By the time I came home from work tonight, I had logged 24 hours of work in just two days. Chalk it up to writing four stories, typing 108 inches of Nobles County Fair results, working on more than 35 photos for the special Nobles County Fair edition that publishes on Saturday, covering a 2-hour City Council meeting with MnDOT Monday night and sitting through a 6.5 hour county board/budget hearing fiesta today.

I feel like my brain is fried, so I’m treating you all to a bit of randomness in my blog tonight. It’s too late to focus on one specific topic.

* Did you know that the easiest way to peel a banana is from the bottom? Just squeeze the end together and you can easily remove the peeling. I remembered this after sitting down to write my blog and the end snapped off the banana that was sort of my supper.

* After logging 47 miles walking around the lake in July, my August routine isn’t going so well. Blame it on pre-fair, fair and post-fair. I’m going to try to get my routine back after the fair tab goes to press, but there’s an issue with my sneakers. I stepped in a cow pie at the fair at some point Saturday, and it seems to have dried in all the little crevices at the bottom of my shoe. The question is, do I wear them on my walk and hope the dried dung falls off, or wash them in my washing machine and then have to scour the machine with bleach? Yes, it’s quite a dilemma.

* While I was unsuccessfully dodging cow pies at the county fair on Saturday, my mom had a little excitement of her own. Dad left the gate open in the cattle yard on Saturday. He’d taken the tractor in the pen to drop off a bunch of sweet corn stalks and, rather than get off the tractor to shut the gate (the cattle were in the back pasture), he decided to put the tractor away. He then proceeded to finish mowing lawn, forgetting about the gate. Next thing they knew, the Jerseys were encroaching on the garden. In her haste to stop them from stomping on her vegetables, Mom got her foot caught in the squash vines and toppled over. She’s OK … maybe a bruised knee and some hurt pride, but she’s laughing about it with the rest of us.

* Remember the loud cracks of thunder and lightning of Saturday night? Well, you may have noticed in Monday’s print edition that a tree in Worthington was split by one of those streaks of lightning. It seems the Buntjer farm was also impacted by the storm. Dad went out to get sweet corn for the Fairmont Buntjers Sunday morning, only to find one of the new straw bales smoldering out behind the grove. He ended up taking the tractor and loader out back, breaking the big, round bale apart and trying to knock down the fire. Fortunately the rain that came with the storm prevented the blaze from spreading.

Well, that’s all I have for tonight. My eyes are tired, but I’m pretty sure that darn caffeine-laden pop I had this afternoon will have me tossing and turning for a while!