Saturday, August 30, 1997 -- Geek Purchases and a Freebie
Someone told me that the Shelby HAM Fest was the second largest in the country. Anyone know if that's true, or where the largest is?		We got up a little late this morning, well 8:00 is early for a Saturday, but not if you are going to drive an hour to a flea market. Personally, I like to do these things before it gets hot. We woke up my Aunt and we all left around 9 or so. A quick trip to the bank, to grab cash, and then to Hardee's for biscuits [Real biscuits, not the freeze-dried kind Mikky Dee's sells.] Then on to the interstate and to Shelby. We found a decent parking space, because by the time we got there, there were already people leaving. Last year, I got there when the gates opened, in part to meet Jason and Ginger. I really missed their presence this year, but it made us go through the shops faster. I mean, with Jason there, I could ask him hardware questions, or we might meander and look at Digital Workstations, or something. This year, we just sort of walked up and down the 'aisles'. To give you and idea of size, let me say this. Shelby fairgrounds is a decent sized park/fair area, with a valley-like dip in the center. [We live in the foothills after all...] When we walked through the gates, and got passed the first building, we looked out and saw...tents, RV's, radios--lots and lots of radios. Marie let out an audible sigh. "This is big," she said. I said, "Yep." and turned to grin at her. It took us an hour and a half to find what we wanted, and to look over all the 'used' sections of the fair. Of course, there were four building with 'new' stuff. I bought a modem and some memory,and an old 486 motherboard in the 'new' building. But we didn't even look over all of the new stuff. I bought a nice SVGA monitor for the UNIX machine, and a couple of games at 10 bucks apiece [Dark Forces, and The Incredible Toon Machine]. On the way home, we discussed the new computer ["Where are we gonna put it?" "I thought I'd use the glass table." "You will not, we'll buy a desk." "A cheap table will do." "Well let's go to the flea market and get it" "OK" {can you guess who is who?}] Well, we missed the exit for the Flea Market. Well, actually we got off at that exit, but Marie didn't realize that it was the Flea Market, and I didn't warn her in time...oops. So we drove two miles to the next exit, turned around and went back. By this time it was 12 or so, and the flea marked was dead. But Marie wanted to stop anyway, and grab a table, or some tomatoes. We parked, and heard some incessant mewing, and spotted a kitten on top of a truck wheel. When we walked over to it, it hid up inside the truck...which we thought was a pretty dangerous place for a kitty, so we pulled it out. Well, that was all it took. After we realized he'd been abandoned, we took him home (stopping along the way for kitty food). Other than his peeing on me when we pulled into the parking lot, nothing bad happened. [You really can't blame him, he'd had a rough day, and as we discovered he was litter box trained.] Maggie isn't too happy with our orange striped visitor, but she isn't very aggressive about it. Dickens just wants to play. He's been sitting and staring at the kitten, wondering what to do. And the kitten, no doubt frightened, has been staring back. Hopefully things will settle down soon. In the meantime we must name the cat... Generic Joe's A Typical Male