No Moon Pies THIS Time

So, today was my birthday, and we're in Nashville. I have some family up here- my aunt and uncle, cousin and her family, and of course, my sister. Additionally, my mom's up here this weekend, because of the Alias show last night, so it was nice timing to have a family celebration for my birthday.

We had my birthday in Nashville last year, too, but that was a little bit different. It was the brainchild of my sweet young sister-in-law, who thought it would be fun to combine my birthday and her bachelorette party, and make a weekend of it. It was a lot of fun, I will say, but involved a lot of drinking, as well. In fact, this afternoon my sister-in-law and I were trying to reassemble the order in which we visited various places that weekend, and were pitifully inept. As the song says, blame it on the a-a-a-a-alcohol.

This weekend had a different tone. Unlike last year, we did not have bachelorette party girls with us, and, also unlike last year, we did have the Man and Small One in tow- so the venues were tamer, the fun more family friendly. Last night, of course, we went to my sister's show, and during intermission, my aunt asked me if we wanted to go to the Moon Pie festival.
"There's a Moon Pie festival?" I asked, incredulously.
"Sure!" she exclaimed, "Do you know how many flavors of Moon Pie there are? A LOT of flavors. AND they deep fry them. AND there's R.C. Cola."
Well, now, I ask you- who could resist an event like that? So I said that of course I'd want to go, and then I asked what time they were leaving. She said 8:30. I paused for a moment, certain I'd misheard, but no. 8:30. In the MORNING. Because if you don't grab that first Moon Pie before 9, you've wasted your day? Nevertheless, despite my personal "no Moon Pies before noon" philosophy, we decided to go.

Arriving home, I puttered around a bit, then at about 1am thought I might check out the Moon Pie festival online. Turns out, it wasn't this weekend at all! I'm really glad I figured that out, though, because there actually was some sort of biker gathering in the town to which we were headed, and I would have been deeply upset to have gotten up early on my birthday to go see bikers. We regrouped, and decided to go to the Strawberry Festival in Portland, TN.

It was a wonderful day, overall, and I very much enjoyed having a chance to visit with my family. We ate lovely strawberry shortcake- really, top notch, and probably too much of it. And Small One had fun bouncing,

climbing,


and sliding down various inflatable things.

I learned a few things today, as well, like this:

which I wouldn't have expected, since it was roughly three hundred and eight degrees outside today. I also found out what the Six Million Dollar Man has been up to since 1999:

That's really good, I think- good to see him staying busy. But the biggest revelation at the Strawberry Festival was some of the crafts. I'd been blissfully unaware, until today, that people made hair bows out of bottle caps! Were you aware? I didn't get a picture, but you can get the idea out of this one I found online. You get the idea, though, and I can't figure out where one might wear these unless it is to some sort of pageant. A pageant for the tacky, perhaps.


The biggest surprise to me, though, was the garden hose wreaths. I mean, nothing says "Welcome to Our Home" like a big old garden hose hanging on your front door. Thanks, Strawberry Festival folks, for the idea- I'm going to go put on one my door the instant I can manage it.