For many years, my job has been to welcome vendors to West Grand, help them find their spots and try to answer their questions. I also get to see the influx of visitors that begins with a trickle hours before the official start of the fair and then builds to a swell of gold-rush proportions.

I asked a few visitors if the price of gas was a consideration in deciding whether to make the trip this year. One group from Lawrence said it didn't care what gas cost. This was a tradition, they had their checkbooks, their husbands were comfortable at home on the couch watching football and nothing would get in their way.

I think that pretty well explains it.

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As I was traveling through Walton, I see where they now are covering the not-so-old and repaired-many-times concrete U.S. Highway 50 with asphalt.

Wouldn't that kind of be like building a brick house and then covering it with siding?

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When I stopped at the fair information booth at the end of the day, the reports were glowing on the success of the event. The parking lots were fuller than usual, some of the vendors sold out during the day and the mood all around was upbeat.

Without the many volunteers who chip in each year, there would be nothing to report.

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Does anyone else feel that New Orleans wasn't the only place looting occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? I'm thinking it may have occurred at the gas pump as well.

If a few cattle ranches in Kansas went off-line for a couple of weeks, I don't believe the price of beef would spike out of control.

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Drum roll, please.... Our own Jerry Engler broke the Kansas State Fair record by 30 for most books sold by a single author at the "Book Kansas" booth. He peddled 101. Not bad for an old hippie from Auburn, Kan.

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Did you notice the post office stamp cancellation booth at the Arts and Crafts Fair didn't close during the noon hour?

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It is amazing to me how significant the advent of the computer has been for the creation of new businesses.

One can take a less than $200 200-gigabyte hard drive and put it in a used $200 computer tower, creating a server that can run a business with around a million dollars in sales.

Oh, yes-you can get free server software to run the darn thing and you have to know someone smart enough to put it all together.