Middleton Good Neightbor Fest - Recap

MiddlMiddleton is my hometown, which means the Good Neighbor Fest (GNF) is my hometown fair, which also means there is a lot of GNF sentimentality attached to the festival.

When I think of Middleton Good Neighbor I think of the food first.

Mini donuts, kettle corn, funnel cakes and cheese curds; (although the cheese curds weren’t as good this year as they have been in past years – sorry Kiwanis).   After a weekend at the GNF, one needs a full body cavity flush and a green salad.

I think many other people think of the food first and art & craft show second.

And therein lies the problem.

It’s also the last fair of the season, smack dab at “back to school time”.  Another problem.

So let’s get down to brass tacks and dissect the goodness and lack of goodness of this particular art fair, keeping in mind that it pains me to say anything other than great things about the GNF.

The Good

1. The food. In addition to wide variety of grease laden items already mentioned, you can also get cream puffs, chicken and/or steak sammys, burgers, brats, pulled pork, pizza, pretzel, pie, ice cream, fries, fish, chicken dinners , cotton candy, caramel apples, soda and beer. Whew. I mean for small town fair, the spread is pretty good.
2. It’s close to home. Bonus.
3. The weather! GORGEOUS! Picture perfect 78 degrees blue skies and sunshine. A far cry from the Mt Horeb Steam Bath in mid July.
4. Firemans Park. It’s a park...not a parking lot. There are trees. There is grass. There are also an enormous amount of daddy long-leg spiders,  but we seemed to co-exist peacefully,  although I do feel really bad about unknowingly smushing one under my sales book. Live and learn.

The Not so Good

1. Firemans Park. Park = good. Hauling your crap into the park = not good. There is no easy load-in/load out. Basically, it’s a free for all. Technically artists are not supposed to park on North Ave, the very small block of road that butts up against the park… but no one pays attention to that rule, including me. I got lucky and parked on North Ave Sunday morning,  so load out was slightly less horrible. It’s every man for himself when it comes to packing up and heading out. And I’m all about me when it comes to getting the hell outta there and home as much as the next guy.
2. Communication with the Show Coordinators. I think art show coordination is a hazing ritutal. Some young eager beaver blindly accepts responsibility and then falls down the rabbit hole. In my experience manning the GNF artshow gmail account was pretty low on someone’s priority list.
3. The buyers. There were lots of people but not lots of buyers. I think this stems from two things:

• The general stock market rollercoaster of late doesn’t actually inspire confidence. Lack of confidence = lack of spending. Economics 101.
• Back to School. Most families are tapped out from back to school supplies, book fees, tuition and otherwise being nickel and dimed to death by their local school district. Factor in August being a big vacation month and people are tapped out.

At the end of the day I did respectable but not great. Not great is hard to parlay into excitement about doing this show next year. I’m on the fence. On the plus side I made a few contacts about other shows and got a hot tip on a better way to process credit cards. (I’m currently using a knuckle buster. That name is no lie.)

I figure the sour taste of this years GNF art show will fade and by May of 2012 I’ll be full of fresh hope and optimism. Time will tell.

Culture

Once a year I attend American Players Theater (APT) with my girlfriends in an attempt to get cultured.

I am not against culture, but plays just aren’t my thing. That probably explains why I only attend one per year. I’m more of a musical kind of gal. If folks aren’t intermittently breaking into song and prancing about in costumes with sparkles you’re going to lose me.

The whole event is very nice. It really is. There is picnicking beforehand with an ample amount of wine, snacks and snarky banter. This is my favorite part of the whole affair. I’d be only too happy to sit in the woods in Spring Green and drink wine all night. But then a bell chimes indicating the play is going to start and we trudge “up the hill” as they say, to be cultured by Shakespeare.

There are a couple of flaws with the whole culture in the woods Shakespearean plan. First, I’ve usually had a few glasses of wine, am happily buzzed and would like to continue to go on being happily buzzed. I’m a booze bag that way.

But one can’t continue to throw down red wine whilst watching Shakespeare. That’s frowned upon by the management. Spirit crushers.

