Don Ho and the Testicle Festival

Provocative subject line, eh? Haha I'm kind of sickly proud of myself for that one.

Tonight it snowed. A lot. And my aunt and uncle and cousins were out again to go camping but we spent the time inside reminiscing about old vacations and eating chinese food.

My Mom told us about her trip to Hawaii when she was 16. They saw Don Ho and went to a luau. Has ANYONE, ANYWHERE, EVER, heard about Don Ho? Really? My Mom still has her souvenir drink cup from the concert... she was drinking from it when the subject came up. The guy has an afro and he's part black, part Hawaiian native. Ah, the pictures of my Mother, with that 70s show hair and yellow tube top with a lei on. HAHAHA.

Which got us talking about Don Ho being like that guy in Vegas who does the shows. But no one could remember his name... it took twenty minutes and five phone calls to friends to figure it out. (We don't google things in the country.) "You know, the guy who's tall with the fake tan and the dark hair and flashy white teeth who uses all the brill cream? I think he owns horses too... he was on the Chevy Chase Vegas vacation movie..." "AHHH. What is his name???"

Little known fact about me... I've been to Vegas five times. With my family. It's our most popular family vacation destination. (Here comes the part where I justify it...) It's warm, cheap, clean, beautiful, full of theme parks and pretty sweet entertainment, lots of desert around if you want to get away for a bit, and it has lots of campgrounds to camp in too. Don't worry, we don't gamble away our shirts. Four times out of six we've come home richer than we started - don't know how that happened.

In case you're still wondering, it's Wayne Newton. The guy is Wayne Newton.

Yep, we're high class here. (As refined and as good solid nice polite as you can get, we own Don Ho cups to drink with. Oh, and three Testicle Festival cups that Grandma brought back from Utah once just because she thought they were funny. Somewhere in Utah, they have a Testicle Festival every year where they castrate their bulls all at the same time. ick.)

Another little known fact about me... I can castrate hogs. Oh yes, 18 years of living as a hog farmer's daughter has some obscure benefits. We used to mark them with a pink bingo marker for girls, blue for boys. Then we'd throw the blue marked ones (yes, like a baseball) across the barn where the other sister would catch the piglet (they were castrated at about two weeks, or five pounds) and put it in a grocery cart. When we had about five, we'd castrate them and cut their teeth off and their tails off. We had it down to a science - 30 seconds a hog, 5 hogs at a time, to do 80 hogs every two weeks. I assure you, this is all very necessary for their health and well being; and for the quality of the meat. Hmmm... I could have been a surgeon!!!

Gretchenville

It was the last weekend of the summer... and we were bored. And we realized that we missed the rodeo season. And in a semi-drunken moment my aunt said, "We can make our own rodeo right here (in our campground)!" It was a moment we would never look back from.
As any self-respecting Albertan knows, for a rodeo you need a bull. So we made one. A 'real' bucking bull made out of a barrel that is more difficult to ride than it looks. (I speak from experience.) My little cousins Kyle and Cameron (my boys :) ) made the rodeo. Cameron was the 'pannouncer' and Kyle was Dale Flower, bullrider extraordinaire (he also does all the other rodeo events).

And a rodeo needs a parade too, right? So we had one. With my brother's new car (the bum, he gets a version of my car only it has new car smell and was kept in a heated garage it's whole life and purrs like a sweet devil kitten), the horses, the quads, the car hood, and our Mayor (the aunt who came up with the idea). We named our little 'town' Gretchenville.

Lord, how I got suckered into wearing the 'medic costume' I'll never know. My little cousin (he's 7) Cam said, "But I have to wear a costume I don't like. It's not fair if you don't too." Frig, how do you say no to that? ( I fell asleep while I was supposed to be on 'medic duty' - night shifts and warm sun and the smell of horses and soft ground just all combine to be some weird magic potion.)

We had beer gardens too. Everyone now KNOWS (proof positive) that while I appear rational, really I am just nuts.

Comment on the horse... his name is Jimmy. He's actually a rodeo champion, won the stampede calf roping. His full name is Jim Beam Whiskey, but we call him Jimmy for the sake of the impressionable cousins, trying to be like the real cowboys they see in the rodeo movies. I love this horse. He goes like stink when you want him to. And while he's spirited and stubborn too, he can be sweet and gentle (once you wear him out a bit). He belongs to my uncle, and is Cam's horse (Cam my cousin, not me) but when my uncle's not here, between me and Jimmy, I think he's a wee bit mine too.