If you haven’t been to the Minnesota State Fair, than you probably wouldn’t understand it — as I found out after setting up the stage for Wendy Williams appearance at the Fox 9 booth.  It’s very hard to sum up three continuous days at the state fair, but I will start with working at the booth (a first for me).

The best way I can describe working at the fair is comparing it to black Friday in retail:  an unbelievable amount of preparation and money spent is in hopes of pulling off an incredibly successful two weeks of customer interactions.

In one day I drove a golf cart through hordes of people carrying Moon (of Moon and Stacy, on KS95), chaueffered a high school glee club through the fair for a charity sing-off, and helped to make sure that we took advantage of Wendy Williams appearance at our booth.  Long sentence?  Well, it was a long day, but one that flew by with fun and energy and overall success, topped off with an hour of relaxation wandering the fair with my dad.  The next day went in a totally different direction.

At this point I would like to mention that with the pace of this weekend left me unable to post a vividly descriptive story of one particular event….but fret not…one will be coming very shortly, so check back regularly!

Saturday:
Ever done karaoke?  Well, I basically ran a karaoke booth for 8 hours at the state fair called the Fox 9 X-Factor Experience.  Sitting in a chair watching the young, the old, the talented, and mostly the terribly un-talented sing into a microphone on a stage, then post that performance to Facebook (yes, I did it and my performance is posted to Facebook…I’ll let you guess what category I fall into .

The real story about Saturday is the traffic.  When every parking lot at the fair is full, 3 express shuttle lots are full, street parking costs you $20-30, and you’re late to your shift, what do you do?  Frantic driving brought me to a lot that I never heard about only to cross my fingers and park in a handicap parking and dash to the bus.  That was the easy part.

If you’re confused on my unorthodox order of storytelling I will give a quick timeline:
Friday – wake-up, go to fair, carry camera equipment over 1 mile (just an added Tidbit about my day Friday), drive Moon in golfcart, chaueffere kids, record Wendy’s appearance, go home, sleep.
Saturday – go shopping with Tera, spend forever parking, watch crazy singers, wait for the guard to show up 30 minutes late, see fireworks at the grandsons, then see an insane electronic music battle on an awesome stage, and finally, the end to my parking story.

I boarded the correct bus as instructed by the driver who picked us up, but I was dropped off in the dark at 11:00pm in a totally different location than I was picked up, in an area I don’t know at all, with the looming question: “did they tow my car from the handicap parking?”.  The journey began wandering from corporate parking lot to corporate parking lot. ( I was in a large business park).  Before I got too far I remembere that I can pull up Google maps on my phone to help me find my car.  So I pulled it out, opened the app, and the phone…shut off…out of battery!  It was getting close to 11:30 and I might as well have been wandering blindfolded.  Finally I committed to a direction and walked.  Things started looking more familiar after about 5 minutes and luck finally started to seemingly find me.  Another five minutes and I found the lot, but would I find my car?  At 11:42 I rounded the corner of the building and sitting alone in an empty parking lot was my beautiful black Jetta TDI still parked in the same handicapped parking space, free of scratches, dents, and tickets.  I got in, closed my eyes and laughed to myself before putting the key in and giving it the half turn, buckeling my seatbelt, and then turning the key the rest of the way to hear my car start up and begin to play my satellite radio, the song ‘Video Games’ adding to the peace.  At last I was on my way….only to be back to the fair in 9 hours.

Sunday:
A wonderful end to a crazy week.  Spending the day with Tera and her family.  Seeing art, science, animals, cool shops, and of course lots of great food.  Here’s the list of food ( in order of consumption):

Foot-long walleye sandwich
Cheese curds
Giant lemonade
Deep fried pickles
Nordeast beer
Honey stick
Summit beer on a stick
Deep fried milkyway
Turkey leg
Deep fried twinkies

The icing on the cake was making 2 putts in a row in the grandstands to win $15, and placing 9th out of everyone at the fair competing in distance to the pin at the 150 yard golf simulator (I was 8.5 feet out).

I ended the day by watching a wonderful documentary called ‘The King of Kong, a Fist Full of Quarters.’ Check back for a review on the movie.  Your comments are always welcomed, so share exciting events from your weekend, and start a conversation, because life is what you make out of it, so make it good and long.