The other flaw is, I generally only comprehend about every third word of the play. That’s pretty good if the play is on the lighter side of Shakespeare such as an “As you like it” or a “Taming of the Shrew”. If you’re going to force me to endure a “Hamlet” then the words to understating ratio is going to drop like a stone.

I know I am a huge cultural disappointment to my friend who graciously coordinates this event each year. Let’s be honest, I watch an unhealthy amount of reality TV and cooking shows. I don’t exactly fit the profile for “has a deep love of the classics”. I choose my books by the ever important criteria of smut content. I definitely gravitate towards books that fall into the “good beach read” category and walk right on by the Jane Austin and Shakespeare at the local library.

Overall I successfully comprehended most of The Taming of Shrew although I would be lying if I said it was my all time favorite play. I appreciate it the experience for what it is. It forces me outside my cultural comfort zone, I get to chat with my besties, drink some good wine and enjoy a nice summer night.

That’s a good dose of culture for this year I think.

Fitness Osmosis

I take a lot of steps to be a healthier trimmer individual. If you read between the lines I’m trying but often failing to execute. Or to put it another way…I’m not always hitting the fitness mark.

Case in point, reading a well intentioned albeit unrealistic article in my monthly fitness magazine about how to “look good naked” while standing at the counter eating Kemps “Under the Stars” chocolate peanut butter ice cream out of the container. Yeah, I know, there are about 10 things wrong with this scenario.

First off no one really looks good naked. Generally the human population looks better half-naked then all the way naked. Clothes are purposely designed to hide the flaws that can be seen while naked. Geesh.

I joined my health club 6 years ago because I wanted to look good better naked and then quickly realized miracles not withstanding I’d settle for looking better in a tank top. Naked arms but the rest of me clothed, just as it should be.

Kemps “Under the Stars”, my new favorite ice cream flavor (chocolate ice cream, peanut butter ribbons and chocolate stars filled with peanut butter) should probably be eaten out of dish. My mother would be appropriately mortified.

And there is the obvious contradiction of the actual eating of ice cream while looking at a fitness magazine. I probably should have been eating a slice of tofu. But ice cream is so much tastier. Who are we kidding here?

I’d love to be able to aim for fitness perfection. Knock out my 1 hour a day of exercise according to the some recent medical study that says women over 40 (sigh) need an hour a day just to maintain their weight. If that isn’t a thoroughly depressing medical statistic I don’t know what is? Right now I can barely manage 30-40 minutes 4-5 days a week.

The lapse in my exercise regimen I’m supplementing with a subscription to Fitness and Cooking Light; hoping the content will seep into my brain via osmosis in between bites of ice cream.

Dumb things managers say

Perhaps it’s my age, but I have less and less tolerance for managers that are promoted to a level beyond their incompetence and inflict their idiocy on the working cogs of the world.

This installment of dumb things managers say includes an exchange between myself and one of the managers in our sister location. This occurred at our painful “teambuilding” torture session recently:

Manger: “How long have you been in our department”

 Me: “2 years. Prior to that I spent 10 years in Marketing, and was in Operations before that.”

 Manager: “That’s interesting. What role did you like better?”

 Me: “That’s hard to answer. They are so different.”

 Manager “This would be an opportunity for you to do some sucking up.”


Me: Dumbfounded but recovered nicely with a very diplomatic take the high-road-kind of answer.


Needless to say, the manager in question does a lot of sucking up.

As if you hadn’t guessed.

This is yet another blog entry about Corporate America trying to do the right thing, but falling flat on its face.

Thud.

Teambuilding is one of those corporate buzzwords that invariably make its way into every employee survey and/or managers annual performance goals.

1. Build your team.
2. Create inclusion.
3. Make sure that when people come to work every day it’s a great big warm fuzzy.

First off: There is a reason they call it work and they pay you to do it. I only have to moderately tolerate the people I work with. We don’t have to be besties.

Second: Teambuilding can't be forced.  Yet, misguided managers across the land think that you can toss a bunch of people from two different locations who share like jobs into the same room for a few hours, feed them pizza and expect them all to “friend” each other on facebook. Sorry, not happening.

