I've been down

and now I'm back up. It was a weird summer. I went in to it with the big plans about tracking our work at the fair and tracking my self with Volumetrics but guess what that didn't happen. Too much work, not enough day. Oh I thought about things a lot. Made mental notes, started posts in my mind, even collected some news articles that made me think about personal finance but the end result was still the same, I couldn't find a place or a time to post on a daily basis and so the result was just a big blank space here. However, I did start one thing that may pan out.

The first time I actually met Jim was the year I came up to help my girl friend, Terri, with her stand and ended up starting my career as a vendor slash carney. At that time, Jim was working for the Icee guy setting up his stands as they moved around the California fair circuit. The big ones at Del Mar and Sacramento and Pomona and the mid-size ones like the Orange County fair where this whole story started for me.

Now I didn't know how he moved over to the vendor side but right from the start Jim struck me as a carney. Maybe it was the fact he seemed to sleep in the same clothes he worked in, or that he never spent a dollar when he could get you to spend yours, or that his hands reminded me of my farming days and the locals who always had a finger missing from hands that looked like they could chop wood without the need of an axe. Or maybe it was the fact that he moved with a slight limp which I was later to find out was caused by the Giant Horse's sidekick pony but that's a story for another time.

The thing was I didn't know that there was a distinction between the carneys and the vendors until Jim and I were talking one day and I said that I felt I really could get into this carney life. "Well," he replied, "That'd work out real well if you was a carney but I can tell you right now that it ain't no life for you." I came to learn he was right. There's two things you should know, you cut a carney and his or her blood will sort of seep out dark and dangerous and while you're watching that happen a silent alarm will gone out and you'll be having to fight the whole carnival just to get out of there. Cut a vendor and they'll just bleed.