Elderberry Pie, Chemicals, French Fries and Onions

Otherwise to be entitled the Recap of Fair Week.

One year ago, dear hubby offered to allow the fair to use our house on Saturday for the dinner for the band, a place for the bus driver to sleep and dinner for the fair managers.  You see, each year on Saturday they have a country music singer as the entertainment and every year it poses a problem of where the bus driver can sleep, where the band members can shower and where to serve them dinner.  Our house, which borders the fairgrounds seemed like such a logical solution to HIM, so HE offered.  That was the first time I threatened him with "I know where you sleep"  Usually fair week in years past has my house looking like nothing short of the aftermath of a Category 4 hurricane by Saturday, but this year was going to have to be different.  I cleaned and cleaned and CLEANED and still I felt it was not clean enough, but enough of that and on to the Rain Gutters/Elderberry Pie incident.

The rain gutters on our house and garage were starting the resemble those "green space" roofs that they are trying to promote in cities everywhere.  Maybe they drove by here and saw my gutters and that is where they got the idea.  Seriously though, there were weeds in the the gutters that were three feet high in some places.  I think that my gutters were the only wet spots in the yard.  John is not big on getting his feet off the ground and while I don't mind getting up in the air, I try to take into account my clumsiness and not get that high up in the air.  Having asked our carpenter friend earlier in the summer about cleaning out the gutters and reminding him several times over the summer, I approached him last Monday and asked/demanded that again.  He made some comment about how I should have given him more warning and while I had...I decided to take the NICE approach and not the B*&%$...NOT NICE approach and offer him the elderberry pie that he keeps mentioning.  This is where things turn.  He jumps at the offer and says that he will be there the next day.  Now, I am not a pie baker, I can paint a picture of  a pie, and I can manage a canned fruit pie here or there and even make my own crust but truthfully, they are not that good, so why bother, but my step-daughter makes about the best pie crust I have ever put in my mouth, although mostly she makes them for her FIL, but that is another story for another time

Dear hubby John volunteers at the fair for the entire week and works from 8 am until 11 pm every day, but before he goes there on Wednesday, his job is to go and pick the elderberries.  After all, they are HIS gutters also and HE volunteered the house.  He leaves and gets them with a huge story of tromping through the swamp and getting wet...blah, blah blah, honestly you would have thought he was hunting alligators in the Everglades instead of elderberries in the backyard as much as he complained.  On to Jenn who had never made an elderberry pie.  She gets to work and explains to me that her oven is not working and she is going to make that elderberry pie in my kitchen.  MY KITCHEN!  I thought I was having a heart attack!!!  I had just cleaned and polished and rubbed and buffed and would not even allow John to make toast for breakfast in my kitchen!  That is where my MIL got involved...when I said that since I was taking the boys to the fair that night, she could spend some quality time with her grandmother and make the pie at her house.  Three hours, purple hands, two little boys hopped up on cotton candy and carnival rides later...we had an elderberry pie.  Do I have clean gutters?  Well, the garage gutters were clean, but in the process, the carpenter thought that the tree needed trimmed and now I had a pile of brush that needed cleaned up before Saturday, the gutters on the house still are not cleaned, the elderberry pie was so sour that you had to really douse it with sugar to eat it.  The carpenter got one piece of pie...and the gutters are still not cleaned out.  I know that there is an episode of Seinfield in there somewhere. 

Chemicals

In my haste to clean my painting counter, I tried The Works for toilet bowls and when that wasn't doing anything, I wiped it up and sprayed them with window cleaner...big mistake!  I lost a few brain cells in that one.

Onion car.

Thursday night found me heading to Walmart with a list when the Fair decided that they needed stopwatches for the show that night.  Someone else had already been sent and they bought pedometers?  I left work at 4:30, rushed to Walmart (17 miles away), flew through my list and picked up the stopwatches and back in my car.  Big problem, I had forgot to put the garbage from the house in the dumpster at work and my car, sitting closed up in the parking lot now smelled...mostly of onions, but also of other yucky garbage items. I did make it back to the fairgrounds with the stopwatches before six for the show.

French Fry Car.

Our church mans the fireman's food stand at the fair all day on Friday every year and John and I organize that so we are there from 10 am until midnight.  (that is his day off from volunteering in the office) Saturday AM when I went to get in my car...French Fry Grease was the air freshener of the day.

Onion Car

The caterer that prepared all the food on Saturday kept filling garbage bags and I kept taking them out and throwing them in the back of the truck, which was in the garage with all the brush in it from the Elderberry pie incident and a garbage can full of gutter stuff.  By Sunday morning, my car smelled of onions AGAIN as well as gutter stuff and some other non-descript odors.

Locking me out!

Monday morning when John arrived at the shop, he questioned why the screens were not in place on the windows and I had to admit to how many times I had to crawl in windows because I kept locking myself out...why didn't I use the same window every time?

Fun week?  You bet.  I got to see Kendall ride her first carnival ride.  She loved it!  I got to spend time with all of my babies and visit with people and now I am enjoying a clean home. 

And now more craft items.