Emi Makes Stuff

Today I finally went to the Clackamas County Fair. This has been a year in the making, since another blogger I love made a post about the fair last year – but she post it on the last day it happened, so I didn’t get to go since that was the first I’d ever heard of it. My mom is actually the one who first pointed me to that blog post, and so we’ve both been waiting all year to get our chances to go.

We brought my brother, Noah, and his girlfriend, Annette

– but actually ended up splitting up with them pretty quickly, once it became clear my mom and I were the only ones who wanted to check out the animals and 4-H displays and whatnot. We started at the bunny barn.

I don’t know if I can properly convey to you how absolutely gigantic this white bunny was. I asked my mom to put her hand in the picture to give a sense of proportion but it doesn’t quite do the trick. Suffice it to say: huge bunny that I wanted to take home, so I could have a dog-sized bunny hopping around the apartment. I imagined taking him out on walks in the neighborhood, too. He would have a rhinestone collar, of course.

I have nothing to say about this next bunny except that yes, it really is a bunny, and not an adorable Ewok-like creature:

After the bunny barn, we stopped by the bird barn. While we were in the bunny barn, my mom kept talking about the smell, which I barely noticed. But once we entered the bird barn I was like “whew, it sure is smelly in here” to which my mom said, “really? I thought it smelled worse in with the bunnies”. Further essential information about the differences between my mother and me have emerged: we now both know that I prefer the smell of bunny poop to the smell of bird poop, and her vice versa.

I only took one picture in the bird barn, and that’s because, aside from ducks, I think most birds are pretty foul (fowl? ahahaha. get it?)….. anyway, I took the picture for just this reason since this particular turkey was incredibly angry and also truly hideous.

What is that fucking thing they have hanging down atop their nose? It makes it look like that is their nose, which is disturbing. Anyway, turkeys are delicious, I’ll give them that.

I wish I had taken a picture of some of the tags on the cages. The animals who were disqualified for competition all had these kind of disheartening little tags with words like “unfit” and “low quality”. It was like adding insult to injury. Most of them were just kind of sad, but some of them were really funny and odd, especially since half the time laymen like us really couldn’t see anything wrong with the chickens at all. But much like the way I find every English Bulldog absolutely adorable despite what may be very serious flaws in its gait or coat or what have you, I think chickens all look the same, and are all pretty much awful, so what’s one extra black feather or two? I felt downright generous in all my ill-thoughts toward chickens after reading those tags.

After the bird barn, we went to visit the swine, and llamas, and cows. I love cows. I got to pet a few, as did my mama.

There was a baby cow, too!

It looks like this llama was being really cooperative and helpful in terms of letting me photograph him without moving, but actually he was just not moving for a really long time. He was like a llama of stone. So getting this adorable photo of him was super easy.

After visiting with all the animals, we just kind of walked around a bit. I took some pictures using my Hipstamatic app for iPhone.

One of the main reasons I love fairs is because of fair food, so, between the two of us, my mom and I had 2 corn dogs, 1 lemonade, 1 slice of lemon meringue pie, and one of those little paper baskets full of cheese curds. And we both bought bags of Kettle Corn to take home!

I would like to say that this is a totally overexaggerated face I’m making, in which I am pretending to attack the corn dog with such absolute ferocity – but unfortunately, I just asked my mom to take a picture of me biting into my delicious corn dog and apparently this is the horrifying face I make when I am doing that. Note to self: you should not eat corn dogs of this magnitude in public, Emi.

Last, but not least, I took one last picture as the light was fading, which created some strange effects. Everyone meet His Eminence, Holy Lemon Meringue Pie:

Today I don’t have pictures of what I’ve “made” because it was pretty awful, actually.

At school there was some kind of mysterious hair color curse afoot. There were a bunch of color-related mishaps and subsequent corrections and redos.

I got a little girl (well, like, 12) who wanted a pink shadowbox and purple bangs. Already this is slightly questionable just because she wanted to keep the rest of her dishwater blonde hair natural – which is kind of a bunch of weird color combinations, but whatevs. The real problem was that pretty much the only vibrant colors we carry at my school are all in the red family (and no true pink). So myself and two of the instructors basically just mixed colors to try to achieve as close a result as we could. What happened was her shadowbox ended up, like, Ronald McDonald red with just a little bit of a pinkish tint, and her bangs ended up this really subdued kind of grayish violet that basically looked like what would happen if you dipped blonde hair in grape kool-aid. But miraculously (or because she was 12) she seemed to love it anyway. I just did not love it. Although I feel like if someone comes in wanting a crazy-ass vibrant red, I now know exactly how to achieve that using our color line.

Then 2 other people also had color issues tonight, and both were worse than mine since they had to attempt to correct it, which I did not. So, although I didn’t love the results I got tonight, the client did, I was done by 8:30 even though I double-processed both sections (lightener then color, I mean), and it could’ve been worse, so I’m alright with it I guess. Let’s just say I’m not chalking it up as a win, but I’m not chalking it up as a loss either.

Plus Tia asked me to help with her mom’s hair because I’m “really good at haircutting”, which was awesome, although I was a minimal help at best since I’m still honing my texturizing skills and that’s what she needed most. But it was nice to be asked for help as though I might know what I’m doing. And then Tina, one of my instructors, said “yea, you are really good”.

I also got my own hair colored while I was at work today, and it looks badass (and that I have a picture of, although not a very high quality one – it’s purple folks)! So although I called a draw with the actual hair color, I call today overall a win!

Today I made something fairly mundane, but also totally refreshing: cucumber water!

One of the girls I go to school with keeps bringing in these jugs of water filled with bright green cucumber slices and every time she brings one in I get thirsty just looking at it.

It’s hard for me to drink just plain old water – I always feel like I’m missing out on flavor, on taste, and on carbonation. This should solve two out of three of those problems, and hopefully get me drinking much more water.

Anyway, here is what I did:

I sliced 1 large cucumber (do not peel), and divided it into two little 1-qt jugs I have. Then I squeezed the juice out of half a lemon, and added half of that to each jug. I threw some fresh mint in, covered it all with ice-cold water, and put it in the fridge and let it sit overnight so that the water will really take on the flavor of that cucumber goodness.

Voila!