Like all small towns, mine has weird festivals that it does every year. In this case, the current festival is the Iris Festival, in it's 54th year of irisy goodness. It celebrates, (can you guess?) the iris (you're so smart), since Keizer is actually the iris growing capitol of the world. Or something like that.

We're proud. Iriss are pretty, and they smell fantastic, unless you're in an entire field of them, and then it smells like a cheap whore and you faint a lot. Also, there are bees.

With The Iris Festival comes all the things you'd expect with a festival. Pancake breakfasts put on by the Fire Department, a parade that runs two hours and twenty minutes long (and grows progressively longer with each year and thanks to the morons on the city council who passed the no throwing law, no longer throws candy. $@%!! The candy was my favorite part! Some people throw it anyway, and risk the wrath of the council and the $15 dollar fine that comes with it) that has every church, school, and small business in the town marching in it, along with sisters, who are in Color Guard, in the front row...I'm told this is a good thing, because only people who are good at twirling batons and marching in place get the front row. I am good at neither, so I would probably be fired.

Also with it are street fairs, a carnival (which nobody'll go to with me, because they all stink), and a quilt show. I don't quilt, but I plan on going because I have decided I will make a quilt, even if it comes out lopsided or looking like a scarf.

So, our town is now clogged with about 200,000 people who don't live here, along with the however many who do, tramping up and down the sixteen block area very near my neighborhood, which means we have people parking dangerously close to in our flowerbeds. Which is rude, and makes me want to have them towed. Take that, tourists!