I was recently a victim of the forced teambuilding pizza lunch experiment.

P-A-I-N-F-U-L.

From the 3 hour long car ride down to the neutral location to the teambuilding exercise, to the pizza lunch, to the 3 hour long car ride back home.

Please baby Jesus – let it be over.

And then the pain was followed up with….wait for it….a survey to share our feelings.

Please kill me now.

Pass me a gun so I can shoot myself. And if you don’t have a gun, hurl a few bullets at me. Maybe one of the bullets will break the skin and I’ll die from a nasty infection.

A few bits of advice from an experienced “team member”; the following team building tactics don’t work:

1. The team lunch. I think I’ve sufficiently beaten this one into the ground.
2. “Guess who I am” surveys; participants answer questions about themselves and we all have to guess who it is. Because – gee, when 30 of the 35 people on our cross-location team list “Christmas” as their favorite holiday…that’s a dead giveaway to the identities of people I’ve never talked laid eyes on.  This also includes the ever popular “two truths and a lie” and let’s not forget the sugary sweet “guess the baby picture.”
3. Anything via conference call where the audio is crappy at best and the video shows a wide angle of a conference room. You can’t feel the teambuilding love when one can only hear every third word and the people on the other end look like ants.
4. Team Goals. These are made up initiatives usually at the department level to address some problem that really isn’t a problem, like lack of teambuilding. I’m not kidding here. There was an actual committee, which used real work hours to brainstorm solutions for turning two units into best friends forever. I couldn’t make this up if I tried.

I appreciate the concept of trying to get these two team to mesh and gel. I do. This is not lost on me. I am not that heartless. But honest-to-pete; people have to get to know each other a little more organically. They need to be on projects together. Working together through a real project not a pretend project manufactured by the kumbaya fairy is how it should be done.

For the record, the team building committee did suggest that one team building option was to pair folks from different units on the same project. Management responded with how that was not "cost effective", but we can spend all kinds of time driving employees hither and yon for some forced teambuilding.

Head slap.

I guess I should be grateful there wasn’t a ropes course involved.

I might have been left swinging.

Hippity Hoppity Movie Hopping

I popped my movie hopping cherry this weekend. Who knew? I am a glorified movie-geek and I have never ever done the movie hop. The pay for one movie, watch it and when it’s done, skirt into another movie. A two-fer.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that my teenage son suggested we movie hop. I’m not embarrassed that I did the movie hop with my kid, only that I didn’t think of it first. Damn kids are too smart for their own good.

Times are tough, the economy is sluggish. I’m all for stretching my entertainment dollar as far as I can.

I suppose I should feel guilt; movie hopping doesn’t reek of leading by parental example but honestly, I don’t feel that bad when movies are $7.50 a piece (and that’s a matinee). I’m pretty sure the fine people at Paramount or Fox Studios of whoever it was that didn’t benefit from our extra $15 in ticket sales will find another way to fleece the movie going public.

Despite my novice standing in movie-hopping, I am an expert in the sneaking in of concessions. When a small diet coke is roughly the same price as a 12-pack at the Pick-N-Save…all’s fair in love and smuggling. It’s all about survival.

I highly recommend stopping at Walgreens for the boxed movie candy. Nine times out of ten they are on sale for $1 a box which is far more reasonable then AMCs take- it-in- the -shorts price of $4.25 for a box of Junior Mints.

Popcorn is a bit trickier, but it can be done. A ziploc freezer bag will hold plenty of popcorn and can typically be shoved in the arm of a jacket. Carry the jacket in over your arm. In the summer months a big purse works well. Empty out everything you don’t need, carry your wallet and stuff in the much needed provisions.

The movie-hop was great fun. We probably had success because it was a Friday afternoon, there weren’t a lot of ushers around and it’s a multi-plex. The multi-plex lends itself to movie hopping potential.

For the record we saw “Crazy, Stupid, Love” which was worth the price of admission and then hopped to “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”.

Kinda glad I didn’t pay for that last one.

Putrid.

