland Games.   These include the shot-put for distance and height using a 22 pound stone.  I kept getting the image of Hamish in the movie Braveheart saying [insert heavy Scottish accent here] “I could crush you like a worm!”  It also includes tossing the caber, or as we might call it here in rural America - “log chucking”.  They had three or four other events that basically involved tossing something heavy either as far as you could, or as high as you could.  You can see the various events here:  Highland Games

All in all it was fun, even if it was wet.  We only stayed for half the day.  Our booth began to resemble a bog, and the kids were getting fussy because a) they were wet, and b) they were tired and it’s hard to nap at a festival.  Maybe next year will be dry.

Ok, for the computer geeks in my small band of readers, this will make sense and be funny:

I’ve seen these Yahoo! Avatars on a few sites, so I decided to play around with them myself.  There seems to be a way to link them into a site dynamically, but I’ll be darned if I can find a way to do it.  So, using the trusty alt+printscreen and a little trimming in paint, you can now see the avatar of me from our vacation:

If I was a better graphic artist, I’d have tailored the horse to look more like Moon.  He’s black, but he’s an appaloosa so he doesn’t have the white stripe on his face or the white socks on his feet, and he’s got white spots on his butt.  Close enough for government work though.

I upgraded to the latest version of wordpress last night, and now I’ve got these stupid characters all over my posts that look like an “A” with a carrot over them!  Grrrrr…

I also updated Allena’s and got the same thing.  Hopefully, new posts won’t have them as I really don’t want to go back and fix data - it’s a royal pain.

I was talking on the phone with my Mom this evening - she’s planning on moving to the Branson area in a year or two, so she was looking at realestate online.  Apparently, Disney has said it’s “coming to Branson”.  They didn’t say when, or in what capacity, just that they’re coming.  My first thought was “well, in the west it’s Disneyland, in the east it’s Disneyworld.  Maybe in Missouri it’ll be Disneyholler”.  What do you think?  I think it has a ring to it…hehe