How do you solve a problem like Maria?

I schedule appointments.  I don't like common names.  Why does every other female spanish speaking client have to be named Maria?  Are there not enough names to go around?  And if some family has 3 girls, they are all named Maria.  Why...WHY!?!?!  On the other hand, I'm not keen on super wierdo made-up names either. 

Giant Toothbrush

The other day I went to a small town fair. It's a bummer it was so expensive! Most rides required three or four tickets and each ticket was like a dollar! My sister, nephew and I rode the spinning strawberries. We got spinning really fast!!! What a thrill.

They also had a bunch of game booths. One game was balloons and darts. The man was nice and gave us a couple extra darts which we threw at some balloons to try and pop them. We won a little penguin. My sister wanted one of the monkeys because she collects monkeys, so the man said: "I'll give you 10 darts for 10 bucks and you only need to pop 6 balloons to get it" We figured we could probably just buy a cuter monkey for that much and declined.

We moved on to the lucky duck game. This was a little moat thing that had rubber duckies floating around in a circle. For $5 one could pick up 3 ducks and adding up the numbers on the bottom, win a prize. My nephew won a gecko and the booth man threw in a giant plastic toothbrush for a bonus.

Next we played a game which had a ramp and balls that rolled into slots with a different number assigned to each slot (sounds like a casino huh!). Adding up the points at the end, a particular prize was awarded. The boys won swords after we traded up two smaller, (lame) prizes.

The game I found most exciting was a racing one. So there was a guy that talked fast like an auctioneer once the race started, and the cars were wooden cutouts with the Flintstones as drivers. To get them to move, the players had to get a ball into a color coded hole. The better the hole the ball went into, the further the car went. My nephew won the game and got a cow.

It was interesting and I saw a real, live cowboy, he wasn't just pretending. We enjoyed the fireworks show from the car afterward. Hooray for small town fairs!

My lips hurt real bad, gosh!

I love that scene from the movie Napoleon Dynamite where Napoleon calls home to see if someone can bring him some chapstick. Chapstick is one of my essential items i cannot live without it! My two favorites-in case anyone ever needs a gift idea- are Burt's Bees Beeswax Lip Balm (a smidge pricey but worth every penny) and Chapstic Mint (which is rather hard to find!). Burt's Bees is true to it's label, reading: ' Soothing. Cooling. Refreshing'. Another favorite is that one that you can buy at Bath & Body Works, that falls into the lip gloss genre with its goopy consistency and colored tint. It is also flavorful and refreshing! :)