Wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube fish!

Really, I would have said "....fin-flailing...," except these are quite clearly arms and not fins.

 Yay, ALCOSAN! Or something. Kids, today we went to the award-winning AlCoSan (Allegheny County Sanitary Authority) annual Open House, which looked and acted like a festival. Yes, my children, a festival at the shithouse.

I'm not kidding, we went to the bloody sewage plant for games, giveaways, a tour, and free lunch. A part of me is very annoyed that I didn't think this up myself.

The pic above is Martie in front of Frankie the Fish, the official mascot. There is also a paper printed pic of Martie being held by the poor teenage boy in the Frankie the Fish costume, but I wasn't allowed to take my own picture so I could upload it here, and I don't have a working scanner. You're just going to have to imagine it. See it in your mind? Of course you do.

 Look, a dandelion in the middle of September! I think the soil around this place must be super-nutritious for flowers. Or weeds. Or both.

 Lookit the size of that rain gutter! Seriously, the longest damn rain gutter for a small shack I've ever seen. These people are dead serious about their rainwater. No word on whether the pumpkins were grown in the sludge.

They wouldn't let us take pictures on the plant tour, either. Something about terrorists seeing the inside workings, then blowing it up and covering us all in....well.  You get the idea.

After the tour, I had two hot dogs, two oatmeal-raisin cookies, an apple, and some cider. Kevin had a hot dog (he can exercise more restraint than me, I frakkin' love free hot dogs)(oh, shut up), an apple, some lemonade, and he gave me his cookie. N'aww. Martie had a hot dog and a cookie bigger than her head. We weren't downwind, for which I was grateful.

Okay, now, one nice thing--to encourage a whole lot of green habits, including discouraging soil erosion and generating oxygen, they were giving away tree seedlings. This one is our new friend Socrates, a Hemlock (GET IT?!?) Canadiana. He's living in our kitchen window until he gets big enough to plant and not be mistaken for a weed, or mown accidentally. Or maybe he'll be a bonsai. He might like that.

Never let it be said I never get out and do anything interesting.