c_eagle

The rain.

The rain came to Mount Olympus park slowly enough that it seemed reasonable to go get something to eat --- fries and bottled Pepsi Zero; the park seems not to have fountain drinks --- and wait out a storm that might go an hour or two. This plan lasted for a couple of minutes, and maybe a quarter of the fries, as the storm grew heavier. And darker. And windier.

Finally we made a break for it, taking shelter with a couple dozen people in front of the lockers. It wasn't much space, and there was nowhere to sit but the ground, but it was three walls and the open wall was parallel to the main gusts. But the gusts kept going, and strengthening. With thunder and lightning, just in case it wasn't enough. I don't think that our phones sounded the increasingly common emergency alarms, but it would not have been out of place. I wondered if we might make the dash for the picnic pavilion, a much larger spot and one with picnic tables that they were letting people into, but bunnyhugger didn't think we could make it without getting soaked to the bone, which yes, would have been a worse situation.

At some point we heard people calling out the excitement: a big bough had fallen off a tree. And yeah, we could see, this tremendous heap of tree fallen off and blocking the walkway past where the trail split between a go-cart track (they have a lot of go-cart tracks) and Pegasus. Can you imagine that? We could see it. Gradually, slowly, the rain started to let up, and people ran off in packs. And then finally I realized something.

It wasn't that the rain had stopped, but it was tolerably light enough that you could walk in. And you know, we could just go to our car and sit out the rest of the rain, listening to music and having conditioned air that maybe would even let us dry out. The park gives out daily wristbands so there's nothing special to do for re-entry. bunnyhugger agreed and we made our way out past a lot of fallen branches, none so big as the one that blocked the walkway.

In the car we could see the evaporated parking lot crowd; there were maybe a half-dozen cars left. bunnyhugger thought this a good time to take a nap --- she hadn't got enough sleep --- and started taking her contacts out lest they irritate her closed eyes. Except something went wrong taking them out and one dropped back in to her eye, possibly folded over. She couldn't get it out. And I couldn't even see where it was exactly. We've had similar contact problems, one time going into a hotel's lobby bathroom so we could use a bright light and big mirror to work it out but here we were stuffed inside my Prius.

After a while of bunnyhugger not being able to do anything with her eye, and despairing where we could even find an emergency optician, we decided the best thing to do was drive back to our hotel room where we would have space, and the big bathroom mirror, and the bathroom light and room to do anything. Given the park was shut anyway the only thing we really risked was that they'd make us pay for parking a second time, but we had a hang tag and the receipt for it so I was ready to fight if they wanted to be trouble.

I think that by the time we got to the hotel she had successfully removed the folded-over contact lens but by then, what's the sensible thing to do except go back to the room and be comfortable while the rain finished? And so we did, bunnyhugger taking a nap and cursing the time she lost trying to remove the contact lens instead of taking the eye weirdness of a nap with them in. Me, I puttered around and got some of my blogs caught up on things while the rain carried on for a couple hours. Eventually, though, that let up, and bunnyhugger woke up, and we could try to see what was left of the day. It was maybe 5 pm.

With today's pictures I close out the Potter Park Zoo expedition from last Christmastime. I too am wondering what's up next but I can just look.

The building with the Theio's bench and the lion and shrew also has ringtailed lemurs, although this time, it's mostly the tail we could see.

Still, standing on tippy-toes, I could prove there's the main body of a lemur somewhere in there.

Back out in the cold. Here's the rare holiday tree not sponsored by a dentist (ignore the one dentist-sponsored on the left).

The swan is also one of the older ornaments; possibly the oldest they still have? But they didn't have the fountain that goes with it this year, once more.

Now here's some holiday trees themed to classic tree-decorating holidays like Three Kings Day.

We closed out the zoo, of course; here's a last picture of bunnyhugger heading toward the exit.

Trivia: The home run that Babe Ruth hit in 1921 to break the previous lifetime home-run-record-holder's (Roger Connor, of the New York Giants, who retired in 1897 with 138 home runs) was estimated to be the longest ever hit in a game (about 575 feet); it certainly cleared out of Navin Field (Tiger Stadium). Source: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.

Currently Reading: Growing Up in Alphabet City: The Unexpected Letterform Art of Michael Doret, Michael Doret. The amazing thing about all the graphics shown off in this is that none of them are pinball logos even though they look ready to be.

