The Feast of Santa Rosalia came to town yesterday. This, of course, means that I had to go and get my fix of overpriced undersanitary street fair food. Prompt as prompt could be, I was there yesterday with the now traditional hot sausage from Lucy's. While the price may have gone up to $5, they apparently heard my griping from last year, for now they include 2 sausages in the bun instead of 1. Today, while out touring the fair with Liz and some of her friends, we sat down and had us some nice ribeye steak sandwiches. Of course, we had forgotten that those bad boys cost $10 apiece. While they were tasty, they were most definately not $10 tasty.

Stop the world, I want to get off.

But the big wrapper was the rides. When looking at the rides yesterday, Liz was egging me on to ride the spinning inverter ride. Essentially a pair of enclosed cars (each car consisting of a pair of 2 seater halves, one looking forward, one looking backwards) on long swing arms. The reason for the pair of swing arms is that they spin in opposite directions to offset any generated torque. The arms swing back and forth, until at last you get full inversion, followed by constant centrifuge like spinning, topped off by a fully inverted hang, before swinging back and forth back down to stop. Oddly enough, this full cycle is manually controlled, as we watched the operator hold a pair of punk boys fully inverted for a few minutes to cool them off, before bringing them back to earth. The cars looked small, and mostly the teenage kids were getting on, so I figured there was a height and weight limit to the cars. But Liz kept insisting that tomorrow we would ride the ride. Fast forward to today, and I'm at the Feast with Liz, her kid, 3 of her friends, and 3 more girls. Jen, the 12 year old girl (I think they were all 10-12 years old) wanted to ride the Inverter. And who do you think was the only one willing to step up and accompany her on the ride (you can't ride alone, especially if you are a little girl)? The ramp-up is actually a quite familier feeling, much like how when you swing really really high. And then you get inverted ... almost. Going forwards is no big deal, you get pressed up against the seat back, but going backwards is a biotch, as you feel like you are falling out of the seat and over the safety harness. Since I weigh so much more then my companion she probably was in fact falling out of her seat. These and the slow full inversion area the truely stomach churning experiences. Luckily we never got the full inversion hang/pause (the operator tried, but miscalculated and so we slowly overshot the full inversion hang/pause point), which was good as poor Jen already had slightly vomited in her mouth already. I fear for what might happen if we got stuck upside down for a few minutes. I, of course, was shaking in my boots, but tried to keep calm so that I could keep Jen calm. I hope it worked. Got off the ride, overacted the loopy dizzy disorientation to hide my very real leg shaking, and came out of it looking like a swell guy for having pitched in and allowing Jen ride the ride. :: WeddingFilter I think I've already sickenned everybody that even remotely cares about last weekend's wedding with more details then even the bride and groom care about. So this will be the last post on anything to do with the wedding. I suppose what most hit me about the whole thing was how much fun I had with my old friends. How comfortable it was, how I could pretty much talk about anything and not worry too much about permenantly offending anyone, unlike even the fun I had tonight. I could be relaxed. I could be myself. And I was hanging out with people I wanted to really hang out with. I haven't had too much of that since college, my anti-social streak having come on real strong after graduation and my total lack of vision for the future. I missed it a lot. So I suppose I just got really really homesick for the past. Too bad you can't ever go back there anymore.