Today was a mixed day. We had a lot of fun at the first annual Floyd County Fair today. There was a cute olympic event that involved milk chugging and cheese eating, and lambs, cows, tractors, and vegetables.

Then we went to the Taste of Floyd at Harvest Moon Cafe. Maybe a better name would have been the ‘Harvest Moon Sample Plate.’ I’ve been to numerous Taste of events around the country, and I don’t think I ever felt as, well, scammed as I did at this one. Five dollars a person to get in, and that got you samples of, let me try and recall them all: beef, pork sausage, two pieces of cheese, a slice of apple, piece of canteloupe, cracker with some goat cheese, cracker with salmon (1 per person, please), and two or three coffee places (of course, we don’t drink coffee). Honestly, nothing more than you would find in the endcap sample sections at your local Whole Foods. Five dollars.

So, let’s see, get people to spend five dollars a person to try a few things that they can (conveniently) find at the store hosting the event, thereby bringing in lots of extra business to the store. Oh, there was a wine tasting area too – that was another five dollars. I didn’t see a single local restaurant represented at the Taste of Floyd – doesn’t that seem pretty strange? And you couldn’t even look around first to see if there was anything you wanted to try – Cabol actually saw someone turned away who just wanted to look around and maybe BUY some of the things sold and not taste! Now there is a good business philosophy.

In summary, the county fair was great – I hope we are around to see many, many more. The Taste of Floyd basically felt like something designed to pull in tourists. That’s another thing we noticed: at the fair, I felt like I was seeing the “real” citizens of Floyd County. The ones who greet each other by name, whose children all know each other, who can stack bales of hay two at a time in 30 seconds, the 4-H members showing off their lambs. At Harvest moon the crowd seemed to be retired baby boomers and tourists (or both) and younger people, all trying to feel hip and trendy because they are there samplin’ all that fancy overpriced ($7.00 for a jar of spaghetti sauce?!?) organic stuff and feeling like they are “making a difference” before they head back to their McMansions and plasma tvs. I’ll take the county fair crowd any day, thanks.

You know, before we moved here, no one warned us about the flies. I suppose it’s the same way the Michigan Board of Tourism fails to mention that you might encounter a mosquito or two while you are there. We seem to have very few mosquitos. We have a lot of flies.

Sure, we have some animals on the property that certainly attract flies (especially the chickens and the ducks). But the flies were here before the animals. Everywhere. Buzzing around my head, and congregating on the strangest things. There will be dozens and dozens sitting on the truck. Today there were at least 20 sitting on the charger for the electric fence. They don’t seem to be the biting sort of flies. Are we just some sort of layover between cow pastures? The Schiphol of the Copper Hill?

Oh, and it was foggy this morning.

This coming weekend is Floyd County’s 175th anniversary celebration. I’m sure all our friends are busy planning to come up and visit during it – after all, who can resist…cowpatty bingo?

Although on a more serious note, one of their events is carding and spinning wool – maybe someone at the event would know where we could get our sheeps sheared!

After much delay I finally racked my two batches of blackberry wine, and combined them into one 5 gallon batch so it would only use up one carboy. It seems to be a very nice ruby red color, except when the yeast is still in suspension, at which point it looks a lot like tinted primer.

Racking

I also started another batch going (about 2 1/2 gallons) with the last of this year’s blackberries. They’ve spent more time in the fridge than they really should, though, so I’m not sure how tasty it will turn out. In fact, I saw some bubbling while the berries were soaking (before I added the yeast), which could mean some wild yeasts got a head start. But since the only real costs were a packet of yeast and a bag of sugar (and a lot of holes in my hands), it’s no big loss if it’s gone bad – we’ll just have a lot of blackberry vinegar to bottle.