Now that it's not three AM, I wonder where my brain was that it decided to head right down the road to deadly seriousness with that last entry. Seriously need to learn to feel the facts with my gut.
In other news, The Grown Ups were down for the weekend. As is always the case with a visit from my family, we actually do things.
On Friday, we went to a little town half an hour north of here for their Thresher's Festival. They had all kinds of steam engines running old threshing machines, husking corn and grinding sorghum and that kind of thing. They also had a saw mill turning trees into lumber.
Saturday we went to the Fort Massac encampment down in Metropolis. They have a revolutionary war fort down there and they've had the encampment for something like thirty years. The place was packed, being Saturday. They had a battle in the afternoon that was OK, but not exactly anything military. For one thing, they only had ten guys on a side, and that's not really enough to form revolutionary ranks.
The other thing they lacked is that in a battle situation your goal is to take something. Unlike most first person shooter games, the goal is not to shoot all their guys before they shoot you. You're supposed to be trying to gain something, and the deaths are more an unfortunate side effect of your actions.
In a real battle, you're trying to gain a hill, or get their cannon, or sink their ship and get control of the river, or take their fort, or whatever you're going to do in order to try to get the other side to say, OK, enough. (This is why it's next to impossible to declare war on a noun, and really impossible to deal with militant terrorists, there is no "enough" line in that situation.)
Anyway, these guys were pretty much on a field shooting at each other, and when the French and the Indians killed enough of the Scots and the British, the French assumed they'd won. It was neat to watch 'em fire the weapons and give commands and all that, but it wasn't much in the way of a battle compared to some of the other re-enactments I've seen.
Still, it was a huge affair and really nice weather and it's cool to watch the demonstrations.
Sunday was the local Vulture Fest, which is basically a dirty hippie festival in a town of about 300 that has next to no ordnances since their last mayor left office. (Or so I've heard.) It's a festival more about the atmosphere than anything else. There's a bronze sculpture shop there that has a pretty elaborate garden out back and there are a lot of country gypsy bands that play, it's a sort of nifty place.
That's what I've been doing lately. Pictures up on Flickr whenever I get them up there.