I spent yesterday evening with a hundred fair exhibitors and their oversized cucumbers, knitted socks, quilts with fur-trapper themes, cribbage boards made from logs, strawberry jam, and photos of golden retrievers. This morning Tom (aka Photography Judge) heads off to sift through entries. Paul will be running a 5K, judging baked goods, and then selling hotdogs in the Patriarchs Food Booth; but I will be going to the grocery store to buy the ingredients for my entry in tomorrow's Maple Syrup Baking Contest. I'm submitting a maple pecan pie, which I fortuitously invented for Thanksgiving dinner last year. And because I also entered sunflowers and a mixed-vegetable arrangement into the exhibit hall, it's conceivable I could win, like, ten dollars.

To get ready for this busy day, I am sitting here at the kitchen table reading Linda Gray Sexton's novel Rituals, and it is awful. Let me just say: her mother's genius with a simile did not transmit down through the generations. Think Valley of the Dolls set among rich Harvard girls in the 70s, the kind of chicks you find blotto at the Ritz and smoking Thai stick by the family pool. You get the idea.