Several months ago I bought a raffle ticket. It was quite expensive as raffle tickets go, $5, but I was hooked by the great idea behind it. It was called “Cow Pat Bingo” and the result would be decided on 19 September at the Auckland Point School Gala Day. I noted the date in my diary and eventually the day came around. I had quite a wait before the “draw”, but there was some really neat face painting to watch:
Here are some of the others:
Plus a few other examples of her work:
But back to the main topic, the “Cow Pat Bingo”. Here’s how it works. A small jersey cow by the name of Caramello Bear would be lead out to an arena marked out with 1000 squares, numbers randomly distributed. Here’s the spot:
At exactly 12 noon the competition would begin. The square which received the first cow pat would be the winner of the $1000 prize. The crowd tension was high
Some of the onlookers tried to influence Caramello
while the faced painted girls were very helpful and pointed out my square:
Here it is, the one right in the centre:
I waited and waited for more than an hour with my camera pointed at the correct end of the animal
but nothing happened. I’ll just have to wait until they ring me with my prize. (As I drove past later on my way home I saw that Caramello had sat down for a good rest, still watched by lots of patient people. Wonder how long they had to wait?)
(Postscript: I read the next day that Caramello had settled down for a sleep for an hour, but 30 minutes after she woke up the result was decided. Organisers happy.)
Walking back to the car I saw an interesting sight. Some mini-cars were being driven on the school playing field, accompanied by around 40 or 50 seagulls. These were feeding on earthworms which seemed to be accessible just ahead of the minicars. The birds would swoop down and land, grab a worm, then take off just before the delighted child arrived. If you look carefully you can see the bird second from the left has a fat one.
Actually, the best thing that happened to me there was rather a surprise. Heroes from the local Tasman Makos rugby team were running a quickfire raffle. The prizes were a bottle of wine and a large cake of chocolate. I took a ticket, but didn’t really want to cart the bottle around for the rest of the afternoon and am not supposed to eat much chocolate. Besides, I never win raffles. So I gave my ticket to a small kid watching the face painting. To our surprise, it won! The child and its mother were delighted, and I got more of a kick from that than I would have had I won the raffle myself.
If you would like to see more images, you can find them here in my pBase galleries.