After our gloomy, drippy stretch of weather this week, the weekend is here and looking pretty nice. I know there are a lot of folks for whom Saturday and Sunday is not their personal weekend...in fact, Monday and Tuesday made up my weekend for big stretches of my work-life. I didn't mind, since it gave me great excuses for never having plans on Friday or Saturday nights: "Oh, yeah, I had lots of folks calling me to go out but, having to work the next day, I decided to stay home and watch that very special episode of Love Boat where Captain Stubing trys an herbal hair-growth product and hallucinates that he is actually a news-writer in the Twin Cities. He's calling Julie, Mary and Gopher, Lou...it was just a mess." Anyway, it is the weekend and time for lots of area towns to begin their festivals and special days.

For example, the wonderful town of Richmond, Missouri...the Mushroom Capital of the World...is celebrating the 26th annual Mushroom Festival all weekend long. In addition to great food, games, exhibits and music, they will have 800 pounds of morel mushrooms in a refrigerated truck. It's a great time in a great place. It also answers the age-old question of where dogs from the Iditarod spend the night...in a Mush-room. (I wonder if we could put in a digital rim-shot for awful lines like that one.)

The Mushroom Festival reminds me of the small Wisconsin town where I grew up. It was a little like Mayberry, with the Bates Motel just over the county line. Sort of like Norman Rockwell painted it after a very long night on a bus eating too many macadamia nuts. I wouldn't trade growing up there for anything, though. Every year the big weekend was called Town and Country days. Considering our town was mostly country, it always seemed a little pretentious. But it was great fun, with carnival rides and games, polka bands, a beer-tent, sales at all the local merchants.

One year they had a traveling circus in town and one of the elephants broke free and rambled to the nursing home. Actually, he rambled through the nursing home and did some damage to one of the hallways. No one was hurt but one resident told me years later he thought he needed to get his medication changed until someone told him it really was an elephant he had seen in his pajamas that morning. ("How he got in my pajamas, I'll never know..." See, we really need that rim-shot.)

But, year in and year out , the main event of Town and Country days was the Cow Chip Toss. Yes, it is exactly what it sounds like. Remember, we're talking about Wisconsin which is filled with cows. As it says on the license plates: "America's Dairyland." For awhile there was a push to get that slogan changed to "Smell Our Dairy Air" but it fell flat. The official state motto is "Forward," which most of us in rural Wisconsin knew as "Forward, but watch where you step."

Everyone had a chance to see how far they could hurl the meadow muffins. The serious competitors would look over the pile carefully judging which dry pie was the most aerodynamically sound. There were many techniques such as the shot-put toss and the Frisbee throw. For a little kid it was quite a memorable spectacle. As I think about all those Town and Country days I spent watching the bovine biscuits soar through the air, I wonder if being surrounded by that led me to being a weatherman. You may insert your own joke here...and rim-shot.