Bill Roehl the Pepper King taken by Mr. Marcos.

Last week’s poll about how many times you attend the Minnesota State Fair every year came out with an unsurprising result that the vast majority of respondents go once or twice a year. What was surprising for me were the number of people who don’t go at all. I thought everyone in Minnesota did. Crazy.

On to this week’s poll. Yesterday I did a presentation on peppers and cooking with them at the Minneapolis Farmers Market. I am not really much into public speaking although I have done it enough that I wasn’t terribly nervous about the whole thing. Thankfully, because I was cooking at the same time I was talking about peppers, I was able to spend my time concentrating on the food instead of looking at those in the audience (no, I’m not going to cut peppers and onions while looking straight ahead). From all accounts the presentation went very well, the food was good and the content was interesting. There were lots of people in the audience and very few got up to leave during it–a win in my book.

So what do you think about public speaking? Is it something you enjoy or not? Do you do it often for pleasure or work? Do you go out of your way to avoid it or is it something you really look forward to doing time and time again? Whatever you have to say about public speaking go ahead and comment on as I’d love to hear your thoughts. After you do that go ahead and vote on the sidebar and then feel free to check out our expired polls in the archive or read through the previous posts about polls here.

Coming up in the next few weeks I will be interviewing at least one of the two candidates running for Apple Valley Mayor. While there are many candidates vying for a spot on the council (including incumbent John Bergman), I just don’t have the time to interview that mess of people. With that in mind I decided to concentrate only on Mayor Mary Hamann-Roland and her opponent Ryan Richard Moe.

I have already gotten in touch with Mr. Moe and he has agreed to the interview. I have been following his posts on both his Facebook page and his Twitter account and found that many of the links he provides point back to me. While I find it flattering that Mr. Moe shares my ideas I want you to know that, at this point in time, I support neither candidate in any way and will leave it up until after I have an opportunity to speak with them before I will feel confident in making a choice. Based on my reading of his Facebook page and Twitter account I have a slew of questions working their way through my mind to ask him during the interview.

I left Mayor Mary a voicemail yesterday asking for her to get back with me about doing an interview either by phone, in person or via e-mail. The affidavit she filed for her reelection only included her phone number and home address and did not provide an e-mail address or website with which I could link to here or contact her at. You will have to use the archive of Apple Valley City Council Minutes on the city’s website or any variety of other sources with which to pull your knowledge of her prior decision making from.

Even though I have some questions I’d like to ask, just like I did prior to interviewing the candidates for Burnsville City Council, I am asking for you to provide your questions that you’d like me to pass along to them. The same disclaimer applies: I will do my very best to incorporate everything that is asked on this site in my interviews of the candidates but won’t hold myself to necessarily include them all.

So please do read through Mr. Moe’s Facebook page and Twitter feed and comb through the minutes or other sources which you find viable about Mayor Mary and come up with some questions which you feel should be asked of these two in the coming weeks.

Last weekend we headed out to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum with Joey and his family for a nice afternoon which included lots of food under the willow trees and some wandering and looking at flowers. During our picnic, Joey’s wife noted that she wanted to play State Fair Bingo this year. Well, The Wife thought this was a hilarious idea and did some searching and found this site which offered homemade Minnesota State Fair Bingo cards for download. What better way to do everyone’s second favorite thing at the State Fair: people watch with a purpose?!

After looking through the Great Minnesota Get Together Bingo Cards available, we decided that a handful of the options were not appropriate and The Wife set out on a mission to recreate these cards with her own options based on personal observation and research done, via Flickr, of the people and things seen at the MN State Fair. In addition to those more suited for adults, she has also created a series of cards just for children which include mostly animals and State Fair booths. The Wife went on to add more than 100 new options. Wow!

I plan to use the Minnesota State Fair Bingo cards to eliminate some of the boredom I have while walking around the buildings and animal barns and hope to document as many as possible with a photograph. I have a feeling that would make for an awesome online image gallery :-) So far, after looking through all of the options my two favorites are “Double Fisting Corndogs” and “Jason DeRusha”.

After much hard work we present to you the 2010 Minnesota State Fair Bingo cards for your own amusement. Feel free to click the thumbnails to see a larger version or download the PDFs below to print and use over the next two weeks:

In addition to what The Wife has come up with here what other options would you like to see added to the cards? Do you think you’ll be participating in this year’s State Fair Bingo or will you just do your “fly by the seat of your pants,” people watching? Would you be willing to submit your own photographic evidence of what you saw? Whatever you have to say about the Minnesota State Fair Bingo cards The Wife created go ahead and comment on!