Guilford Labor Day Fair

Monday, we went to the Guilford Fair. It's an old-time country fair with 4H-ers showing animals, entries competing for blue ribbons in baked goods, garden produce, sewing, flowers, jam,  etc., horsemanship, sheep-shearing demo,  ox-pull and horse-pull competition, chainsaw and crosscut saw competition, circus arts, bingo, fire department chicken BBQ and lots of other food booths, musical entertainment, a small midway, etc. It was a perfect fair day. We watched the horse-pulls. The first round winning team pulled 8500 lbs. and the heavier second-round team pulled 9000 lbs. We thought one team was particularly handsome. Beautifully matched.

                     Horse team pulling 8000 lbs.

                   Teams waiting to pull a load

 Julie and Tamar, and Tamar's friend, Sam, showed up at about 12:30 and we joined them and had a little time together. It was good to see them, because we hadn't been with them since June. Ben has gone back to school at UMass. I'm not sure where Max was. He had a good summer at the Harvard summer school for high school students.

                            Julie, Tamar and Ellen

Toward the end of the day, one of my favorite bluegrass bands, the Stockwell brothers, were playing at the entertainment stage. So we sat and listened to them for a while. I think Betsey was in high school with some of the Stockwell brothers and really liked them too.

 Bruce, Barry and Al Stockwell (their sister Kelly is hidden -  playing bass)

We had left the car parked with the windows partly open to keep it from getting excessively hot inside, and when we returned, we found this beautiful dragonfly sitting on the driver's seat. I very carefully took a picture, but then when we went to touch it, to get it to fly away, we discovered, sadly, that it was dead. I think dragonflies have very short lives.

                      Amazing gossamer wings!

After the fair,  we came down to Shutesbury and spent the night there.  Savanna is doing well. 

Tuesday, I again went to the library at Mount Holyoke college, and continued to find articles that have cited my dissertation. I continue to be amazed by this. I will have to say, however, that two of the articles I found cited my dissertation only to dismiss it! Oh well! 

The Main Reading Room at Mt. Holyoke College Library