The San Diego Fair 2013

* When someone says 'Game on!', it means that they are accepting a challenge or ready to get something done.

Did You Know? - A fair (archaic: fayre) is a gathering of people to display or trade produce or other goods, to parade or display animals and often to enjoy associated carnival or funfair entertainment. It is normally of the essence of a fair that it is temporary; some last only an afternoon while others may last as long as ten weeks.

Did You Know? - At Grilled Cheese A-Fair, chef Barry Schneider?s overstuffed grilled cheese sandwiches look almost impossible to duplicate at home, but he did have a few tips for me that made my version of his fair favorite sandwich much easier to prepare.

“Grill the bread slices separately, and put cheese on each slice,” he said. “When the cheese starts to melt, spoon the mac-and-cheese onto one slice, and the warm, pulled pork on the other. Then put ’em together.”

When I tried his method at home, the melted cheese acted as a barrier to the gooey pork-and-pasta filling, and the bread remained crisp and buttery to the last bite.

Did You Know? - The Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) is a milkweed butterfly (subfamily Danainae) in the family Nymphalidae. It is perhaps the best known of all North American butterflies. Since the 19th century, it has been found in New Zealand, and in Australia since 1871, where it is called the wanderer.

It is resident in the Canary Islands, the Azores, and Madeira, and is found as an occasional migrant in Western Europe and a rare migrant in the United Kingdom.

Its wings feature an easily recognizable orange and black pattern, with a wingspan of 8.9?10.2 cm (3??4 in).

Did You Know? - Look for a pallet that has HT stamped somewhere on the pallet. This means the pallet was heat treated, or kiln dried as opposed to chemically treated.

Because you can never be sure that chemicals were stored on an old pallet or that there is some sort of bacteria lurking inside the recycled pallets, I would scrub the wood down with some bleach and soapy water and let it dry out before using it to plant anything.

Did You Know? - Development from egg to emerging bee varies among queens, workers and drones. Queens emerge from their cells in 16 days, workers in 21 days and drones in 24 days. Only one queen is usually present in a hive.

New virgin queens develop in enlarged cells through differential feeding of royal jelly by workers. When the existing queen ages or dies or the colony becomes very large a new queen is raised by the worker bees. The virgin queen takes one or several nuptial flights and once she is established starts laying eggs in the hive.

A fertile queen is able to lay fertilized or unfertilized eggs. Each unfertilized egg contains a unique combination of 50% of the queen's genes and develops into a haploid drone. The fertilized eggs develop into either workers or virgin queens.

The average lifespan of a queen is three to four years; drones usually die upon mating or are expelled from the hive before the winter; and workers may live for a few weeks in the summer and several months in areas with an extended winter.

Did You Know? - Mother Nature (sometimes known as Mother Earth) is a common personification of nature that focuses on the life-giving and nurturing aspects of nature by embodying it in the form of the mother. Images of women representing mother earth, and mother nature, are timeless.

In prehistoric times, goddesses were worshipped for their association with fertility, fecundity, and agricultural bounty. Priestesses held dominion over aspects of Incan, Algonquian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Slavonic, Germanic, Roman, Greek, Indian, and Iroquoian religions in the millennia prior to the inception of patriarchal religions.

Did You Know? - Pyrite enjoyed brief popularity in the 16th and 17th centuries as a source of ignition in early firearms, most notably the wheellock, where the cock held a lump of pyrite against a circular file to strike the sparks needed to fire the gun.

Did You Know? - Inlay is a decorative technique of inserting pieces of contrasting, often coloured materials into depressions in a base object to form patterns or pictures that normally are flush with the matrix.

Did You Know? - A liqueur is an alcoholic beverage made from a distilled spirit that has been flavored with fruit, cream, herbs, spices, flowers or nuts and bottled with added sugar or other sweetener (such as high-fructose corn syrup). Liqueurs are typically quite sweet; they are usually not aged for long after the ingredients are mixed, but may have resting periods during their production to allow flavors to marry.

In the United States and Canada, where spirits are often called "liquor" (pronounced /?l?k?r/, with stress on the first rather than the second syllable), there is often confusion over liqueurs and liquors, especially as many spirits today are available in flavored form (e.g. flavored vodka). The most reliable rule of thumb is that liqueurs are quite sweet and often syrupy in consistency, while liquors are not.