PS: Why Is Everyone Angry at _Crankshaft_? I Mean About the Harry Dinkle's Father Story, a special bonus complaining-about-comic-strips post.

Wednesday was the day of our trip most hit by storms; we were out there in the midst of one that, if it didn't send an alert message to everyone's phones, deserved to. This would be our trip to Mount Olympus Water and Theme Park, formerly Big Chief Carts and Coasters. Mount Olympus is both an amusement park and a growing hotel empire in the Wisconsin Dells, a point of mixed emotions. On the one hand, it's taking over every motel in an area that used to have a billion different motels; on the other, it's probably attractive to families that they can have one familiar name and trust that the experience staying at Mount Olympus Motel Building 72 is not going to be appreciably worse than that at Motel Building 2. As I've asked before, why can't things only have good sides without the bad?

Anyway we decided to take our chances and eat at the park, knowing this meant we'd get fries or pizza (it would be fries). But that might be fine since Mount Olympus Park is a small one as these go. There's four wooden coasters there, but past that very few rides, or at least adult rides. (They don't even have a carousel!) Kids have more options, including a bunch of rides in an indoor warehouse-style building. They also have a surprisingly modest ticket price, which we understood as soon as we drove up to the parking lot and saw that was forty bucks. They're clearly expecting you to park at the hotel and take a shuttle (or walk) over and since we were staying at ... well, an IHG-owned hotel ... we had no such benefit. But at least we knew now where they get you.

We knew also that rain was to come, early to mid-afternoon, and last maybe an hour or two. This would take a chunk out of the day, so our priorities were to get on every coaster we could as fast as we could and hope we beat the storm. This turned out to be pretty doable. The first coaster we reached, once we made our way in from the parking lot, was Zeus --- by the way, do you get the theme of the park yet? We have to credit them, they go in for the Greek Gods theme, with the rides having reasonable names like Zeus and Cyclops and Hades 360 (formerly Hades) and the buildings put together in a Vaguely Ancient Greek style. I might sound dismissive her and don't intend to; it's genuinely nice that they do try fitting things to the theme. This goes down to fine details like the warning about offloading unsecured junk from your pocket before going on a ride being about how Zeus is feeling cranky today and you might lose anything that you don't put in a locker or leave with a non-rider.

Anyway we hurried to the roller coasters; nicely for us, two of them were just past the entrance. The coasters were our favorite kinds if we couldn't have antiques: wooden, for one, and built to use the hilly terrain of the Dells; the park is a little more vertical than Kennywood is. Zeus happened to be the first that we got on, and Hades 360 the second. Hades 360 picked up the number in a 2010's renovation that added some steel track to what had been a wooden coaster. This enabled it to add a corkscrew twist in the track, and an overbanked turn, things that are a lot of fun but tax a wood structure too much. Hades 360 also has an exciting tunnel; the track goes underneath the parking lot we used to emerge in this small peak out near the edge of the lot, rising like a little mountain next to the highway. A tunnel is great to start with, and moreso on a ferociously hot day where it's nothing but cool air, although it is also an extremely noisy tunnel. But a good long tunnel and poking up in a spot visually unconnected to the park? That's wonderfully dramatic and evoked the fun that Ravine Flyer II's leap across a Pennsylvania state highway does. We knew now which would be our favorite ride at this park, though we'd have to wait to ride two more coasters to say we'd had a fair judgement.

We also, without knowing, reached bunnyhugger's 350th distinct roller coaster. We knew that barring incredible catastrophe we would reach that small milestone this trip, but we had thought we'd reach it at our next park. (The coaster counting web site had a lag between her entering new rides the night before and showing the total, throwing us off.)

Both Zeus and Hades surprised us by not being brutally rough, difficult rides. We'd been led to expect they were rattly things and found they were not. Hades 360 was extreme --- we wouldn't have re-ridden it right away even if we could --- but hardly outside reason. People are prone to exaggerate how rough wooden roller coasters are, and also how rough (and dangerous) any ride at a park not owned by a big chain is, though. Also it did look to me like a good number of pieces of wood had been replaced recently so perhaps we're the beneficiaries of a bad reputation and recent retracking. Hard to know.