Stuff I like – Pea Pod Magnets by Polpette Clay

I’ve had this shop ear-marked as one of my “favorites” on etsy.com for some time now, but I never had occasion to buy a pea pod magnet. Three peas in a pod are symbolic of a certain amount of closeness. Be it family, kids or friends. It’s also a bit kitschy. But I like kitsch.

Polpette Clay sat in my etsy favorites list unloved for quite sometime. And then something amazing happened. Well, amazing is a big word, but I was on a project at work with two other women and one of the ladies made a comment about how we were just like “three peas in a pod.” This statement was met with a fair amount of snarky giggling between us, since the project in question was a heinous compliance project required by the federal government,  so it has about as much appeal as a lanced boil.

Horrible project content not-with-standing, I had an epiphany! I would order my colleagues (and myself of course) one of these cute little pea pod magnets as a memento of our time spent together enduring the pain of this particular federal compliance project.

In one fell swoop I could cement the bonds of teambuilding in corporate America and buy handmade. Smells like a win-win to me.

The magnets are cute. I mean ridiculously cute. And brightly colored. Bright and cute. And whimsical. What’s not to love? And I do like peas even when they don’t have super cute smiley faces. But these do. Bright, cute and smiley.

Buy unique. Buy handmade.

A Summer Fashion Bullseye

Shopping for casual summer fashion is right up there with several of my other most detested shopping tasks: 

1. Shopping for jeans
2. Shopping for bras
3. Shopping for swimwear

I’m a problem child when it comes to summer fashion. I don’t wear shorts. I don’t own one pair. Not one. Shorts look dumb on me. I am thick through the middle with chicken legs. Not a good look for shorts. Ever. At my most desperate I won’t wear shots. Ever. Just to be clear. Not ever.

And I am busty, or to put it another way. I got a big rack. Big racks don’t work in cami’s with shelf bras or halter tops or strapless dresses. And I have a bit of a tummy. Some call it the “menopooch”. One of my besties calls it “the fopa” (pronounced foo-pah),  which translates into the “fat over pussy area”. Yeah it’s lewd, but it’s also shockingly accurate.

So basically I need summer fashion that is a v-neck/scoop neck, can accommodate a bra with reinforced steel girders, floats away from the tummy a little and is stylish without breaking the bank. And I want to be able to wash it and line dry. Dry cleaning is unacceptable. Basically I want it all.

I decided I wanted some dresses to fill the gap in my casual summer wardrobe. I work art shows. I sit at a lot of baseball games. I want to look fun, stylish and effortlessly casual when it 95 degrees out. And so I began my summer dress hunt.

I tried Athleta.com which is an arm of the Gap conglomerate of stores. Very cute stuff. I get their catalog. Clearly I failed to notice all models are 5’11, with 2% body fat and amazing yoga bodies. Bitches. Still I had hope and ordered 3 dresses but nothing fit quite right. And at $59-$89 a pop, the dress should make me look amazing. Not so much with the amazing.

I also tried Soma.com (lingerie arm of Chicos). Very cute stuff. I get their catalog. The models are a little less perfect. I ordered three dresses and struck out swinging. Back they went.

I also tried a few local places and came up empty. I felt defeated, unloved and a summer shopping failure.

And then…I went to Target…not to shop for dresses but for some other random thing, but I stumbled into their women’s department. And there they were…rayon blend dresses with a v-neck, twist knot front with an empire waist that gently floats away from the tummy without looking like a mumu. Score! Well – until I realized it’s July in Wisconsin and everything is thoroughly picked over so my size wasn’t available.

But then I remembered the internet.

Cue angels singing.

Even though it’s July, Target.com had plenty of dresses in my size and color preference.

I wept for joy.

For $60 I bought three totally cute sundresses. For those of you following along at home, that’s $20 per fabulously effortless, wash and wear dress. So happy. And because I must be having a string of amazing luck, I also stumbled across an uber cute Karen Kane designer dress, on the yellow dot sale rack, in my size (woot!) at the mall. Yellow dot is code for “so cheap you can’t afford not to buy it”.

So $100 got me 4 dresses which nets out to $25 a dress.

I know! 100% utterly fabulous!