Safety Fair

The weekend is going way too quickly. Anakah showed late this morning all excited about returning to the “Kids Safety fair”. She went out last night with a local church group. The Kids Safety Fair is a scam setting bringing together lots of private non-profit and for profit entities in an effort for these groups to get a lot of exposure under the disguise of meeting to teach the community “safety tips. What results is just unmitigated chaos. Kids, kids and more kids with parents in toe—a lot of what looked like divorced dads having the kids looking for a cheap kid day. Many of the vendors at the fair have candy and crap to give away as an enticement to bring the parents to their table to hook the parent in for the big items. So there is lots of low-income there trying to get their hands on anything the can, add to that the low-middle class and the seniors and you have pandemonium. One of the attractions, this year, was the paint your face booth. I don’t even know what the “paint your face” vendor even was but there was a huge line for the face painters. There were other huge serpentine lines but nothing like “paint your face.”

As a rule I avoid events like the safety fair, to much chaos and to many people, but today I caved. I really wanted to get out and drop into the local Office
Depot where the are closing and has a much of liquidation prices. Tomorrow is our 17th anniversary and I still needed to get a gift for Dianne and I finally realized what I could get her which I think she will really like and really use. They had some mp3 players for 50% off and I wanted to get one before tomorrow. But Dianne and Anakah wanted to go to the fair with them—I should have just said “no” but they were welling to stop at Office Depot so I figured why not? Dianne also sweetened the pot but suggested the we would have dinner at Joe’s Crab shack.—hum and I caved.

I tried to stay out of people’s way. Kids everywhere, little kids, fat kids, Hispanic, Asian, Indian and lots of low-income kids. Tattoos, gross outfits you know, fat chicks forcing themselves into clothes they should never consider and then strut round thinking the look hot. Anakah chose a bunny face to be drawn on her face: red nose and lots of glitter and of course buck teeth drawn on her chin.
Thankfully it was finally time to leave. Anakah had collected another bag of freebies seemed happy enough. We drove over to the Crab Shop and were surprised to see how many other animal faced kids were there. Anakah felt right at home. We had a twenty minute wait which was not too bad and but we finally got the call and we had a pretty good dinner. Still, I always am disappointed at the meals end at the crab shack. Too much grease and the taste is lacking I am rarely pleased just a lot of hype.

So a long day but I got the present I wanted for Dianne. I hope she likes it. Then I found out we are doing mongo tomorrow for Gabes birthday. /this is a lost weekend…Sigh.