Our next ride was on Cyclops, the oldest of the coasters at the park (if the Roller Coaster Database isn't missing anything, the first one they had); it had a lot of the feel of Hoosier Hurricane which, what do you know, was built by the same people about the same time. (Hoosier Hurricane is a trifle smaller and faster.) Really fun ride and we'd get onto this again after --- well, that's to be discussed later.

The last of the roller coasters we'd ride for the first time was Pegasus the park has a steel kiddie coaster but we're too large for that one. Pegasus is presented as a family rather than an extreme coaster, and it is smaller and slower than the others. It was also the coaster to have the most brutally long, slow-moving line. None of the other coasters had much if any line so we didn't know why this, although my guess is that as the family coaster it attracts people afraid of, like, the wooden coaster that tips you upside-down. We spent a lot of time in the line and giving thanks for the moments we were in the shade, before getting a ride on a coaster that was the most jerky and rattle-y of any at the park. It's a pleasant ride --- it takes a lot for a wooden coaster to displease us --- but it was an anticlimax to be the last of our new coasters for the day.

With the storms rolling in --- we could see and smell them --- we hurried back to the bigger coasters to get re-rides in, just in case the park were closed the rest of the day or something. We went to Zeus first, so far as I remember arbitrarily; I think we might have got a back-seat ride this time. We then went to Hades and found people walking back out of the line. At first this seemed to be because of some maintenance problem and that got resolved soon enough we counted ourselves lucky. But then they made the dread announcement: because there was lightning too nearby, they had to close the ride.

The rain was coming.

I ask you now to imagine it being December and chilly and time for the Potter Park Zoo's Wonderland of Lights and our getting there the first chance we could get, which was dangerously close to the last night they were running it, because they never run it after Christmas day anymore. Got it? Here we go:

First, a picture of the night sky, since we got there around sunset and the sky was being wonderful for us.

Here's some of the trees up front by the entrance in a great setting.

And here's the portal ring you can use to step through into the dimension where you're a Rankin/Bass stop-motion animated character.

This is eternal photographic favorite the wall of rainbow lights. There wasn't so much snow this year so we didn't get that nice effect of puddles of light underneath.

And here ... uh ... there's supposed to be a Jabberwocky there, I think? Maybe we could get someone to check on that please?

More of the pathways through the zoo. We'd had a little bit of snow at least, and some melt, so we get that nice damp cement making for great reflections.

Trivia: Before the voyage on the Endeavour which would bring James Cook to Australia in 1770, James Douglas, president of the Royal Society (sponsor of the expedition), gave Cook a vade mecum (a reference book) with the instructions that should he encounter inhabitants of any lands discovered, ``they are the natural and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit. No European nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent. Conquest over such people can give no just title; because they could never be the aggressors.'' Source: Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World, Simon Winchester.

Currently Reading: Growing Up in Alphabet City: The Unexpected Letterform Art of Michael Doret, Michael Doret.

After the great organ concert we all went to our respective cars for a maybe half-mile drive to the other building. This is a smaller place, maybe the size of a regional train station, but one with an awesome collection of stuff for middle-aged white guys to look at. Great clocks. More band organs. A full-size train with a couple cars that isn't operated to go anywhere because the city's zoning board won't allow that in a residential zone. A temporary exhibit of more perfume and cologne bottles. And a carousel.

Specifically, the Eden Palais, a salon carousel, a nearly-extinct kind of carousel that once travelled Europe, especially, setting up temporary buildings with elaborate fixtures and furnishings, trying to make the mere amusement of riding horses into an experience straining at elegance. The name gives the aspiration away, doesn't it? At least it's an entertainment striving for respectability. We've been to salon carousels in Europe, at d'Efteleing and at that museum in Paris, but now? One --- maybe the only one? --- in the United States.

We got a ride on the Eden Palais; that was part of the admission price and the thing that made this a key element of our trip. Just the one, though. We were also scheduled to have time to wander around the carousel, and this part of the building, although it wouldn't end up being enough. We had spent a great deal of time in the first building and its musical pieces and cologne bottles, and the docent had a hard deadline as there was some event going on that evening. (There was one guy in the party --- the only person below middle age --- who was an organ player himself and apparently had some familiarity with the Sanfilippo Estate. He was clearly straining to not take over the docent's job of explaining things here and there.)

