Beth's New, Improved Austin Bloggery: Hey Shorty! It's Your Birthday!

It's good to be back home.

One of the best things about Eeyore's Birthday Party is that everyone is so nice... it's a very happy festival, full of charity and goodwill, not to mention dogs, at least one shoulder-borne cat, a goat, a pig, probably some other wildlife I didn't see, people dressed as Twinkies and bananas, the guy on the two-story bike, drums, smoke (both kinds - the dangerous one and the illegal one), and beautiful girls and boys of all ages and shapes and sizes in various stages of dress, undress, feathers, foliage, and paint. Also, there's beer.

Last time I volunteered at Eeyore's, year before last, I painted faces. The pressure was just too much, though - even though most of my paintings came out extremely well, I was horribly anxious about all of them, and the one silent, solemn little girl whose liquid eyes welled up and spilled over when I gave her the mirror was enough to convince me that this was not a job I was ever willing to take on again, even if nobody asked me to decorate their naughty bits. So this time I sold beer tickets. This is a doable job: insanely busy and fast-paced, and you have to be able to do simple arithmetic in your head reasonably quickly - a weak point of mine actually - but everybody's happy, everybody's nice, and because you're roped off behind a three-foot-tall fence of orange webbing, nobody cops a feel. The organizers give you a special marker that turns yellow on real bills so you can check 100's (and you'd be surprised how many people pay with those). You run out of tickets and ones a lot. It was the fastest two hours I've ever spent - I'm definitely up for doing this again next year!

After our shift, Robbie and I wandered around a bit, visited the drum circle, checked out the egg toss, and then found our lovely friend Diane, in honor of whose 50th birthday the whole festival was actually being held even if many of the partygoers were unaware of that fact. What better way to celebrate?