Saturday, July 31, 2010

Judging

Yesterday we judged the third day of the Clermont County Fair Flower Show. It took more time than the other days as the exhibits seemed to be more closely matched. The exhibits all looked good but you can see where the dry weather is setting in. Today I saw my first spider mites on the edge of soybean fields on Farmers Road.

We had quite a crowd watching as we got down to the Best of Show. The dahlias often win but yesterday there was a little too much damage from the drought on the foliage. We picked a baby's shoe full of a flower arrangement for Baby's First Steps or whatever they called that category. The theme categories are always interesting and the Midway them is shown in the big arrangements on the left of this picture.

Today I had to get a new padlock for the old barn and some rough service bulbs for the grain dump building. The Martinsville Mall didn't have any so Sable and I wondered over to the old Murphy Hardware store in Lynchburg managed by Charlie Spaeth and his daughter and grand daughter. Charlie used to run the only grocery store in town and knows Lynchburg as well as anyone.

Lynchburg has seen quite a demise over the past 50 years like most rural towns but a few good stores are holding on. I will have to go there more often as he said his business is off half from last year. The big box stores like Lowe's and WalMart has killed most of the mom and pop stores and I much prefer spending my money in the little stores.

They do have two good little diners in Lynchburg and we eat there once in awhile. Cantrell's First Stop killed off the good little Marathon station and has the only groceries in Lynchburg now. That's a similar story across the nation, no matter the town.

Tomorrow we go judge the Great Greene County Fair in Xenia. Xenia is famous for the tornado that almost destroyed it back in 1974 when I was a young teacher driving through Xenia to take an FFA member to the DP&L FFA Awards in Dayton. We made it but we were lucky to tell about it. Thirty something people didn't.

It's Xenia too, not Zenia. It is pronounced zenia like Xavier is pronounced zavier not X avier like lots of people do. Words that start with X really messes people up in English.

They had another tornado a few years back that just about destroyed the fairgrounds, too.

Such was the last day of July for us.

How was your day?

Ed Winkle

2 comments:

  1. The fair liked my pictures so much they asked permission to use them for promotion.

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