I know we always close places out but how are we expected not to close out a building that has, like, a circa-1960 performing robot jazz band? Or heaps upon heaps of the fanfold music scrolls for band organs? A luxurious train car and then a more normal one with all the trimmings of an early-20th-century game room? The ``Personal Desk and Chair that formerly belonged to Farny Wurlitzer''? All right, I mention that just because ``Farny Wurlitzer'' sounds like something robots call each other as an insult. But you see how whatever time we had here, it wouldn't be enough. Yes, I was the last person out, begging the time to use the bathroom; I'm told one of the docents grumbled that she thought I had already gone.

Well, had to spend all the time I could at a fascinating place. Now, it was on the road, journeying to a land I had never before set foot in ... Wisconsin.

Next thing on the photo roll was a rare Friday night where we went out to a pinball tournament. And you know where it was we went?

No, not an Aladdin's Castle that's survived time's ravage, but the Sparks Pinball Museum at the Oakland Mall, which has a lot of that sort of stuff housed within.

It being late December they had a random-draw gift exchange, everyone participating bringing in something and getting something back.

Meanwhile, remember the Time Traveler holographic video game? I do!

Here's the path you can take through time, including such far future years as 1998 and Trader.

Anyway, here we are gathered around to follow MWS's instructions.

bunny_hugger wearing her reindeer costume at the gifts table.

Trivia: In the early 1890s the United States Patent Office --- following decades of patent submissions regarding flying machines --- refused to consider any application outright unless the inventor actually succeeded in flying. The Wright Brothers' March 1903 application was rejected as ``a device that is inoperative or incapable of performing its intended function'', with claims ``vague and indefinite''. Source: First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane, T A Heppenheimer.

Currently Reading: Growing Up in Alphabet City: The Unexpected Letterform Art of Michael Doret, Michael Doret.

Tuesday of our Old Northwest Tempest would bring us first to a Chicago-area ... well, not exactly museum. It's a private home, a mansion, of the Sanfilippo family. You may know them from no you do not. Sorry. But the family business for a couple generations has been in making own- and store-branded nuts, and packaging, which is one of those things that may seem small but when you consider how many people like eating nuts of some kind will give you the chance to make a lot of money.

So a part of the estate is the Place de la Musique, a private museum with a staggering collection of mechanical musical devices, and concert and band organs. Also coin-operated gadgetry. It was hard not to think this might be what Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum might look like had Marvin won a billion-dollar Mega Millions. It also was hard for someone else in the tour group with us to compare to The House On The Rock ``except everything worked'', a faintly ominous note since going to The House On The Rock was a possibility if we decided to make time for it on the trip.

As alluded, they sometimes run public tours and getting one of them was one of the more annoying constraints in bunnyhugger's planning out our trip. And strangely, our tour group was a small one, maybe a dozen or so people; the seating they had available was for something like fifty people or more. I couldn't help thinking of our visit to that private carousel museum in Paris last year, when maybe half the usual crowd attended. Maybe we're just lucky.

We gathered as directed, cars parked in a line along the long driveway because, it would transpire, only part of the tour was in the mansion, with the event moving toward the end over to an outbuilding. The mansion is still a --- if I say ``working home'' will you follow me? So we had a couple of rooms we were allowed in and reminded a couple times that the family was still there. We'd been asked to dress respectably, which is why I had one of the polo shirts I wear into work; given that the whole crowd was mostly retired-looking folks I'm not sure they had to specify respectful dress.

The collections started out with the eldest Sanfilippo going from his mechanical-engineer's interest in how to better automate the shelling of pistachios into how much amazing stuff mechanisms can do. So mechanical music-players, particularly, drew his interest and as he had the money to put into an obsession he could get a lot of really interesting stuff. Some of it resembled things I'd seen back in the Netherlands at the Speelklol Museum, including such novelties as the changeable-disc music-box players. (I kept waiting for the docent to mention how it used to be you could rent a music-box player and different discs; he never did. Maybe that was just a European thing or maybe he figured that was getting too far into the weeds.)

The centerpiece of the collection in the main building is a player organ, rescued from a movie palace, with pipes running all over a big two-story auditorium built for some of the many charity events held. (The docent mentioned repeatedly about the charity events held but not what any of them were, to the point of it growing suspicious. I understand not wanting to brag about doing good, or to make it sound like you should have too much credit for what a group does but, like, we admit bunnyhugger does her charity tournaments mostly for the Capital Area Humane Society.) We'd keep coming back to it while we were in the main building.

