Yesterday (Saturday) my family and I attended the 50th Annual Bayfield Apple Festival in Wisconsin. We spent the better part of the day there, mostly walking around looking at the different booths, buying food and souvenirs that grabbed our interest. One of the highlights was seeing a glassforming demonstration (I was thinking of the "creator" wingtails in Caustizer's story
Far Away Home as I watched

); afterwards I bought several glass art pieces (mostly miniature sculptures): a sea anemone pendent, a leaf, an Italian carnevale-inspired bird mask, a turtle, a seahorse, and a tiny little dog bone. When we were done at the festival, we visited a local orchard to pick our own apples (Cortlands, to be precise). The most memorable event that happened there was when my youngest brother was implementing the method of shaking the tree to knock apples down, and one particularly large one dropped off and hit him on the head

(Yeah, sometimes it feels like I live in a cartoon

). My brother made a sound like "ehhhhh…", slumped forward to the ground, rolled over on his back with the apple clutched in his hand, and marveled at a windblown leaf.

Fortunately, he was only mildly dazed, and he took his revenge on that nefarious fruit before dinner.

We left some of our harvest with him at his dorm, but we still returned home with over 42 pounds of apples.