You're Doing It Wrong

I lived in two different houses growing up, both in southern California. We had an ice cream truck in both those neighborhoods. The second neighborhood was deep suburbia.

At the first neighborhood, when I was little, it worked like this: When you heard the music, you had to run and ask your Mom if you could get something. If she said yes you ran out to the curb as fast as you could and stuck your hand out so he would stop. If your Mom said, no, then you’d run out and stand by the truck and hope someone else’s mom took pity on you and got you something. Otherwise you had to watch your friend have an ice cream while you just sat there which seemed tragically unfair at the time.

At the second neighborhood I was already babysitting and had money but was often too cool to stand around buying ice cream from a truck with the babies.

The trucks were like white delivery trucks with a big open window in the side where you’d order your ice cream and the ice cream man would pull them out of freezers built into the truck. The truck had pictures on the side of the different choices. They also had candy. There was this one kind of ice cream that came in a cardboard cone. The ice cream part covered colored plastic stick with an animal that would be revealed when you finished your treat. If you got a white stick you got a free ice cream. It might be you had to get a white lion or something, I can’t remember that part.

When I was in junior high one of my friends was “friends” with the ice cream man and sometimes he would let her ride on the truck. The rest of us were never allowed to ride on the truck due to “insurance” reasons. I remember being kind of envious.

Now I think it’s creepy.

Recently there have been a glut of ice cream trucks in our neighborhood which is walking distance from two mini-marts and a Safeway.

Every time I hear that winky-dinky ice cream truck music I run to the window and look. I’ve never seen anyone stop one of them. Every time it’s a different vehicle. Some of them aren’t even trucks. I saw a beat-up two door something and yesterday a minivan with the driver lighting a cigarette. I saw one that looked like the carts that Portland law enforcement uses except it was painted orange.

I don’t think a minivan should be allowed to be an ice cream truck. Do they just open the back and pull stuff out of a cooler packed with dry ice? Is there a menu? I guess I should have stopped it and found out before doing this post.

Now that I’m a grown up and don’t need to ask my Mom for money, I buy fruit pops at the grocery store. (I like lemon and lime.) And I eat one whenever I want, even at 10am or a half hour before dinner, usually sitting on the back porch in the sun.

On Monday I worked a half day and Bob and I headed out to the Clark County Fair. I’m not sure words can convey just how awesome it was.

What’s a fair without food? The first thing I wanted when I got there was my peach milkshake. We’ve waiting in much longer lines. The advantages of going on a weekday. And still they were doing a brisk business. I can’t imagine what it must be like on Saturday.

After my shake I was full and it was hot so I was worried I wasn’t going to be able to eat anything else. Just what a person should worry about.

Check out the lady wearing the sting dress. I didn’t even notice until just this second. I don’t freak out around bees but the large quantity of bees loitering around the displays eventually made me nervous.

Hi Mr. Bunny! That wire cage looks like an awesome place to spend the day. They have everything at the fair. Tons of bunnies, chickens, sheep, cows. They also had an exotic animal exhibit with tigers and stuff and for the first time in my life I was like, “Where the hell is PETA?”

Look at this guy! He’s bigger than my car.

I really wanted to see some baby pigs and we didn’t see any pigs anywhere except here. And the sign for some sort of pig races. I’m not sure if we just missed them. Maybe Clark County isn’t pig territory. Or maybe swine flu paranoia. I read today that there have been 11 cases of swine flu in the world resistant to Tamiflu and two (2!) were in the state of Washington. Awesome.

I still wanted to see baby pigs and was denied.

One of the top ten foods in the world: fried dough!

The featured program we wanted to see: jousting. I think it was called Knights of the Realm. In the beginning, one of the fair directors came out to tell us all about fair happenings but in the middle the audio died.

So they brought out the Boy Scout color guard and some lady walking through the mud in heels to sing the National Anthem. (Yes, before the jousting, not sure exactly how that works.) Except we couldn’t hear her because no audio and Staind was doing their soundcheck at the amphitheater next door.

Turns out jousting is sort of like baseball or football meaning there’s only a few minutes of action and then lots of filler. But they play a lot of “Lord of the Rings”-like music. The knights were cute and I’ll watch anything with cute knights. It was a fun show but with lots of weird boring parts.

The last thing we watched was the dock dogs which are adorable doggies jumping into a big swimming pool trying to catch things in their mouths.

Other things we ate: baked potato, giant cup filled with fruit (me, obviously), double hamburger with grilled onions, roasted cashews. It was really hot otherwise I would have eaten more things. I wanted fried dough, and a corndog, obviously (hi Shane) and one of those giant fried onion flowers. I could have eaten a lot more.

Someone just tossed these in the trash. And yes, our garbage cans say: Vancouver Sparkles.

I just did a Target run. I bought a bunch of stuff like a purple sports bra and new kitchen dish rags because all of mine smell mildewy and gross.

My wedding anniversary is coming up and I thought I’d get my sweetheart a card. We both buy each other stuff all the time so we don’t really celebrate couple-y events like anniversaries or Valentines by exchanging gifts. But I thought it would be nice to have a card to hand him.

All the anniversary cards at Target were huge tri-fold or multi-fold things with foil or rhinestones or whatever. And they were like $4.50. Not to be cheap but isn’t it ridiculous to pay $4.50 for something that’s going to be opened and then thrown away? For another few bucks I could buy him a CD or a book or a bunch of stuff from the dollar menu at Taco Bell. Do they have a dollar menu at Taco Bell? I haven’t been there since the 90’s.

I didn’t get him a card. I’ll get some construction paper and make him one. Or maybe just write happy anniversary on a piece of scrap paper. Or just say it really sincerely.

The plant of millions of unripe tomatoes. Part of this guy collapsed under the weight of its fruit and enthusiastic growing. I propped it up with another cage this afternoon.

I finally bought a new pocket camera. I put it off because I bought myself a nice camera. But the nice camera is big and it seemed silly to buy another camera. But my old pocket camera is a pocket piece of crap. I did about 5 minutes of research before I bought it and even then I wondered if I would regret it later and I did.

So now I have a new pocket camera that I can take to the office and on walks and now bug everyone everywhere I go by taking pictures of everything. yay.

woo!