I had a great senior portrait session with Andy. We spent the first part of the session on a beautiful farm a few miles west of Chelsea.

After a while we headed into town.

That’s the historic Chelsea depot behind Andy. It’s a wonderful old depot that’s been well-preserved and is now host to a wide variety of local events.

The Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum came to the Chelsea library to teach local kids about the Great Lakes. Specifically, they gave the kids a hands-on illustration of how water flows through the Great Lakes to the ocean.

Hey, look! Up in the corner! It’s Canada! Good thing there’s a Great Lake or two in the way.

The lakes were represented by aluminum pans of varying sizes, and they were resting on foam blocks of varying sizes to provide the varying elevations of the lakes. (Varying varying varying varying. Varying varying? Varying!)

Once the lakes were arranged at the proper elevations and locations, they punched holes in the sides of the pans and used straws to connect the lakes. (They used modeling clay to seal the holes.)

When the lakes were connected, the water joined the party.

The model worked very well.

The above photo shows Lakes Superior (top straw) and Michigan (left straw) draining into Lake Huron, while the below photo shows Lake Huron draining into Lake Erie.

If you’re wondering where the next straw is…well, there isn’t one. Why? Because Lake Erie drains into Lake Ontario by way of Niagara Falls! You can’t see it in this photo because Lake Erie isn’t yet full, but the water drained over the top right corner of the pan into Lake Ontario.

Here’s a look at the entire model:

The whole model was a simple but remarkably effective way to help kids — and adults, too! — get a good understanding of how the Great Lakes work. Even better, it’s something you can very easily do at home with your kids. Just get a few aluminum pans, straws, and modeling clay and you’re good to go.

On Saturday — the last day of the fair — I finally got a chance just to walk around the fair. It was a beautiful day.

As I was walking around, I saw Colors the Clown doing a show for the kids.

Chelsea has changed quite a bit since I was a kid (back in the 20th century?!), but it’s still a rural small town surrounded by farms, so the fair still has a significant focus on farming. Since a farm can be a foreign concept to many kids, it’s valuable to have that focus. Food exists before it’s in the grocery store, and it’s good to get a reminder of that fact every now and again.

Here we have future bacon lounging in one of the barns:

I realize that could also be future ham, but I like bacon more than I like ham.

The next barn had goats.

You might think that’s a conceited animal to go around calling itself Greatest Of All Time, but here’s an important detail: the animals were around long before a conceited professional athlete ruined the name.

That barn also had sheep.

That particular sheep was remarkably sociable. Or maybe it was hungry. Or maybe it was stealing watches and wallets. Would that make it a pickBAAAAAcket?

Speaking of sheep: another barn had sheep shearing demonstrations. I don’t mean there were people protesting the practice of sheep shearing — though I’m sure there are malcontents who would do just that — but rather there was a farmer shearing sheep where people could watch.

That gentleman has been shearing sheep for decades. The process proved to be very efficient, and when he was done he let the kids come up to feel the newly-shorn sheep.

While the kids were admiring the sheep’s new haircut, he explained that the greasy substance they felt on the sheep was lanolin. Or, in the native language of sheep, LAAAAAAAnolin.

If you’d like to see what sheep shearing looks like, here’s a short video:

shearing

One of the other great traditions of the Chelsea Fair is the fair parade. It seems to be longer than it was when I was a kid, but that just means it involves even more candy, so kids (and dentists) still enjoy it.

The parade marshal was the very cheerful owner of a local barbershop:

I’m pretty sure Gary doesn’t wear the old-timey barber gear on a normal workday, but his barbershop is wonderfully small-town and old-school.

As usual, the CHS marching band wasn’t playing when it marched past me:

A local church put its worship band on a wagon and entertained the crowd along Main Street:

The Lions — not the Detroit Lions — brought their disease-fighting air force:

The Beach Middle School band actually did play while they walked past me!

The fair parade is a happy time for everybody. Don’t believe me? Take a look:

If that’s not happy, I don’t know what happy is.

The 2011 Fair Queen was in attendance:

The CHS cheerleaders cheered for the crowd:

The Chelsea House Orchestra got out of the house and turned into the Chelsea Parade Orchestra for the afternoon:

Eventually, everybody’s favorite fair parade feature rolled by: the Jiffy Mixes truck!

