So what was I doing, while ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger got more angry at the idea of pinball? Mostly puttering around. The whole mezzanine had tables on free play, apart from the designated tournament areas, so I could wander around and look at them. Occasionally agree with some other guy who was there that this was a heck of a table. Some of them were ones I knew well from tournaments or pinball museums, such as Quicksilver, this lovely liquid-goopy-character-based early solid state game. Or the early-solid-state Rolling Stones, which plays these lovely tinny early-synthesizer versions of a couple pre-1980 Rolling Stones tunes. This is one that I had played a couple times in past tournaments without ever getting a handle on; here, I could, and discovered it's actually pretty fun. The real key is collecting five stars and repeating, which can give you an extra ball, which is victory in a game of that era.
They also had a Mystic, the magic/tic-tac-toe-themed early solid state that's always an agent of chaos at Fremont pinball events. This one played a tiny bit different from the one AJH had, but not very much. The important thing is it had its sound turned up high enough that I could hear how many things in the game produce nice spooky sound effects. It's not a completely different game but it is a fun addition. Whenever we get to Fremont next I'll be sure to ask AJH when he's getting the sound fixed on Mystic. He'll be very happy to have me drop in and make demands like that, I can tell you!
I also discovered Cleopatra, one of those games made at the electromechanical/solid-state transition (they had the solid-state version) and High-Hand, a King Kong-themed electromechanical that apparently I could play all day, given the chance. I was a little sad not to have played in New Pinburgh, if the games I was putting up on these were any guide. But everybody plays great games when they don't count for anything.
And there's another special game, but I'll save that for a little later.
When the lunch break came we had the choice of what to do for lunch. The bagels and doughnuts from breakfast had been cleared away, replaced with popcorn. I suppose we could have gotten something to eat at the movie theater concession stand, but we figured we could probably do better. The question was where. There was a taco place we considered --- more on that anon too --- but we figured that was too far away to get there, get food, eat, and get back.
So instead we drove to a Sheetz, filling up on gas that was cheaper than what we would get back home. And learning how they've changed their deli counter ordering system since Covid-19. I don't like having to deal with giant ordering screens for everything --- they seem too much like an attempt to even further divorce customers from the people who do the work for them --- but they are much better than those video menus that keep refreshing the screen away from what you were trying to read, and they do make it easy to find the not-boring vegetarian options. So we got good sandwiches or wraps or whatever (it's been weeks, does it matter what it really was?) and drove back to the Rezzanine.
We lost the excellent parking space we'd gotten by being there at 9:45 in the morning or whatever it was. We ended up taking a parking spot to the side of the movie theater, near where some driving school --- or schools --- had set up some traffic cones for people to practice parallel parking. While we got ourselves organized we watched more people park near us --- the lot was empty when I pulled in, I swear --- and traffic students doing their best to parallel park, the nervous ones clearly reassuring themselves only by the thought that nobody was watching them and making comments about when they blew their attempt.
And before reentering I tried without success to reassure bunnyhugger that nobody thought she was a bad player (they certainly did not) and that the tournament was not lost yet. I hadn't looked up the standings but I promised her that one good round would put her back into contention. As it turns out, had she managed to have a perfect round four --- three first-place finishes, nine wins --- and nothing else changed, she would have ... been bounced into a tie for 18th place, just below the cutoff of top 16 players going to finals. I think that counts as being in contention, but reasonable people might disagree.
Back now to the Silver Bells parade of lights. Ready for some very exciting lights?
OK, these are only moderately exciting lights, but still, the garbage truck people make some nice displays.
And here is everyone's favorite, the Petoskey Stell Drum Band! Two levels of lots of people playing steel drums on a rocking truck.
This thing started as just a high school band director up in Petoskey getting really into steel drums and turning it into a thing.
You may notice the aspect ratio on these pictures is weird and that's because these are stills from the movie I took. I'd share the movie but Livejournal doesn't make that easy, at least not yet, and I'm making Livejournal pay for my photo repository.
I wonder what they do in the non-Christmas season.
Person here looking at the Petoskey Steel Drum Band moving on, wondering if he'll know joy again before next Silver Bells. We may hope.
Trivia: In 1760 parts of Rhode Island's South County --- today's Washington County --- the southwestern part of the state with large sheep and dairy farms using a plantation system --- were one-sixth enslaved persons. Source: Rhode Island: A History, William G McLoughlin.
Currently Reading: The Oregon Trail: Yesterday and Today, William E Hill.
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Date: 2024-08-21 03:34 am (UTC)You host them on your Livejournal account.
And my ISP has, I've just discovered, been deliberately blocking Livejournal.
I'm reading your journal from my holiday cabin now, using a completely different ISP. There are going to be *words*