But before I describe all that, here's a couple of pictures from around Thanksgiving, spent with bunnyhugger's parents and their pets.

bunnyhugger's father brushing their dog's teeth, a nightly chore that I hope is helping for all the work it's put both to.

Start of a story in three pictures. The cat, napping.

The cat, noticing me.

The cat reacts.

And not long after Thanksgiving we had our first substantial snow of the season! Look at that, you can totally see the city not plowing the street.

Back yard, so you can see this was a regular old two or three inch storm.

Trivia: When Humphry Davy isolated a sample of magnesium (by electrolysis from what we would call magnesium oxide) in 1808 he proposed it be named ``magnium'', arguing the word ``magnesium'' was too much like ``manganese'' and would lead to confusion. His recommendation was not taken up. (``Magnesium'' reflects the magnesium mineral having come from Magnesia, Greece.) Source: Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Animation by Filmation, Michael Swanigan and Darren McNeil.

So happy news! Our mouse came through surgery fine, and was judged not to need an Elizabethan collar. Which is the better outcome, yes, much as we were kind of hoping she'd have one on.

We got her back as she was still recovering from sedation. She looked wet, which we can't quite explain. The vet tech --- who it happens shares a name with one of us --- explained a bit about everything that had gone on, and that everyone had been excited since they don't often get a hamster in for surgery. I supposed this to be a slip of the tongue and figured if we did not get a mouse back we would have words. The surgery went fine, though, and the mouse, for she was and is a mouse, will need a daily injection of meloxicam. We're very familiar with giving meloxicam to rabbits, who by and large come to like it, but mice are a new line for us. We may have to give her a dosed cracker or vanilla wafer to ingest it.

Also, the poor mouse started to squeak when the vet tech picked her up, and particularly tried to turn her over so we could see her chest and where the scar was. Mice don't really squeak like you see in cartoons; they make that sound mostly as infants begging for mom to feed them, or as adults signalling their surrender to whoever is doing something that they can stop now, they're submitting. Between mice this is usually a quick bit of business to sort out but you can see how mouse would not understand why the vet tech isn't taking their surrender. We're supposing that the she's going to recover from this terror; one merciful thing about animals is they don't seem to mope a lot about inexplicable scary experiences outside their control. But we are going to want to try medicating her with as little physical contact as possible.

We should be able to arrange this, since the recommendation is our mouse be kept alone for the ten long days until her sutures come out. This to keep any other mouse, such as an over-grooming sister, from working on her sutures until something bad happens. Fortunately, with the deer mice released, we have a couple suitable bins. We were asked also to limit the mouse's activity, which the tech admitted was ... uh ... a challenge. The big thing is we're not setting a wheel in her pen, and also not anything much to climb. She has a little wooden bridge she can walk up and down but that's not much work to go up or down again.

I didn't explicitly mention this the other day but given the extreme heat and humidity we've moved all the mammals up into our bedroom, with the air conditioner running. This has been pretty nice especially for the mice as they're very easy to see from bed. In their cage's normal location they're across the room and I have to get up and stand next to it to see them doing anything. Here I can just roll over and oh, there's mice doing mouse business.

Given that, now, let me give you a half-dozen pictures of our mouse back home.

Here's the mouse in the travel kennel. Beside her is a monkey biscuit given by the vet's as food and, we think, drink, as it was moist.

Here she is in my hand. The bald patch on her head is because her sister grooms her too hard.

Now here, this bald patch on her side is from the surgery.

But there, isn't that a darling face?

We set her in a clear plastic bin to examine her chest without the stress of holding her, and this gives you the chance to see mouse paws at work standing.

And here she is, set in the recovery bin, with litter and things to hide under and a world she can kindly ask to leave her alone now thank you.

Trivia: The only text on the back side of the Declaration of Independence is the description: ``Original Declaration of Independence dated 4th July 1776''. This would be so that, when carried as a scroll perhaps with other official documents its contents would be known without unrolling. Source: Signing Their Lives Away: The Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence, Denise Kiernan and Joseph D'Agnese.

Currently Reading: Animation by Filmation, Michael Swanigan and Darren McNeil.

Before resuming the trip report there's a mouse report needed.

