Tourney of the Rose and The Fair

Hi, everyone! I hope you had a nice weekend. I'm finally back home and looking forward to inking this month's TGF designs tomorrow!

So this past Saturday my boyfriend and I went to the Moose Lodge in Palm Beach Gardens, where the Tourney of the Rose was taking place. Thanks to a friend's kindness I had pretty garb to wear, which was nice. Plus Will was nice enough to buy me a belt on the spot, and I also had the pendant he got me at Gulf Wars to wear along with his token and all the little site tokens and other things I've collected since I started going to SCA events with him.

The thing I enjoyed the most at this event was taking photos. In fact, since I can't seem to become interested into any particular SCA craft or activity, I think this is what I will dedicate myself to: get a really nice camera and just go around taking pictures of everyone. I'm sure everyone will enjoy looking at them later and at least I feel that I am doing something helpful that isn't easy to screw up very badly.

This is my favorite of all the photos I took:

On Sunday, as planned, we went to the Miami Dade County Fair! It was SOO awesome. Every year I look forward to the Fair almost as much as to, oh, I don't know, Christmas. I love it! As soon as we went in we ate a couple of arepas, then I bought a hat and souvenir pencil holder and we asked one of the salesguys to take a photo of us together:

One of the best things in the entire day happened almost immediately after: they had a petting zoo! Full of goats and cows and other critters like zebras and giant tortoises and kangaroos, but most importantly... GOATS!

Many of you know I love goats, and if you didn't, well, now you do! Goats are one of my favorite critters along with deer, owls, squirrels and garden snails. That one up there totally loved a good scratch! They had little cups with sliced carrots for sale at $1.00 each, and I bought six. This is one of the photos Will took while I went around feeding these cuties:

Isn't that adorable?! It's so cute I can hardly stand it! I even submitted it to Cute Overload. First time I submit anything there. I hope it gets posted!

Another interesting thing was that they had a large display of dioramas made by schoolchildren, and I recognized a lot of Safari Ltd animal replicas in them. You can visit this thread in the Laughing Giraffe forum to see those photos; here is just one of them:

As you can see it was a very fun weekend for me, but very exhausting as well as expensive. I am looking at my bank account and can't figure out some of today's charges... One shows up as a very unhelpful "Miami" for all reference and I cannot remember what it was. At this point I am beginning to fear I got swindled on something, and when it happens on the last day of the Fair that is Bad News. Hopefully I will remember whatever it was.

Wishing you all a nice week,

-Marina