Burlington Fall Festival Pumkin' Pitchin'

It is the last Saturday of September, 2008 and it is time for the Burlington WA Fall Festival. Part of the festival involves destroying pumpkins using medieval type machines called trebuchets (treb-u-shay).

Here are three video's I took with my camera of three of the tosses.



For the last few years, the contest has been distance throwing, see how far you can toss your pumpkin.


This year was a bit different. Instead of seeing how far one could toss the pumpkin, the object was to hit your target. With practice on Friday and Saturday morning, the teams had the opportunity to set their targets where they wanted to for the "official" tosses during the competition.


It turned out to be a lot of fun watching the different teams attempt to hit their targets. In fact, there were a few direct hits and several very close shots. And, of course, there were many far misses.

The targets were small stacks of hay bales with a flag mounted on it. The formula for figuring the winner was something along the lines of this... distance from the flag divided by the distance of the shot gave the accuracy percentage. The team with the highest accuracy percentage was the winner. The second video was scored a direct hit, because they actually hit the pole that the flag was on.

I apologize for the quality of the video's. They were shot with my digital camera and not with a video camera. (I gotta get me one of those.)

I hope you enjoyed watching the video's as much as we had watching the actual thing.

Cousin's Get-together

This past Saturday, the 13th of Sept., was our second Cousin's Get-together. It was started last year and was held again this year. Dave & Bev live on the south fork of the Nooksack River and they have built their own beautiful little park on the river bank. That is where we all gathered. We all had a lot of fun getting caught up with each other's lives. Here are just a few pictures that I took while the food was being prepared for serving. We all brought a hot dish and a dessert or salad. There was plenty of good food enjoyed by all.

We were also very pleasantly surprised to see Don & Arlene there. It has been a very long time since I have seen them and we had a good time visiting with them again.

Making a Game

In the past few days, I have made a Ladder Golf game out of PVC pipe and golf balls. This game can be made with two 10' pieces of PVC pipe, one 1/2 inch and one 3/4 inch. Of course, the necessary connections are also needed. Below, you will see all the pieces after they were cut, along with the necessary connection pieces.

I spent most of Saturday cutting the PVC pipe into the necessary sizes and then I drilled holes in the golf balls. I bought a bag of reclaimed golf balls from Fred Meyer. It had 36 previously used golf balls in it. Afterwards, the bag makes a very nice carry case for the bolo's that I made for the game. I also painted the golf balls with some paint that I had in the garage. I needed six golf balls in each color to make three bolo's.

Here is the golf balls that I prepared, along with the bag they came in and the clothes line I bought to make the bolo's with . It is 1/2 woven line. Wrapped line does not work as well, because it can become "unwound" while playing the game.

Here is a close up of some of the golf balls with the hole drilled through them.

After cutting all the PVC pipe into smaller, precisely measured pieces, all that remains is to glue and assemble the pieces. Great care must be taken to make sure that the pieces are flat so that it makes a nice looking target. It is also designed to be taken apart for easier transporting. Each of the rungs comes apart and the base is built to part in the middle, below the rungs.

Here are all the bolo's, after taking great care to make sure that they are all reasonably close to the same length. They have to be long enough to wrap around the rungs, but not too long, so they don't wrap around two rungs.

And here is the whole thing, disassembled and ready for transport.

To play this game, all that is needed is two to four people. The distance from the target can be mutually agreed upon, but it must be far enough to make it challenging. Generally, the target will be 5 to 7 paces away. Each person takes turn throwing, under-handed, all three of the their bolo's, one at a time. After each person has thrown their bolo's, a score is taken. The top rung is worth three points, the second rung is worth two points and the bottom rung is worth one point. The person with the highest score goes first on the next toss, working down to the person with the lowest score. The first person to get to 21 EXACTLY wins the game.

During play, bolo's can be knocked off and then those points are lost to who ever had that bolo. If a player happens to go over 21, then the points earned on that toss is subtracted from their score at the beginning of their toss. For example, Player A has 19 points and he needs two to win. His first throw is on the 1 point rung. He now needs another 1 point to win. His next toss wraps around the three rung. He now has 4 points for the turn and he started with 19. He then will "short throw" his last bolo, so as to not get any more points. He now has to subtract the 4 points from the 19 points he had and he now has 15 points for his next turn.

During play, anything can be done to distract the thrower, except touching. It is not allow to touch the thrower in any way.

One interesting "rule" we added for playing this game at Lake Roosevelt this past year, was that if a player landed on 13, he (she) had to go back to 0. This can really make the game exciting.

If anyone wished detailed directions on building this game, please e-mail me and I will send them.

A Work of Art

After looking at all the food that Ri, and Lorrisa and Renee keep adding to their blog, I just had to post the following.

Now.... Isn't that a work of art? And delicious? You bet it is. Really, there is nothing better then home-made bread. This loaf will spend the night in the refrig. and then it will get sliced tomorrow. After that, it will be used as toast and for making sandwiches for lunches.

I really wish you had smell-a-vision, so you could have smelled this thing as it came out of the bread maker.