So we discovered one of the mice has a tumor. A big one, like she were smuggling a jellybean in her chest. It's default for any unneutered female mice to get tumors by about age two, but she's only age one. We discovered by accident, when picking them up to clean their litter and finding one got distressed when I rubbed her head; our guess is this pressed her tumor into her chest in a way she could otherwise compensate for.

Last week bunny_hugger took the mouse in to the vet, where the examination came back yeah, it's a big tumor. Investigating it did involve puncturing the skin and that let a good bit of fluid out, at least, but it also left the poor mouse every upset; she was peeping submissively, the way a mouse begs for a release from these torments, for the rest of the day. At least until we got her back in her home nest with her sister. (Her sister seems fine, so far.)

Today, bunny_hugger brought the poor mouse in to the vet for surgery. That'll be tomorrow morning, when the vet who does small-animal surgery is in. Turns out the particularly difficult part about small-animal surgery is not so much that it's a tiny workspace, but that small animals lose body heat fast when they're anaesthetized, so I guess it's lucky we brought her in the hottest week of the year.

The best case scenario is that she comes through fine and we bring her home tomorrow where she can recuperate in a cage we've moved into our bedroom where the window air conditioner is going. The second-best case scenario is that it turns out she chews at her stitches and so has to be put in an Elizabethan collar. You may know it as the Cone Of Shame on dogs, but, mice can get them too. More, since mice are flexible and dextrous creatures that could wriggle out of a collar that's merely snug around them, the collar has to be sutured in. I don't really want that, since every round of anaesthesia is a chance to die under anaesthesia, but also ... gads can you imagine how adorable that would be, seeing? There would definitely be so many pictures of that rushed here, if it comes to that.

Meanwhile, let's get back to chilly November and the Silver Bells parade and all. We're up to something important in my photo reel ...

You see it? It's coming up right ...

Now! The 2025 was back to an Aggressively Normal coloring after the ruby-anniversary red of 2024 (the event's 40th) was mistaken for being a pro-fascist coloration (and, going back several years, the green-with-a-red-band was taken for being a cigar or a picke or something).

And they put a drone light show in between the tree-lighting and the fireworks. Have to admit the drones are getting more interesting.

So here's a map showing where the State Tree started out its life.

And here's where it ended up.

Glinda the Good in her bubble, one of a number of drone shows reflecting The Wizard Of Oz but also really Wicked II: The Wrath Of Boq.

Trivia: On the 2nd of July, 1776, the Continental Congress closed its doors at the normal 9 am hour; about an hour later, as the vote to declare independence was happening, a severe storm struck, for the second day in a row. Source: John Adams, David McCullough.

Currently Reading: Animation by Filmation, Michael Swanigan and Darren McNeil. I like the book --- really an encyclopedia of all Filmation's projects --- but it's got a weird lot of copy-editing glitches. The one giving me the weirdest giggle so far has been the Fat Albert executive producer credit given to sex pest ``Dr William H Cosby, Jr, pH''. (I'm not sure just how old the book is but it is old enough that Cosby was still held in esteem back then.)

I apologize to my dear bunny_hugger most of all, but I haven't had time to continue writing up the Old Northwest Tempest trip report. Please enjoy a double-dose of pictures from Silver Bells maybe after you read up what's going on in The Phantom's weekday continuity, please. It's probably not aliens but I can't prove it's not just yet.

There's the reviewing stand, before many people have got ready to sit down and review stuff yet. You can kind of make out the big throw switch they totally use to light the State Tree.

And here's an architectural thingy on the capitol that looks all nice and official and all. ... Is that tree stumps on the left? That's tree stumps on the left, isn't it?

Paws, the Detroit Tigers mascot, rides in one of the first cars of the parade.

The mayor and grand marshall of the parade and the tree-donating family get brought in by horse with ruby-slipper horseshoes.

Here's eternal crowd favorite the Cata-piller bus.

The Old Newsboys float advertising their spoof newspaper that I didn't see last year either.

Here's the Hager Fox inflatable suit.

Ooh, hey, got a picture of someone taking a flash photo! Or just using a spot light to take a less bad picture. You know my picture is art because of the light leak.

And here's the TV camera operator in front of one of the floats, and as the camera operator is in focus you know this picture is also art.

Eternal crowd-favorite the Petoskey Steel Drum Band. Turns out the drum band started out because one guy really thought it'd be a fun thing and yeah, the Petoskey community agreed.

