behine the scenes of a State Fair

The Alaskan State Fair is scheduled to open on the 21st of this month so it is time for all the arts and crafty people to show off their talents. Have you ever wondered how people earn their ribbons? Well we had the chance to find out how the canning people earned their ribbons, we were recruited to be tasting judges. There were over 500 entries and we arrived at our duty station at 7 pm and we were told that we should be finished by 10 pm and if we stayed until the end of the tasting we would earn 2 tickets each for admission to the fair plus a ribbon that said we were judges. Anyway we arrived (Del, Cathy and myself) at 7 pm prompt and the tables were all set up to hold 8 people, there are 4 judges to each process, so I was paired with Cathy and two other people and Del was paired with 3 people. We had to judge the packaging, consistency, taste, smell. We tasted so many jams, jellies, preserves, marmalades, pickled beets, pickled who knew what, chutney, we had to rate each group and pick 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc, let me tell you, talk about a sugar high, oh my gosh, I tasted some weird stuff, good stuff, fabulous stuff and stuff to die for, at the very end of the tasting they broke out all the salmon stuff, smoked, canned, and by that time there were only 6 of us die hards left out of over 40 people for that tasting, we had to smell, taste, judge the looks and I am sick of salmon. I have never tasted so many different kinds of ways to can salmon, we had peppered salmon, jalapeno's salmon, dill salmon, smoked salmon, just plain salmon, pickled salmon. The reason they saved the salmon for last is if they had opened up the salmon before all the rest of the stuff, then everything would smell and taste like salmon. We finally finshed at midnight but my stomach did not settle down until the morning talk about tossing and turning, ugh, I did not feel the least bit hungry today and right now I could care less if I never had jam, jelly, preserves, pickles, salmon for a long long long time, but I am ready to do it again next year haahhahaah....it was fun.