I went out to the eastern part of the county, which is the site of the annual Fair.    It follows pretty much the same template, year after year and is a celebration of rural life.    There is livestock from large, like the milk cows and bulls to small, like the rabbits and chickens.

Or the large small animals like this giant Belgian rabbit.   It was twice as big as my wild rabbits.

Or the  miniature large animals like this tiny donkey and horse.

There were vendors selling an array of unusual products, like rhinestone cowboy hats, salvation and really hot hot sauce.

There is overpriced fair food, deep fried novelties or familiar comforts.

Various competitive exhibitors show off their skills, of course I always look for the quilts.

And there are the shows,  usually music in the evening, and animal performers during the day.  This year we were treated to the birds (previous post) and a sea lion show.

Living in a landlocked area, I think that we appreciate the athleticism and beauty of sea lions.   In San Francisco they are seen as lazy nuisances, and they are everywhere (well, everywhere along the coast where they can scrounge fish).

And there was a dragon, they really are everywhere!

One of the many joys of summer is enjoying the beauty of wildflowers.  We have had a lot of rain this year, so there are a lot of wildflowers in bloom.   Me and Miss P were out for our walk this morning, and found these beautiful specimens.

This looks like some sort of chive.   It’s a gorgeous shade of pale lavender.

These tiny daisy-like flowers are very hardy.   They bloom every year regardless of rain or the lack thereof.

Allium have these lovely triangular purple flowers.

Perhaps these are coreopsis, and they covered the hillside.

I have no idea what these weird alien-designed purple flowers are, I don’t ever remember seeing these in this color, they are usually white.

This was the only one in bloom in this field.

There were just a few clumps of these purple stalks.

We found all of these flowers growing in an un-mowed section of a city park.   These flowers just are, they were not planted, they are not watered.   I had fun photographing them and Miss P kept her nose to the ground to sniff out the creatures that had been here enjoying the flowers too.

In the Disney movies ‘Cars’ and ‘Planes’ these mechanical objects are presented as human, with emotions and feelings.   But as far as I know, they haven’t made a movie that speaks to the condition of rural machines (those city machines hog all the attention).   So I would like to introduce you to some machines that I recently became acquainted with.

Oliver has a rather jaunty three color paint job, that lets you know who he is.

Co-op is no doubt short for Cooper, and he is a rather sporty orangey-red.

Tractors are given to informality, I’m sure that Case is just the diminutive for Casey.   The streamlined radiator cap lets you know just how fast this tractor is.

John is a very popular name for tractors, there were quite a few hanging around that shared this name.

In the Disney movies, machines are always involved in a big race against all odds.   So, there wasn’t a a race exactly, but these tractors gamely demonstrated their individual strengths for their humans by pulling increasingly heavy loads.   But the humans get the glory (and the little hat pins that show who won) and the machines modestly retire until the next competition.

When I was a little kid I remember looking at an ‘Arizona Highways’ magazine and being fascinated by the pictures of wildflowers growing along the roadsides.  I was amazed that flowers would grow, without anyone planting them or tending to them.  Our backyard/baseball field was pounded into dirt, with a few scrawny flowers growing along the edges.

I took these pictures this afternoon as Miss P and I were out for a stroll.

This plant had flowers ranging in color from deepest purple to lilac.

Purple and yellows predominate.

Which really lets the Painted Daisies stand out.

Milkweed is a favorite flower of butterflies, and it’s a lovely pink and white.

And Queen Anne’s Lace is a nice contrast to the green of the native grasses.

My Mom loved flowers.   I was talking to her once about how beautiful they were, and she asked me to send her some pictures.   So I documented every different wildflower I saw in one summer, and there are a lot of different ones.   I discovered that Colorado has highways that are just as beautiful as the ones in Arizona.