People's Fair and Lego Go Well Together

06 Jun 2010
Posted by jcfiala

One of the events I look forward to each summer is the Capital Hill People's Fair, a huge collection of food (most of it bad for you) and art/nick-nacks all crammed into the Civic Center Park. It's usually crowded, and was this time, and it's usually very warm, which is why Tammy and I were very happy to find the straw hats we'd bought at last year's fair to wear to this one.

I parked a fair distance away at the place I've been parking to work downtown at Examiner.com, and it was a decent walk to and from... but then, it was only a dollar to park! I guess I'm cheap. We walked our way over to the Capital, and then walked over to the park, where we shared a cheesesteak together before we started hitting the shops. Lots of neat stuff - jewelry and clothing is popular, as well as advertising for something else. I saw Cartoon Network, Yelp, and several booths for the Denver paper around as I went through, and happily paused for a quick twelve minute massage while Tammy went off to see about a Henna tattoo. (Sadly, too busy.) We didn't end up buying anything this time around. We went about 75% of the way around, and then decided to leave, taking off to a nearby Starbucks on the mall where we could unwind and enjoy eating a sweet crepe we picked up before leaving the fair.

Drinks and crepe consumed, we went down the 16th street mall to the Denver Chalk Art Festival, where crazy people kneel on the hot pavement and make fantastic chalk art. Most of it wasn't near finished - we showed up Saturday afternoon, after all - but given how hot it was Sunday I'm glad we went then. It was quite cool to see all the work. That said, we got pretty tired out by then, walking our way back to the free shuttle and taking it back to Glenarm, where we walked up to get back to the car.

But not before my pointing out the existance of Bayou Bob's, a great little hidden Cajun/South place. We got a pair of ice teas and two appitizers: one of hush puppies and the other popcorn shrimp. The Hush Puppies were great, crunchy and rich with taste, and the popcorn shrimp was nicely sized, spiced and lightly fried up - a fantastic afternoon snack. I went through two big glasses of Iced tea before we continued back to the car.

Sunday (today) has been awfully hot, so I'm pretty glad that today is when the local Lego store had schedule demolition of the eight-foot-tall Buzz Lightyear that had been built in an event about three weeks before. It was made by lots of local kids, who would build mega-sized bricks out of 2x4 and 2x8 bricks, which would then be put together by a Master Builder into a giant statue. Although it looked great, the fact is that it needed to go to Miami for the next build event, and so it had to be taken apart into it's component bricks! Happily, sixteen members of CoWLUG (The Colorado and Wyoming Lego Users Group) showed up and - as many hands make light work - we had it taken apart in a little more than two hours. We were done before the pizza even arrived!

So, with that done, what's to do but sift through piles of Lego the club had gathered, and some parts given to us by the nice folks at the Lego store, while discussing lego and the like. Then the pizza did arrive, and after that we delt out some base plates and got a little certificate for the help. After that I hit the Lego store - we'd been working in an empty storefront - and picked up the Space Police limo with the Pimp lego figure, a Racer 3000 and Pyramid Lego board games, and some other bits, including some Brick magazines. I'm really fond of the new Lego Board games - they're interesting, I adore the interchangeable lego dice brick, and the rules lay out some simple rules before suggesting how you might want to change the board... after all, it's Lego.

So, it's been a good weekend... although my fingers are a little numb from working with so much pointy plastic. :)

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