The Jiffy truck is accompanied by friendly locals handing out free (FREE!) boxes of Jiffy Mixes:

Back when I was growing up, there was nobody handing out boxes. Instead, the truck driver threw them out his window. The newer method means a lot more people get boxes, but…well, I do miss the old method just a little bit.

The Jiffy Mixes folks did introduce something — or rather, someone — new this year:

That’s Corny, the new Jiffy Mixes mascot. The character was created when the company produced a new video to accompany its factory tour, and it proved popular enough to prompt a real-life Corny costume.

Finally, scattered throughout the fair parade are a bunch of demolition derby cars. The winners — not just the overall winners, but also the individual heat winners — get to ride in the parade with their thoroughly trashed but still victorious cars.

Remember the library-sponsored derby car?

Yes, that’s driver Kim Potocki on the library car. She drove the extraordinarily well-read car to a heat victory on Wednesday.

A relatively recent fixture of fair week in Chelsea is the Run for the Rolls. What’s the Run for the Rolls, you ask? It’s a set of two races — a 5k and a 1 mile — that take place Saturday morning of fair week. The 5k takes place in the fairgrounds earlier in the morning, and the 1 mile heads down Main Street immediately before the fair parade begins. Since the latter runs the parade route immediately before the very popular parade, it includes lots of spectators to cheer on the runners.

Oh, and if you’re wondering why it’s called the Run for the Rolls — after all, don’t people usually run to avoid getting rolls? — it got its name thanks to the Common Grill and its inconceivably delicious dinner rolls. If you haven’t had a Common Grill roll, you don’t know what rolls are. They’re all-caps GOOD.

I wasn’t able to photograph the earlier race at the fairgrounds, but since I was set up to shoot the parade, I was all set to shoot the 1 mile run down Main Street. Before the race started I was certain I knew who would be running in first place, and I was right.

Before you get too impressed at my prognostication skills, let me explain: Bryce, the runner shown above, finished second in the state as a junior in the 2010 cross country finals. It wasn’t hard to guess that he’d be leading a 1-mile run through Chelsea.

The race has become quite popular:

Because it’s a short race in a fun environment, it attracts lots of kids and families.

Wednesday night was the second night of the demolition derby. It also happened to be a day of spectacular weather. When I arrived to stake out my spot, there were  beautiful storm clouds just past the fairgrounds.

Unfortunately for all of us spectators waiting for the derby to start, those weren’t the last storm clouds in the sky. Not long after I took that photo, the sky got angrier than Brian Kelly after another Notre Dame turnover. The result was a downpour accompanied by uncomfortably close lightning strikes and deafening thunder.

After taking shelter and enduring the storm, we were treated to more gorgeous clouds.

After a delay to let the storm pass, the derby started. It was a little muddier than usual thanks to the deluge, but it was still plenty of fun.

After a couple heats, yet another intense storm began to move into the area. For a while we were just past the edge of the storm, and the frequent flashes of lightning provided a spectacular backdrop for the derby. The following is one of my favorite photos I’ve ever taken, and it came courtesy of the fisheye lens I’d bought just a few days earlier.

A few minutes after I took that photo, the lightning strikes again became uncomfortably close, so I decided it was time to head to my car. This turned out to be wise: just as I reached my car, the heavens opened up yet again. I sat in my car for about fifteen minutes listening to the rain pelt my car and watching the lightning flash directly overhead with astounding frequency. To put my time to good use, I shot more photos through my windshield with my fisheye lens. These weren’t nearly as good as the above photo, but they’re still worth posting.

Sometimes the lightning was behind the clouds, making for eerie photos…

…and sometimes it was front and center.

When the rain let up a little bit, I headed home. But while the rain stopped by the time I got home, the divine fireworks were still going strong. When I arrived home, the lightning was over the field behind my house, so I spent a few more minutes getting photos of the remarkable storm. This was the best of the bunch:

Neither one of those light sources is the moon. Was it a ridiculous display of lightning? Yeah, it was ridiculous.