Here's a float showcasing, based on the way those streaks look, two people shooting 1930s Flash Gordon serial guns nowhere near each other.

And again I catch the TV camera operator taking a picture. I like that you get motion blur on the float from my picture but see it clear enough in the TV camera's screen.

Trivia: The (apochryphal) Books of Enoch and of Jubilees, dating from Maccabean times, mention a year of 364 days containing 52 weeks, with the year divided into four quarters of months of 30, 30, and 31 days, with a warning about abandoning this year in favor of a lunar year. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Animation by Filmation, Michael Swanigan and Darren McNeil.

Something I forgot to mention about the construction fence. Fences, actually, as there were several areas blocked off. They were decorated with those low-effort AI-generated posters promising something coming next year. Something campground- or nature-themed, apparently, since a typical one promised 'Nature Is Getting A Lot' ... and then the main body of the image before the conclusion of the teaser. This only makes sense if whatever the big project for next year prominently features 'Lot' in its name and I'm going ahead and betting it does not.

Anyway we were able to start getting some good riding in after the rain, starting with Flash: Vertical Velocity, the Wicked Twister-like coaster that would not be the only Wicked Twister-sibling we rode this trip. And then Joker, which in this incarnation is a ``wing'' coaster, with a course that's in nearly a vertical plane, the track rising and falling and going back on itself. It's a lot like a Mad Mouse in its vibe. Or a spinning Mad Mouse particularly, since the cars --- on either side of the track --- can spin freely(?). The result is a ride that isn't just a long vertical climb and then a bunch of bunny hops back and forth and back again; it's also twirling so at any moment you're going up, or down, or back up again. It is a lot of fun and we were both feeling maybe a little overwhelmed by the motion. I've been lucky not to be particularly vulnerable to motion sickness, but bunny_hugger was having a worse time of it than I understood. Bodies, you know?

Also the ride asks you to choose whether to ride the purple or the green car --- one on either side of the track --- but a park employee supervising where the Fast Lane line-cutters join the regular line assigned us green. That had a nice benefit though since as we were waiting to get in line, someone coming off the ride spotted bunny_hugger's t-shirt and got enthusiastic about ... I forget which park she was showing off just then. (More encounters like this to come.) Her warnings about how dizzying the ride was heightened bunny_hugger's worries that this maybe wasn't a great idea but no, the ride was a great idea. Riding it several times in a row, though? No, and so we did not.

After another and heavier rain --- I had a sad picture of Foghorn Leghorn and Petunia Pig barely visible through the downpour --- we would get a couple hours of solidly good riding time. This would be how, for example, we got a pleasantly short wait for Great America's newest coaster, Wrath of Rakshasa. The Rakshasa is a figure from Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Indonesian folk-Islam but don't worry about whether this might be a little creepily appropriation-ist: they've themed the ride as an Old Timey Travelling Carnival Sideshow promising to show off freaky weird stuff going to scare your pants off.

It's a fun dive coaster, like a ValRavn that isn't disappointingly short, and it's got the great conveyor-belt stuff-stowage-system that we first fell in love with on Yukon Striker at Canada's Wonderland. And, like, it's not like the Rakshasa are heroic figures of south/southeast Asian mythology or like the park already had a ride literally named Demon just across the path. But the carnival-sideshow theming --- however well-received it is --- makes me feel uncomfortable.

Going to now finish off Nite Lites, with not just a half-dozen photos but some bonus extras.

OK, so this would be seven (checks notes) swans, a-swimming.

Eight maids a-milking, although the overlapping does make them a little hard to make out now.

Nine ladies a-dancing; the curve of the track makes it easier to see them all more clearly.

And there's (counting) ten lords a-leaping.

If I had a tripod here you could see eleven pipers a-piping!

But this time I got a solid twelve dummers a-drumming.

And now, at the end and beginning of the track we have a moment photographing bunny_hugger in the reindeer costume she made for the holiday. Looking good, right?

And here's a picture of my shadow. The horns are from a cute set of foam antlers they gave everyone to later throw out.

Trivia: Sodium and praseodymium can slow the speed of light passing through them to six miles per second. Source: The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Period Table of the Elements, Sam Kean. Kean mentions this as being slower than the speed of sound, though I'm not sure if he means the speed of sound in sodium or praseodymium.

Currently Reading: Animation by Filmation, Michael Swanigan and Darren McNeil.