The Tanana Valley State Fair is open!

rabicano horse

This horse is a rabicano, with white at the tail base and white hairs is a striped pattern on the sides.

This year it runs from August 3rd through the 12th – a full week plus two weekends. The theme is “The Age of Asparagus” which rather surprises me – asparagus, while supposedly marginally hardy here in Alaska, is not widely grown. Certainly I’ve never had any luck with it.

My main interest is the horse shows, which are always poorly covered in the fair schedule, and usually have the classes that most interest me (jumping and dressage) before noon, when the gates are not yet open. I’ve found out how to handle that this year – show up early and go in the livestock gate! But they certainly don’t make it easy for spectators. I did get some photos of unusual colors today, and will be adding them to the posts on horse color genetics.

Fair concession area

Pretty early, and the sky was threatening. But the vendors were there and ready.

It was a cloudy day, threatening rain, and attendance was sparse. All the better for getting around, as far as I was concerned. The gyros booth was open, so I’ll probably again have gyros for lunch most days during the fair season. I find I can assume 55 grams of carbohydrate for one and it works beautifully for calculating the insulin I need. Most other fair food is very hard to calculate, and of course some (such as elephant ears and fried candy bars) is just about impossible for someone with diabetes.

My usual blogging schedule will vary a little over the next week. I’ll have the normal blogs on Six Sentence Sunday, Meteorological Monday, Quotation Wednesday and Jarn’s Journal Friday, but the other days will probably be about the fair in some way. Certainly I’ll try to get the quilt show in again!