Back for Big Tex

After taking a one year break from our previous visit to the Texas State Fair, we celebrated the end of Ruth's internal medicine rotation and Gerald's visit by heading there this past weekend. It was a crowded affair since it was the last weekend of the fair, but we were bound to have more fun this time as grizzled fair veterans.

Food
The first highlight is of course the plentiful food. Having gone conservative by partaking of corn dogs and fried turkey legs last time, we fully embraced the fried Texas goodness. We started off fairly normal, with a corn dog repeat, a bbq beef sandwich and some really good fried okra:



We then had to try the "most original of 2007" Fried Latte, which was somewhat of a misnomer since it really amounted to cappuccino ice cream on top of some fried donut. We were planning on trying Fried Coke and Fried Cookie Dough, but the coke concoction was pretty much like the Latte except substituting coke for ice cream so we switched it to the scrumptious looking Fried PB&J&B (peanut butter and jelly and banana). They were both extremely tasty but also filling turned somewhat gross by the last bite:



Fun
Roothie demands that the fun always start with pig racing where viewers are ushered into a barn and folks dressed as hicks (or maybe they aren't acting) bore you with filler time around three pig races. It was made much more exciting by Ruth, Gerald, and I betting coupons on pigs. Unfortunately, each of us won one race, so it came out a wash, but it certainly made it entertaining. Of course, the only race I filmed was my victory :)



We also had to have Gerald go look at Tiny Tim, the world's smallest horse, since Andrew missed out last time. It's actually pretty sad since it's all boxed up and doesn't look very happy, but Gerald jumped in to get an up close look:



We also played a bunch of games, largely to no avail. We started with a softball type toss game, which Ruth did really well at, but I kept overthrowing. We actually won a prize throwing darts at balloons! It's a good thing we had a dart board living in Mountain View... the practice came in handy. We also threw some cash away playing some skeeball and this rope climbing game. I was sure that Gerald and I were both going to make it, but alas we fell short:





More Food
After having that much fun on Saturday, we proceeded to eat even more on Sunday before vegging in front of some Sunday afternoon football. The Blue Mesa Grill Sunday brunch is some fine Tex Mex dining, especially the chocolate cake with ice cream:



All of the pics from the weekend:

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Alas, Gerald left already this morning back to his favorite town of St Louis, but Ruth is starting pediatrics this month so hopefully I'll get to see her more often!

Job Perks

Instead of lavish parties, gourmet food, free tshirts, and all things computer-related, I now get a few pens, a lab notebook, and lots of nice lab equipment. It sure beats some of the lame supplies I have had to use over the semesters taking chemistry and bio lab, but nothing really to write home about.

But... I did get an ID badge for UT Southwestern and Children's Hospital, some freakishly green Children's scrubs, a pager which nobody contacts me on, and a white lab coat that says "hubert pan, department of pediatrics" on it. But alas, it will take another 6 years before I can formally stitch on the all important additional two letters of "MD". I was considering submitting my name as "hubert pan, m.s." on account of my time at Stanford. I figured there would be at least an outside chances of either: 1) the person inadvertently making a typo since "s" and "d" are next to each other on the keyboard and they're probably conditioned to type "md" a lot or 2) the person noticing it and figuring there was a mistake in the order and intentionally changing it. It would be a lot more convenient if my initials just happened to include M and D like Gerlad...