I haven’t gotten a lot of sleep lately. It’s not that I’ve had a lot to do. No, the reason is simply because this weekend is the weekend of the May Faire in our little town, and we happen to live close enough to the fairgrounds that we could hear probably more than we waned to. Last night the entertainment was Leann Rimes, and tonight we will be serenaded by the Doobey Brothers and Credence Clearwater Revisited, or whatever the heck the surviving members are calling themselves these days. The music hasn’t been too bad so far at least, but the concerts tend to last until after 11pm. Not so much a problem last night, since this morning we could sleep in as gloriously late as we wanted. But definitely a problem for tonight, since tomorrow will start far too early.

We have yet to actually go to the May Fair, despite having lived in this town now for two years and my parents living here for six years before that. I think the allure of small town agricultural fairs just never sunk in. You’ve seen one prize pig, you’ve seen them all, right? Besides, Fair food (motto: If it ain’t fried, why bother?) doesn’t exactly fit into the healthy eating plan, and considering my recent penchant for getting car- and air-sick, I figure carnival rides shouldn’t rank high on the list of things I must do. However, we did go to another festival going on this weekend. Yep, the hippies were out in force on the campus, since the weekend of Mother’s Day is always Whole Earth Festival at UC Davis.

We wandered around the festival but this year it felt…well…tired. There seemed to be something lacking. There weren’t as many people wandering around, especially for noon on a Saturday, and there weren’t as many booths. I didn’t see nearly as much tie-dyed clothing (although a new entry this year was the booth all about reusable cloth sanitary napkins. And let me just state here that while I do try to be environmentally friendly, there are some places where one has to draw the line – and this is one of them where the line gets drawn with a great big girly “Euww!!”).

I left Richard on campus since he’d signed up to volunteer at the Linux booth, and headed home to play with dirt. I’ve had clippings rooting in a bowl of water (which has to be refilled a lot more often than one might expect because a certain grumpy tortoiseshell cat thinks the rooting bowl is her personal water glass), and earlier this week I was taken in by a selection of herb plants and came home with a little pot of basil and a little pot of oregano – both of which had definitely reached a size too large for their tiny little planters. So I dragged the bag of (cobweb-encrusted) potting soil into the house and proceeded to have the most marvelous time making an amazing mess. I replanted the herbs. I introduced the well-rooted clippings to actual dirt. I dragged the ferns downstairs and gave them larger pots (and trimmed off a lot of dead leaves). And then I ran around and watered everything else that was green and growing in the house and when it was all done I put the (much smaller) bag of potting soil back in the garage, vacuumed up all the stray dirt and plant parts, and then collapsed on the sofa for a while until Richard called to say he was ready to come home.