one for the record books

the rice 2011 county fair had to be the hottest and most humid fair on record in all of it's 100 and some years that it has been around.

We brought animals in at 8:45 to try to avoid it getting any hotter while they had to be on the trailer. I got them washed, fed and settled in by 11. I had a beef and dairy interview to go to and then worked in the food stand for an hour. Beef weigh-in was at 4 and get this! my dairy steer weighed 1500 pounds!! and they claim that the scale was light! that's a big boy! he gained an average of 3.5 pounds a day since february til now. I tried to keep them cool by spraying them down and watering every hour.

Wednesday morning was the open class youth dairy show. I was 7th with my fall calf, 1st with my summer yearling and reserve champion overall cow. Pretty good for a show on such a hot day. Wednesday afternoon was the 4-H beef show, i did work up the courage to show another cow/calf pair only this time i took the cow. I made it out of the ring with no mishaps. The Purfeersts even asked me to show one of their cow/calf pairs with their nephew kyle, and it didn't even do anything wrong. I got 3rd out of 5 with my dairy steer.

Thursday morning was the 4-H dairy show. I got reserve champion showmanship and 1st in all my classes. A turn around from the day before though with my fall calf going from 7th to 1st and my cow didn't make it back for state fair line up. My summer jr. yearling was reserve champion yearling and 6th in state fair line up. I will be taking her to the state fair after some much needed weight loss.

Friday morning was the FFA beef show, very few people came because of the heat. I was even first with my dairy steer (out of 1) which never happens because the Otte's usually clean house there, but unfortunately they couldn't make it. Friday night I was graced with the presence of 2 of my people in the whole wide world. Annie and Devin! We watched Annie's show then were walking around the fair and all of a sudden Devin is freaking out about losing her phone. After looking we decide it's a lost cause and she'll jsut have to find a new phone to use. We go home facebook creep and we get a call from kailey who informs us that some people called her off of devin's phone and say that they have devin's phone. After much conversation about meeting at the zipper to get the phone of going to their house in burnsville we finally make a plan to get the phone. I got it saturday night after a little sketchy thing. We finally went to bed at 2 am. bad choice.

Saturday morning we got up at 5:30 to get to the fair to get chores done before working on the clover for the auction. I went to breakfast and the auction and nothing productive happened after that for the day besides a nice nap.

Sunday I did chores and visited with people, ate my last pork burger :( and sat around for the whole day basically.

While at the fair I met new people, learned more about old friends and attempted to learn how to judge general livestock. Now let me tell you, this was a whole completely different concept than dairy judging. Mark did an all right job explaining it in the beef cattle but the second derek started explaining sheep to me my brain was fried. We'll how I progress as the summer goes on.

That's basically all I have on the fair for this year. It was an awesome time and only 365 until next years (it's a leap year next year).

Hope everyone kept cool and is having a good summer!