Goal-oriented achiever

I'm happy to admit that I am a goal-oriented achiever. I achieve much more when I know I'm aiming for something. Even if the something I'm aiming for is that satisfying weekend feeling of not having to face the same thing again Monday morning because I worked so hard on Friday.
So this year I'm thinking of throwing down the gauntlet and entering the Royal Easter Show. You read it here first, folks. It would be my first ever foray into competition knitting. But I am not in it to win it, I am in it for the motivation factor. The goal of being able to hand over my FO to the sharp-eyed and merciless critics of The Guild (at least I assume that's who does the judging), pat myself on the back and say 'Well, now that's finished, how 'bout we go check out the cattle auctions'.
The Royal Easter Show is a Sydney institution. I love going. I have a rigid and immutable order in which I like to take in the Show. (I also freely admit that I am a creature of habit.) First of course I head to the Food Pavilion. This is where heaps of producers set up stalls and give away free samples of their wares in an attempt to get you to buy something. Of course, I never buy anything, but it's good to stock up on free samples because it's a long day at the Show and you don't want to go hungry. Then I check out the regional displays of farm produce arranged to form images. (There is really no other way to describe this. It's weird.) Then I skip the cake decorating competition displays (everyone crowds around those and it's really not that interesting) and head straight for the craft competition displays, pausing briefly to take a whiff at the baked goods displays (even though everything's displayed safely away from grabbing fingers behind a wall of plexiglass, there are some small faultlines through which the most glorious scents of fresh pumpkin scones, fruit bread, etc escape to the surrounding air). The knitting is usually really good but what amazes me every year is the quilting displays. I also often stop to marvel at how ridiculous the craft is where you spin little bits of paper into coils and then arrange them to look like a beach scene or floral display on a homemade card.
Then I always go to the dog pavilion, then I go see the chooks, sheep, goats, llamas, and horses. Then I love spending a half hour or so in the shade of the cattle auction pavilion. It's quite interesting to marvel at how much someone will pay for a bovine embryo. Then it's to the woodchopping, then the horticultural pavilion. And just because a post isn't a post without a photograph, here is a picture of some chickens enjoying the shade on a very hot day last summer at the same farm where I met the horse in my last post. A day of farmyard animals which obviously occupies a fond part of my brain (I don't get out of the city very often, maybe you can tell).

Anyway, entries for this year's show close on 9th December. (Thanks to Kris for the alert.) That's only the deadline for registering, you don't have to put in the FO until late March. Although Rebecca is insisting I enter Rogue in the 8-ply category, I am thinking I'd rather enter something that is not yet finished, so I can make use of the motivation factor. Ahead in the running is Kiri, for the lace knitting category. Any other suggestions? Anyone else keen to throw down the Royal Gauntlet with me???