Brute Force
Here you can see the second place team work like it’s going out of style. If memory serves, there was 8,500 pounds of salt during this pull, which they didn’t complete.

After church and the normal morning activities, we had Erik & Jill (and Henry) out for dinner prior to the day’s activities in Donnelly (since they were going to be in the neighborhood anyway for the parade). Their 1977 Mercedes convertible (aforementioned is a sweet ride, by the way) was going to be used in the parade.

Anyway, we had a good lunch and then headed in to town for the parade, which was good as usual. It also happened to be Kirstin’s first parade. She slept through the latter half of it. 🙂

I managed to catch some threshing going on today, so that was cool. It’s always neat to see the old stuff running again. I’ve seen threshing done several times in my life and it really doesn’t get old. It’s also really interesting to see how it draws a crowd of people once they hear the equipment spinning and whatnot.

I took some pictures today (since we had the camera along), and I ended up creating an entire set of 2007 Threshing Bee pictures as a result. There aren’t that many, but it’s a fairly good sampling regardless.

We also sat in on the horse pull again this year. I’m not a big fan of horses (quite the contrary, to be honest), but it’s really amazing to see these finely-tuned teams in operation (as in the blog picture today). These teams are anywhere between 3,750 and 4,500 pounds combined, and they pull upwards of 9,000 pounds of very dead weight (softener salt). I didn’t take any pictures of the horse pulling until the very end, when all the teams really start struggling (and the power becomes obvious).

Anyway, short of that it’s been a pretty quiet evening. I think we got home somewhere around 5pm, and it’s been pretty relaxing (a good change). Even though I didn’t manage to get a lot of stuff done that I’d hoped, we actually did quite a bit of stuff this weekend. It’s cool to be able to see the old tractors and everything else that makes the annual celebration unique.

In other random bits of news, tonight’s photo upload brings my Flickr photoset to over 2,000 in number (2,006 to be exact). Crazy. 🙂

So seeing as how it’s now nearly 11:30, I’m going to head for bed. Until next time…

“No one can earn a million dollars honestly.”
– William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925)

–MZ