July 11, 2004

Excellent food day today: Bangers, meat pies, beer, margaritas, cornbread, and strawberry shortcake. Mmmm strawberry shortcake. And Shorn's grilled chicken was pretty darned tasty too. Nice, nice day.

As you can probably guess, the day involved a Scottish festival. (As much as I'd like to brag about my homemade bangers, I haven't yet reached that level of culinary sophistication.) We got our bangers at the Dunsmuir Scottish Games at the Dunsmuir house in Oakland.

We'd never been to the Dunsmuir games, so we decided to check it out. After all, the big Pleasanton games aren't until September, and who wants to wait until September for a meat pie? So we went and ate meat, drank beer, listened to Tempest, and perused booth after booth of Scottish goods.

More or less like any celtic festival--but also kinda better. The setting was beautiful and shady, with a cool old house as a backdrop. The atmosphere was laid back, and less crowded then these things usually are. The vendors were a mix of the normal Scottish game vendors and some Ren Faire vendors (castle blocks!) And the 'games' took place on a patch of lawn right in the middle of the festival--instead of off on the fringes. We were mere feet away from guys practicing the hammer throw (supposedly outlawed at this year's game) with only some traffic cones and caution tape between us and the spinning cannon ball on a chain. At Pleasanton, they keep these guys behind a batting cage, but not at Dunsmuir--nope, Dunsmuir is hardcore!

We did our share of shopping, too. The summer festival season is our Achilles heel. Shorn bought a dashing tweed cap (tweed! he so needs a pipe!) and I got a watch that I've had my eyes on for about two year now. Let me rephrase that. I got the watch that I didn't buy two years ago, and have regretted it ever since. And we bought by dad a tin of three different flavors of shortbread, for his birthday.

And that was just what we did before 1:30 in the afternoon. The rest of the day was spent relaxing at my parent's house, feeding them tequila. Like I said: nice, nice day.