Lake Mills and EV Melotte Snapshots

Over a decade ago when online poker was hot I made a friend of another blogger that lived in London.  We both wrote about poker and were on a few forums.  My friends wife was also a writer and we communicated back and forth on Facebook and blogs for the last 12 to 15 years.

They moved from London to Connecticut a few years ago and when the government made it illegal to put poker winnings into banks and they tried to stop online gambling (except horse racing because THAT was not gambling . . . it seems many GOP Senators raced horses.)  poker came to an end as we knew it (meaning we could only play against Americans who were smarter at poker and thus winnings were dampened).

ANYWAY - we kept in touch as she is a GREAT writer.

Saturday at the Lake Mills Art Fair Elizabeth and her family FINALLY met after communicating for over a decade online.

Her husband is in Sad Diego working on software that will be installed in ALL Cobra Drivers so he could not make it but it was so awesome to see Liz FINALLY!!!!

Her family is in Madison for some dance thing for a week and staying in Fort Atkinson.  A joyous occasion.

 

The fair was awesome.  Fourth best of the 38 fairs I have done and a littler nerve wracking as I guess I have a following from the amount of people that said they only come to the fair to see MY stuff (NO PRESSURE).

The interesting thing is that in previous years it was local people purchasing but this year a lot of vacationers and summer home people were purchasing for their lake houses which tells me the economy is improving.

We stopped at Solar in Waterloo for a pizza - REALLY good pizza and as we walked into the busy restaurant someone said - IT's THAT ARTIST and they were pointing at me!!!

Seems DJs cousin had seen us in Lake Mills - then they went to Solar for pizza and had never been there before.  He spotted artwork on the walls and and upon closer inspection noticed they were mine.  He talked to some people who were looking at the art work and told them he had JUST seen me.

Then 10 minutes later we walk in!  Pictures were taking and we all relaxed again!   It sort of reminded me of when I was in Oshkosh for Public Enemies and as I walked into a restaurant people literally started squealing "it's him it's him the blogger guy" and I had to pose for photos with about 15 separate people as everyone in the restaurant want a photo with me. WEIRD!!!  My closets experience to being a rock star!

ANYWAY.      

The crowds were down but purchasing was up. And of course the Deforest fair was completely different from the Lake Mills fair.

Peripheral was a big draw in all it's many forms along with Jonathan but got zero attention 3 weeks ago.

  And of course The Cows

In Deforest people went nuts with Neon Madison and Lake Mills it did not get a passing look!  So weird.  I sold 5 prints of this 3 weeks ago and not one Saturday 

Paoli Art in Mill Park is next in about 3 weeks.  

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From EV Melotte's Snaphots - Where "I" came from 

My father, Redmond Granzow, born 1893, came from a background of lowa farmland and the military. He joined the army about 1911 as a Private, leaving it a few years after World War I as a Second Lieutenant. During those years he had married a pretty

Spanish-Mexican widow with a young daughter, Gladys. He fathered two sons, Don and Gilbeby from his first wife, and then divorced her.

My mother, Gwendolyn Acheson, born 1898, came from an elegant background of lace tablecloths and silver tea sets. She had attended finishing school and secretarial college before working as a private secretary to a Vice-President of Allis-Chalmers.

They married in 1924. Their honeymoon was a camping trip to California to bring Don and Gilbert to Wisconsin to live with them. They drove a 1923 Model T truck with a high canvas top over the truck bed, very like a motorized covered wagon. I know nothing

else about that trip except that one hot day they left a supply of milk sealed in a metal can in the truck bed and after driving all day over rough roads they opened it to get the milk out for supper and found a large lump of butter swimming in buttermilk.

They bought an eighty acre plot of mixed woods and wasteland on Highway 64 in Goodrich Township. The neighbor whose pasture lay across the road allowed them to park their truck there and live out of it while Pa built a tiny one-room cabin, and they lived there while he built the little one-story house where I was born and lived for my first ten years.

He sided the house with rolls of roofing, dark red on the bottom half and dark green on the top half. It was an oddity in an area of two-story, white-painted farmhouses but it wasn't a foolish whim or a make-do move. Fifty-six years later, having been unlived-in and unmaintained for forty-one years, the siding was still in good condition and the house still sat four-square on it's stone foundation.

Pa dug the twenty-five foot deep well himself, by hand, walling it up with stones that were so plentiful that most of them came from the well itself. My mother, pregnant with with my older brother, Wayne, stood at the top turning the crank that let down the empty pails and drew them up filled with soil. My half-brothers, aged six and eight, hauled them away and dumped them, getting as much dirt on each other as possible. My mother must have been fearful every moment that the walls of the well would collapse leaving her a pregnant widow with eighty acres of mortgaged land and two wild stepsons.

It was a good well and it never went dry, although in the drought summer of 1936 the water was scarce and a bit muddy.

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Weather - temps will slowly ramp up all week coming to a head on Friday at 96 degrees and VERY humid.  Heat index will be nearing 110 Thursday and Friday.  Maybe a tad lower in the 107s but - that is still warmish. 

Some rain maybe Wednesday but that is it for the next 10 days!

Get your outside stuff done today!  

See ya!