Back from a great weekend in Sweetwater.

(click on any of these pictures to see higher res versions)

The weather was perfect. We had cool temps in the evening and sunny days, and it waited till we were on our way home to come a turd floater. Don't ya just love a thunder storm? Particularly with all the rain we need nowadays.



Ooo, I think I soiled my armor. I've been waitin' for weeks for rain so I could show you this one.

Anyway, I'm back from Sweetwater today, with a lot of good pictures. I'll post them over at Flickr eventually, but here are a few to give you a taste.



Breakfast on Saturday morning. Pork and eggs, scrambled.



Mmmm, what's left of a breakfast burrito. Good food...



Good people. The folks I went with teach cooking on base, and they are a lot of fun. Good folks, all ex-army or army spouses. They've all taken one or more of my classes, and now a few of them are in grad school. You really have to give a lot of credit to people who did 20 years in the service and now are getting college degrees, a class or two at a time, online and in class, until they get it done. Hard workers, and good cooks.



meanwhile, the cooking competition got going, with people beginning to cook chili, brisket and ribs.



Smoke rose up over the camp from over a hundred grills like this one.



This years competition was a lot bigger than we'd seen in previous years. A lot more people competing, making the odds of winning that much slimmer. One of the big things about this cook-off is the competition over rattlesnake. They had to be processed...



and then you could cook then any way you chose. Some were grilled...



and some were fried. My buddy David fried his, and then stirred it into a mixing bowl with a secret sauce his wife had earlier prepared. Then it was all about product placement.



This turned out to be the winning entry. We were all very proud of David when they called his number and he went up to get his check for $735, and his plaque.



Oh, and the rattlesnake roundup was also interesting. Lots and lots of little wigglers.



Call me a softy, but I can't help but feel sorry about these critters; pulled out of nice cool dens to be measured, milked, killed and skinned. There are experts who think this sort of thing is horrible, but locals, who live with snakes all the time, think it's no big deal. They say that more snakes are run over every year on local roads than are killed at the round up. Who knows?



This guy, David Sager, with the local JCs, is the same guy I've seen doing the presentation for the last several years. That tells you that he knows what he's doing, walkin' around in this pen without snake boots on, with all these western diamond backs, but you get the idea from the presentation that maybe a lot of the danger associated with these critters is hype.



He walks around amongst them, and they rattle, but they never go after him. He shows that they react to vibrations defensively. The show dispels a lot of myths. he says that they don't chase you, and won't bite you unless you step on them or reach for them.



He goes after one, trying to get it to strike and pop a balloon, agitating it to the point that, in stead of striking, it rolled itself up into a ball...



and then he walked around the pin with it curled up in his hand. Amazing.

The gun show was also OK, and the carnival was the same as last year; lots of rickety rides and nasty looking food. The highlight of the weekend was definitely our friend winning first place with his snake. Congratulations to him, and to his wife for makin' the winning sauce.