A Little Thursday Night Rodeo

My city’s summer celebration is this weekend.  And when you live in the Great Wild West that means rodeo.  Now, I’m not like a die hard rodeo fan.  It is totally entertaining, and those cowboys have some seriously crazy skills.  But I don’t have a cowboy hat, or pink boots or anything.  Yet.  But tonight Scott and I volunteered in the rodeo concession stand.  Our town wants to keep the rodeo a family friendly place, so they won’t allow a tobacco or alcohol mega corporation to take over  concessions.  So they ask for volunteers to run the concessions so we can keep alcohol out of the arena.  Which I love.  Creamie will be old enough next year to really enjoy it I think.  I can’t wait!

Anyway, tonight was three solid hours of dousing chips with nacho cheese (ew, so gross) and digging water bottles out of a bathtub size tub of ice.  And then things started to get so busy I ended up on strawberry duty (Yay!).  Different from most every other rodeo in America the snack of choice tonight was sliced strawberries floating in sweet cream.  Yep, standard rodeo fare ’round these parts.  Once upon a time my little city was known for growing strawberries.  But things have changed and we have grown up, and those cups of strawberries and cream are in high demand.  And we truck the strawberries in from California now.  Last night alone they went through more than 300 cases of strawberries.  And we still have four more nights of rodeo to go.  Tonight I think it was closer to 500 cases.  We had probably 10 people filling up cups of already sliced berries and we couldn’t keep up with the demand.  It was incredible.

This was from my short stint as macho nacho maker.  I seriously don’t know what boy outside of junior high can eat that polyester nacho cheese.  Just the color of it gives me the heebie jeebies.  But there are plenty of people that like them.  I lost count of how many bags of corn chips got drenched in nacho.

This big old bull was waiting for his chance to knock a cowboy clear to the moon.  They weren’t too big a fan of all the people trying to get close enough to take a picture either.  In fact, everytime you got to close they stomped towards you.  Scary.  A big giant half ton bull with horns running toward you behind the fence is totally different than a pony running at you.  Anyway, I’m covered with sticky strawberries and I’m going to take a shower before I collapse into bed.  I am pretty sure I poured more than 10 gallons of cream tonight.  My arm and shoulder muscles hurt in places I didn’t know I had.