Gazing into my crystal ball, I do foresee that:

• We will be eating here for Dining Out For Life this upcoming Thursday.
• These photos will be considered at the San Diego County Fair’s Exhibition of Photography, and hopefully be on the list when the winners are announced in June.
  
• We will then spend five days and four nights celebrating that win, school being out, Randy’s Masters degree and our third wedding anniversary at the Cliffs in Pismo Beach.

- Randy, the husband, also known as Spinnerdude, is celebrating his fiftieth birthday today.

- I found out last night that I won an Honorable Mention ribbon at the San Diego County Fair for a photo I took back in February 2009 of a Cal Poly SLO – Navy Academy rugby match down at the Del Mar Polo Grounds.

-  Today is Friday.

I knew the photography exhibition at the San Diego County Fair was big, but had no idea it was this big.  4000 submitted photographs?  982 different photographers?  Wow.

Received an e-mail this morning providing the list of accepted entries: this photo from a February 2009 rugby match made it, this photo of Diego at last June’s vacation doesn’t seem to have made the cut.  Awards won’t be announced until June 11.

Randy and I took my Exhibition of Photography entries over to the Fair Grounds this evening.  I am now officially an Exhibitor for the 2010 San Diego County Fair.  It only took a few years of talking about it to actually get around to mounting up some prints and actually entering some shots.   Technically I guess I won’t know if my photos will actually be seen by anyone for a few weeks, but I still got Exhibitor passes and invitations to the Artists Reception when I dropped off the photos, so I’m an Exhibitor, even if I might end up being an unseen Exhibitor.

Yeah, it terrifies me that next month I could be at the Fair listening to other people discuss my work.  They’re good shots, but for nine years here I’ve been able to be a little bit of an Exhibitionist while not actually meeting very many of you.  People who don’t like what I do don’t tend to hang around, with the result being that the sites can serve as a bit of an ego boost with the occasional criticism easy to dismiss, if not outright delete.

On a mostly unrelated note, Diego was with us and got to go out on the Del Mar Racetrack due to the lack of adult supervision at the drop off site.  He looked every bit the thoroughbred out there, even if the chances of him being retired to stud range from slim to none.  Just thinking though, that maybe if we saddle him up with one of the bobbleheads and sneak them back out there we’ll have our photo entry for next year.

Spinner treated me to dinner at the San Diego County Fair last night.  The artery clogging menu included courses deep-fried zucchini spears, Australian-style batter fried potatoes, and a foot-long hot dog on a stick.  We saw no deep-fried twinkies, last year’s delicacy of choice, and a quest for chocolate covered bacon (recommended by the Sparklett’s man) was unsuccessful.  If someone has managed to merge the two flavors-above-all, we couldn’t find him.

My camera died early for want of charged batteries, hence the lack of pixels in this post, but I couldn’t have done the sunset justice anyways.  We were a hundred or so feet above the ground on top of the ferris wheel, watching the sun set over the dog beach in Del Mar as all the lights of the fair started to pop on.  If my camera had been charged I would’ve offered the operator a fortune to stay up there for half an hour or so, but had to settle for a few short minutes and commit it all to memory.  Wonderful.

We also did the roller coaster and the sky way over the fair, and took in a lot of the exhibitions and vendors.  Too much shopping and too much walking, but certainly a great night.

Sure some things are wrong.  Like blowing off work to go to the fair.  Especially when a holday already shortened the week, and you’ve been procrastinating on a writing gig.  But then, like a deep fried twinkie, you take that first bite or ride that first roller coaster, and all the moral doubts and guilt just melt away. Unlike that stuff on the inside of my arteries that will be with me forever.