Urbana Sweetcorn Festival (& Sweet Corn Eating Contest)
This weekend I visited friends in Champaign for the Urbana Sweetcorn Festival. Let’s just say I’m already off the wagon. Lindsay and James = Bad Idea Bears… Here’s my recap of my weekend in Chambana.
The Urbana Sweetcorn Festival and Busey Executive Sweetcorn Eating Contest
You know it is time for a haircut when your hair keeps getting caught under your arms. You know it’s really time for a haircut when you accidentally coat your hair in deodorant every morning because it gets in your way. Yeah. So I desperately found a salon with an opening for Saturday morning and chopped off five inches. It feels really good because I guarantee that those five inches had been dyed about 30 times. If you plucked out a hair you could noticeably tell that one end way about three times thicker than the other. I didn’t get a picture of it, but you can kind of see it here:
After cutting my hair I stopped off to get some Portillos for lunch. I decided while there that Jeff likes Portillos enough to walk a couple miles for it, so maybe I should buy him one. So I got him a hot dog and it sat in my car for two and a half hours while I drove to his place.
So 2.5 hours later I arrive in Champaign and give Jeff his hot dog and he wipes everything off and eats it and I am not jumped on by an actual dog. Later Jen will ask me why I am there. Well, there are plenty reasons:
1. It was Sarah’s birthday!
2. There was a possibility of me going to Tennessee for work that weekend and that fell through. And then there was a possibility of going camping that weekend and that also fell through. So I just felt like going somewhere.
3. There was a sweetcorn eating contest that day at the Urbana sweet corn festival and you know I will drive anywhere for an eating contest.
OK the third one wasn’t true. Well, it is kind of true, but I wouldn’t just have driven down for this contest (it wasn’t a professional Major League Eating contest after all). It was just a happy coincidence.
Once at the Urbana sweetcorn festival, I made Jeff go with me to try to find the contest stage. It was at number 508 on the map. We got to 508 and there was nothing there. Turns out there were TWO 508s on the map. Crazy?
So the contest was the Busey Executive Sweetcorn Eating Contest and pitted seven of the bank employees against each other to see who could eat the most sweetcorn in three minutes. The contest was “sweet” but short, and they had 7 eaters and a tiny table so they were kind of eating in a circle so you could only see the three people in the front. So I didn’t even see the dude who won eat. He won the trophy and, I’m sure, the admiration and respect of all the other bank employees. I think he ate 6 ears in 3 minutes.
Jeff had so much fun. Competitive eating is his new favorite sport.
After the contest we wandered the rest of the sweet corn festival. And then headed to Wendy’s where I had the worst strawberry shake ever and killed some time at Target waiting for Sid to become a better planner. Eventually he planned something and we met at Crane Alley for dinner. I did not drink any martinis while there since they are evil and since I had given up drinking. I did have a delicious bruschetta that had goat cheese, balsamic sauce, and huge chunks of roast garlic. Yum.
After dinner we headed back over to the fest and everyone got their lemon shake-up fixes, then we headed over to watch Foghat perform. One of Sid’s underlings I met later pointed out that he once bought CD that wasn’t quite their greatest hits but was rather titled “Slow Ride and other hits” which pretty much sums up Foghat and shows why they waited until the very end to play Slow Ride. I’m pretty sure everyone would have left right away if they had played it first.
We actually left after a few songs and chose to bum around on the outskirts and chill with some funnel cake and listen from afar. I did not buy any tickets and therefore could not get any funnel cake for myself so I just decided to pick from everyone else’s. Hence making me a funnel cake whore. Sid says I’m more like a funnel cake vulture. But I prefer the term whore.
Eventually Sid and Sarah called it a night, so I wished her a happy birthday and goodbye.
I joined the rest of the group and we eventually headed off to Jupiter’s where we played games where you had to touch naked women and later not-so-attractive not-so-naked men. I didn’t drink because I am not drinking and on the way back to the car Lindsay and James declared that I am not fun unless I drink. So when we all got back to the apartment Linz started pulling out all the alcohol determined to get me to drink something so I would be fun the rest of the night. Gee, thanks guys.
So I succumbed to peer pressure and had a Smirnoff black cherry thingy and tried to drink the mini bottle of pear vodka, but didn’t make it through a third of it. Did I ever mention Val=lightweight? And then we went to bed, which made the point of me even drinking useless.
Last time I slept at Jeff’s I was suddenly woken up in the middle of the night by a dog licking my face and then jumping on my head. Toby is no longer living there 🙁 so I did not awake to that fate…although I was kind of worried that the same thing might happen. But replace the word “dog” with “James.”
After a night of not getting molested in my sleep (I hope?) we awoke and went to breakfast at the Courier. Jeff was looking at my breakfast funny and I don’t know why. The lady with the coffee came by and asked if I had regular or Cinnamon. Cinnamon? I didn’t know that was an option. Not that I like cinnamon that much anyways.
When breakfast was all eaten I said goodbye and hopped in black pickle for the long drive to JoeW and Meredith’s place…but that’s another blog…
Jeff
August 25, 2008at2:44 pmMy legs look like twigs, so weird.