And now, traveling back in time to August: The Orange County Fair

I'm going to try to race through the last 3 months of posts I haven't had a chance to write. Here we go...

N and I went to the Orange County Fair on August 4th. We went to the LA County Fair last year, which was fun, but we liked the OC Fair more. It was generally cleaner, more organized and had a lot more interesting activities going on.

There were, of course, adorable animals to see, including these pygmy goats (WANT):

Aside from the regular farm animals, we also saw camels, ostriches and all kinds of pretty song birds. But animal-wise, by far the coolest thing we saw were two real oxen. Yes, oxen--like from The Oregon Trail. I had never seen oxen in real life before, and my jaw almost dropped. They are MASSIVELY HUGE. It was something just being able to stand near them.

We also saw a trick dog show that was fun. All the performing dogs were rescues, which was nice. There was a lot of frisbee catching and jump-roping, but the most impressive trick we saw was this:

Pretty awesome balance there!

The fair also hosted a ton of contests including woodworking, scrapbooking and lots of different foods. All the entries were on display. The most interesting contest, though (in my opinion), was the tablescaping contest.

I'd only heard of tablescapes from Sandra Lee's show on Food Network. I thought it was so interesting that there's a whole competition devoted to them (and kind of weird, I have to admit). They had all kinds of themes, including Disney movies:

Various holidays:

And colors:

And, of course, you can't go to a fair without eating fried food! Aside from our regular funnel cake and cotton candy, we also tried these Australian Battered Potatoes, which were pretty good:

All in all it was a fun day out. OC Fair, we might see you again next year...

Up to the Bay Area to visit Niece Hannah

A couple weekends ago, I flew up to the San Francisco area to see my family. N had to stay behind because he still needs to accrue vacation time at his new job. I got a good amount of outlet shopping done (and also came home with a Le Creuset Dutch Oven, yeah!!), but I also spent quality time with Hannah, my 20 month old niece. Get ready for some gratuitous cute baby photos!

My sister and Hannah on the merry-go-round at Happy Hollow Park and Zoo:

Hannah and I taking an Icee break at the park:

Hannah having way too much fun sitting in a car ride that went around and around in a circle:

Hannah looooves holding Yooni the shih tzu in her lap, but I'm not sure if Yooni enjoys it as much as Hannah does:

Yooni's cute too, so I had to take a photo of her:

And this photo isn't from my recent trip up north, but it's a good one, and it seems like I can't publish a single post on this blog without Stewie in it. So here's Hannah heartily patting Stewie on the head:

Stewie yawning (just for fun)