Asparagus Festival

Today we made our first treck to the stockton asparagus festival, Dominic was there last year volunteering but I was on call and couldn't go....Our first stop was the wonderful asparagus food....starting with asparagus burritos, tri tip and asparagus sandwiches and an aspara-mary, which was SPICY

Then we headed for the fried asparagus tent...look at all those people making fried food...they give you six BIG stocks sprinkled with parm and ranch to dunk them in
We decided to take a little walk and find out what else the festival had to offer when we stumbled upon the asparagus eating contest. This is no amature competition, it's goverened by the International Federation of Competitive Eating. We waited in the hot sun (mid 80's) for the competition to begin and were amazed at the different approaches to readying the stocks for quick consumption. Many of the guys were pouring tons of beverages and drenching the stocks with water. Two of the best were in attendance, Joey Chestnut and Pat “Deep Dish” Bertoletti (both currently ranked higher than the well known Takeru Kobayashi). Of course the hometown boy Joey (he's from San Jose) won for the 4th year in a row...you might notice the numbers they're holding up, that's how many pounds they have eaten already, and the final was more than 8lbs for both first and second place (that's in 10min)
Now that eating was the furthest thing from my mind, we continued to walk around and stumbled upon another fun competition, a dog competition. The pups were in a relay where they had to jump the hurdles and pull the ball off the board and return back when the next dog took off...it's amazing how well they time those jumps so they don't even lose stride.
At this point we were trying to avoid sunburn and decided it was best to head home, but again we came across something interesting...check out the truck we discovered between stockton and modesto....I made Dominic slow down so I could capture this unique vehicle
Finally we arrived home and thankfully were NOT sunburned, here is the pup in her typical weekend rest period, followed by her crazy time, she literally moves from one straight into the other without provoking and the back to rest again

While Dominic managed the pup and XBox 360 I decided to tackle a project I have been putting off since Jan 2006...Organizing and weeding through my nursing school notes. In the end it turned out to be best that I waited because I can now adequately assess what information I truely need to keep and what is just common knowledge for me. Here is the before and after. How small is that after stack!!! and I uncovered my 'award'...I thought it was fitting and you might agree ;)