One of nine people charged in the fatal shooting of a teenager at a Sweet 16 party in Caroline County has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.

Bob Rose made his first visit to the Meadow Highland Games & Celtic Festival a memorable one. Goaded by friends and family, Rose good-naturedly volunteered to have a ferret placed down his pants to demonstrate the ancient sport of ferret legging. Twice yesterday afternoon, a ferret was placed down Rose’s sweatpants, only to pop its head out of the elastic waistband. Rose took it in stride, yet the finicky ferret refused to remain still. The third time was the charm when the ferret was placed down the rear of his pants.

Moving the State Fair of Virginia to Caroline County didn’t seem to affect attendance at the annual event. The State Fair drew 247,958 people during its first year at The Meadow Event Park off state Route 30 in Doswell. That marks a 2.4 percent increase from last year, when 242,236 people visited during its final year in Henrico County, which it had called home for 63 years.

Now that the State Fair of Virginia has concluded its 11-day run at its new location in Caroline County, organizers are looking at ways to improve the event for next year—especially the parking. At times, the entrance to The Meadow Event Park in Doswell was a scene of gridlock and hourlong waits. Access to the parking areas at the State Fair site was from one entrance off state Route 30.

Central Virginia has seen a slight increase in homicides so far this year, with higher numbers in Richmond and Petersburg offsetting improved numbers elsewhere. For the first nine months of the year, the region had 59 homicides, compared with 55 at the same time last year. The biggest shift has been in Richmond, where city police recorded seven more homicides as of Sept. 30 than a year earlier. Richmond’s nine-month count of 34 exceeds the total of 32 homicides for all of 2008.

There was a flurry of activity throughout the Meadow Event Park yesterday as fairgoers turned out for the final day of the State Fair of Virginia. On one side of the 348-acre site was youth rodeo, where boys and girls roped goats or tried to ride a bucking bull for eight seconds. On another, a standing room only crowd at the Thrill Pit watched as Cindy Regimald of Tinmouth, Vt., won the demolition derby rollover competition by flipping her car the most times—one and three-quarters in the tie-breaker round.

You couldn’t see water from Robbie Newcomb’s cornfield in Caroline County, just lots of corn and Robbie’s 14-year-old son, J.R., harvesting it behind the wheel of a red combine. But what happens on farms like Newcomb’s and thousands of others in the Chesapeake Bay watershed will play a huge role in determining the bay’s fate. A lot of farm activities are not regulated. For example, there is no requirement to keep cattle out of streams, where they erode banks and drop pollution pies. In many areas, farmers aren’t required to leave grassy strips along streams to catch polluted runoff.

The Great Pumpkin is really, really big! Matthew Morris, 10, and his father, Bobby, of Burkeville, won the pumpkin contest yesterday at the State Fair of Virginia with an orange pumpkin weighing in at 1,057 pounds. It took a forklift to hoist the giant onto the scales. The pumpkin is the second largest ever presented at the fair. The Morrises grew it in their backyard.

Where: The Meadow Event Park, Doswell
  For more information:
http://www.statefair.com
They consist mostly of water.
They can gain as much as 30 pounds a day.
They take a lot of care and feeding.
They come from a special seed called Atlantic giant.

For the past 18 months, the State Fair of Virginia has been talking through the logistics of bringing hordes of visitors, plus funnel-cake vendors and racing pigs, to a new site in rural Caroline County. Now, the planning is giving way to the real thing.

1859: The fair moves to West Broad Street near the present-day Science Museum of Virginia, is suspended from 1861 to 1866 due to the Civil War.
  1906: Virginia State Fair Association organizes to revive the fair after a 10-year absence, uses a site along North Boulevard that’s now home to The Diamond.
  1946: The association reorganizes as Atlantic Rural Exposition Inc. and moves the fair to Strawberry Hill off Laburnum Avenue in rural Henrico County. The site eventually is shared through a lease with Richmond International Raceway.

The designation is part of a 20-year agreement signed two years ago in exchange for a one-time state appropriation of almost $2.4 million to help build the main exhibition hall at The Meadow Event Park.

120 had no critical violations during inspections conducted during the 2008-09 school year; and
93 had two or fewer total
critical violations for the year
Here are some examples of critical violations inspectors found at area schools. These
violations were corrected:
Oct. 30, 2008: Employees were observed handling ready-to-eat food with bare hands at

An early-morning thunderstorm dumped up to 6 inches of rain in some parts of the Richmond region but caused little damage, authorities said. The heaviest rain the Richmond area has seen this summer left more than 6,000 Dominion Virginia Power customers without electricity in the region at one point, but power to most residents had been restored by afternoon.

The number of Virginia schools that made Adequate Yearly Progress goals in reading and math dropped slightly during the 2008-09 school year after the passing rates got a little tougher. But there were some bright spots. A few local school divisions improved despite the higher benchmarks—including Petersburg, which has a long history of low performance on standardized testing.