April 2000

	On April 22nd Miri, Ted and Linda went to Scarborough Faire, south of Dallas in Waxahachie. This is a photo of the "Yorkshire Dungeon" which was rated PG-13, so we didn't go in there. About half the people are dressed in some form of costume (all the employees of the faire are), so during the week before, Linda made outfits: Miri got a red and gold princess dress and sparkling blue "Little Red Riding Hood" cape. Ted got a purple wizard's gown with a wizard's hat, moon on the collar and stars on the hip and hat, and Linda got a wench's outfit -- full green skirt, white blouse, and wine-colored vest.
"Jacob's Ladder" was the name of this amusement. You paid $1.00 for two tries to get to the top; no fair lying down flat. If you win, you get $5.00 back (though note that everyone refers to dollars as pounds while you're at the faire; it's a good thing the prices aren't really that high). Here's Miri having a go....
	...and coming down off the other side.
...same thing happened for Ted!
	Here's Ted at the armory. He wanted a sword but didn't have quite enough money for this one. I made him the wizard's costume. It has tiny moons and stars on purple cloth, which gives it a motley appearance from this distance. The circle next to the moon on his color is his "Dragon Slayer" badge from one of those games where  you bang the mallet down and make a bit rise to ring the bell. Both Ted and Miri succeeded in ringing the smallest bell.
Here's Miri getting a camel ride. There were two camels and one elephant. I guess one camel must've been ornery because no one ever got to ride it, though the keeper walked it round and round. $3.00 for just one circle around a small field!
	Next we went to the haberdasherie. Ted really wanted this hat (and a bigger one) but it was $45.00. Still, we figured though we couldn't have the hat, at least we could have a photo of him wearing it.
It got a little warm, and I couldn't convince Ted to take off his T-shirt and shorts and just wear briefs underneat the costume. It seems he felt that as long as he had clothes on under, it was a costume, but if he just got down to the shorts, he felt he was wearing a dress. So here he's cooler but less colorful. And trying "Jacob's Ladder" again. This one you got 3 tries for $1.00, but it was no easier. Ted spent his last $3.00 having nine tries and nine spills. This is as close as he came. If he could've gotten his hands on the next rung, and his feet on the one below where his hands are in the photo, he'd have had it.
	...but there he goes again!
Ted chose to spend his faire allowance on a short sword, a quite bejeweled one. He found another knight his age willing to do battle, and they spent several minutes bravely battling each other. Earlier we had seen jousting (on horseback) and some Scottish pole-chucking events.
	It being Dave's birthday, we looked all around for a present for him. We finally settled on making him a pair of wax-cast hands, one from Miri and one from Ted. First they dipped their arms into a barrel of freezing cold water and stayed there for a slow count of ten. Then they dipped their arms into a vat of hot, clear wax that looked thin as water. When they removed a hand from the wax, we had to wipe the "boogers" off (hey, that's what they called them!) Here's Ted's hands, with boogers dripping down. He had his fingers crossed.
The photo above and below both show hands pretty far into the process. You dipped and then waited a minute for the wax to cool, and dipped again. The first layer was considered a "sealing" layer, and then you had to dip at least 12 more times.
	Here's Miri's hand, ready to be "cut off" ("Go over there dear and they'll take a knife and cut off your hand....") They made a clean cut around the wrist and then....
...gently tugged the hand out of the cooling but still-soft wax. One couple had their hands done, holding hands with fingers interlaced (about three dips into the process they had to tie their arms together so they wouldn't strain the cast).
	Next, the hands had to float in a barrel of cold water for a minute or two. Here you can see Miri's costume better. She bought the hat and feather herself, with her faire allowance, to match her dress and cape.
If you wanted to pay even more money... you could have your hand-cast colored. Both kids chose rainbow colorings, and here's Miri's being dipped...
	...and removed so you can see how they did it.
Then the hands go back in the water to cool more, and you're done! This was pretty much the end of our day at Scarborough Faire. Next it was back to Mesquite, to the Super 8 Motel that Dave had helped build, back so many years ago when he was working temp jobs when he first came to America. Best Super 8 in the area because they have a heated outdoor pool that is open all year, and it's not a vacation if Miri doesn't get to swim at least once.
	On Thursday, April 27th, the 4th and 5th grades of Midland Academy Charter School did a retrospective of music from the 40s to the 90s. Miri got to be a 50s girl, and you can see her here in the middle of the front row, in a light blue skirt. This is one of the two chorus sections they had, but some kids got to come out and do special bits.
Miri's big gig was "Rockin' Robin" and here you can see her dancing with her partner.
	When she finally got to try on the "poodle skirt" I made for her, the first time she spun in it she said, "This is the dress I've always wanted!" Something that really flares when you twirl is wonderful fun. Here she is outside our house this morning (Saturday, the 29th), demonstrating how well the dress turns.
And here she's showing that though the dress is of the peculiar American 1950s variety of "poodle skirt" we decided to do cats (because they were less complicated than all the fluff of poodles, and none of us like poodles very much, and we do have a black cat and a tan cat now) (and when they told Linda on Tuesday that she had to have a 50s outfit ready by Thursday, she nearly lost it altogether so this was a bit of a dash-together).
	Yesterday, Friday, Miri went out turtle-hunting as she has ever since I mentioned that local wildlife expert Burr Williams says that spring is not really here until the turtles come out of hibernation -- and yesterday she found one of our desert box turtles.
You might think it's easy to get a photo of a turtle, after all they're the "slow and steady runs the race" sort of creature. But I'm not so sure. Maybe that's the tortoise and turtles aren't that slow (they had Turtle Races at Scarborough Faire but mostly that was 20 minutes of warm-up patter and jokes and 2 minutes of silly cheering while the reptiles wandered around).
	But here's an image that shows you how difficult it was to catch this particular "Speedy" the box turtle. I took lots and lots of photos of empty ground, as one second it was just sitting there and the next second it was gone! But here I got an image of it in "take off for rocket blast" mode.