a veritable smorgasbord

really cute future farmer showing his first-place winning goat

a couple of things learned at the utah state fair today:  

1) if you think piglets are cute on the internet, you should see them in real life!

sorry for being such a voyeur, mama!

2) deep-fried snickers are slightly disappointing.

3) i'm really sad i never got to do 4-h and show a goat at the fair.  did you know they're judged on, among other things, their dairy characteristics and how well their mammary apparatus is attached?

 also, utah is number 14 in the nation in pork production.

piglet, irl.

found this state fair poem and lifted it from the poetry foundation website in honor of today's outing:

Butter

BY ANDREA COHEN

I’ve never seen the land

of milk and honey, but at

the Iowa State Fair I glimpsed

a cow fashioned of butter.

It lived behind a window

in an icy room, beneath klieg lights.

I filed past as one files

past a casket at a wake.

It was that sad: a butter cow

without a butter calf. Nearby I spied

a butter motorcycle, motorcycle-

sized, a mechanical afterthought

I thought the cow might have liked to ride.

You don’t drive a motorcycle; you ride it.

But not if you’re a butter cow, not

if you’re a butter cow who’s seen, if

not the land of milk and honey, the land

of milk, and dwelled within it.

It had a short life span, the butter cow.

Before it died, I looked

deep into its butter eyes. It saw

my butter soul. I could

have wept, or spread myself,

for nobody, across dry toast.