Happy doctorversary, dear ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger.
So Sunday I repeated my morning raid of the breakfast buffet, naturally. We got going as close to check-out time of 11 am as possible. We didn't actually get out before 11, or even all that close to it, but we figured we didn't have anything to get to at Motor City Furry Con until noon so what was the rush? And then we saw the fire truck parked across the entrance and gathered what had been going on. We parked a while in the strip mall opposite the convention hotel (and not far from ours) and reflected on how we understood now why there were so many groups of furries hanging around outside the McDonald's and all. We had decided to take the daily walk --- bunnyhugger never misses her half-hour daily walk --- on the golf course grounds, but we were waylaid by more folks we hadn't seen in years who were at the con and ended up talking with them, learning about such things as the Pine Shrine, until we saw the fuss of the hotel getting cleared and everyone moving back in.
I forget now what we hoped to get to at noon, and for some reason Motor City's web site no longer shows this year's schedule (in past years they'd leave it up until the next convention's schedule was ready), so it doesn't matter. We were left wondering what they'd do about the scheduled events as the convention got back together. Holding the dealer's den and artist's alley open an extra hour, and moving the closing ceremonies back an hour, were the big things. We didn't know about closing ceremonies moving and so had an unexpected hour to kick around in the afternoon.
There were two panels we wanted to get to, though. The first was a surprise to see on the schedule, a puppeteering panel. Puppeteering used to be a major thread of furry conventions, and when the professionals stopped doing that bunnyhugger and I tried running it for a few years with our scraps of knowledge. But we hadn't tried that since before the pandemic began and we were startled to see someone was doing it again. So we brought a couple of our puppets in and waited eagerly to see who was doing this and what they had to share.
We would wait a long while. While a half-dozen or so people showed up and a few people drifted in and out, the organizer never showed up. After a half-hour or so someone who seemed connected to the convention explained that there had been something where because of (reason) the rooms for the puppeteering and the Rodents events --- set a half-hour apart, the only things overlapping on the original Sunday schedule --- had been swapped and that was probably the source of the confusion. I think we had the sense that the presenter was going to come to our room --- nothing seemed to be happening in the Rodents SIG room --- and ultimately, while we talked a bit with other people who puppeteered or wanted to, whoever was leading the panel never appeared and we never got a clear idea of what we should be doing instead.
I hope there's a puppeteering panel next year and also that we find it successfully.
Now, let's see if we can't get back to Indiana Beach a little:
The Musik Express/Himalaya, seen from the back. As it's also either entrance or exit you get a sense of how crowded the land-starved park is.
The board-free boardwalk, looking up its length, as the sun gets seriously into setting. The bricks in the lower middle are inscribed with the names of people sponsoring them.
Animatronic welcoming us to Frankenstein's Castle, the walk-through haunted house that we didn't go to, for the first time.
The steps leading up to the Hoosier Hurricane and also Rocky's Rapids. If you peek in the background, on the right, you can also see where some of the eating pavilions have a sign for the 'UPPER' level, which was closed that day.
Cornball Express and Tig'rr Coaster seen in motion together.
And peeking down from the Hoosier Hurricane platform to see Rocky's Roundup carousel looking even more toy-like than usual. Note that the chariot has shields with the initials 'I' and 'B' for some reason.
Trivia: Legend has it that in returning from the Spanish campaign of 778, Charlemagne passed through Roquefort and, served cheese by the monks of St-Gall, immediately started cutting out the moldy blue parts. The monks convinced him the blue was the best part of the cheese and, in the end, they were tasked with providing the emperor two wheels of Roquefort a year until his death in 814. Source: Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky. Kurlansky describes this as ``not well-documented'' and I admit I'd be skeptical, among other things, of an eighth century cheese resembling a modern cheese in any important way.
Currently Reading: The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations, Jacob Soll.
