Last year after we tossed out the decorative gourds that had passed their prime some squirrels (most likely) cracked them open. And at least one took seeds from them and did what squirrels do, burying them in our side yard. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger discovered this a couple weeks ago, when she saw a small but growing pumpkin-class plant growing there. She set up some plant jail cages, to avoid the leaves and vines getting attacked by either our growing wildlife population or by the neighbors who just moved in to the house next door. And hoped that the flowers might get pollinated. Years ago she'd tried to grow pumpkins, but the flowers all came up the same sex.
This time? There were at least a couple of both sexes. And we even had a pollinator we didn't know could do the job. It turns out ants, while not as good at it as bees are, will help plant sex along while going about their business. This took a bit of the edge off this unfortunate stretch a couple weeks ago where we had a swarm of ants in the dining room and spending too much time on the table. (That, we handled by getting very rigorous about crumbs, washing the tablecloth a couple times, and damp-mopping Dr Bronner's Peppermint over the floor several times, and also getting lucky.) Before long there weren't just blooms but actual gourds growing.
Yesterday bunnyhugger harvested one. It's a decorative gourd, the kind we get two for a dollar this time of year, three and four for a dollar in a month or so. It's small, compared to the ones we get at the store, likely the result of having little sun and no fertilized soil But the shape is great and the colors nice. And, most wonderful, it just happened without our specifically arranging anything. Some nice squirrel just did their business and we came out well for it.
Back now in photos: here's the Women's North American Championship Series under way in Fort Wayne. Note that I did not sneak past the lines where the public was forbidden.
People gathering to be ready for the first matchups. And, on the right, non-players just playing around.
Standee for the Women's North American Championship Series. The image on the banner is the backglass for the electromechanical game Centigrade 37, a name which makes sense because ... future women in tubes?
bunnyhugger facing her immediate destiny. (This is one of several killer photographs this roll.)
Sometime later (see it's past 10:30 already), folks sit around waiting for their next matchups.
Picture of some of the games not (yet) in the tournament. I believe the Nine Ball would get swapped in for something that broke --- I think it was missing later in the day, a shame as I'd wanted to play more.
Matchups being made, I believe. Also, on the back wall, we see that the Wizards World arcade was getting Stern banners for pinball games way, way before Lansing League was. The Star Trek pinball dates to 2013, for example, and the Ghostbusters pinball came out ... uh ... I want to say 2016? It was the last dot-matrix pinball Stern made.
bunnyhugger faces her challenge this round: the electromechanical game Pinball, named by someone at Original Stern who was being cheeky and wanted the game to be impossible to look up online and also wanted to do a backglass of a city being crushed by a kaiju sphere.
On to friendlier territory, and Road Show. Since the dot matrix display has only a single score on it and is labelled 'Free Play' it must be after she and her opponent had taken their 30-second practices but before they played. Note the left plunger has a little Ted head, although it just looks like a craggly blob here.
Oh hey, Wizard, nice Arcade. Saw your scarecrow brother outside.
The venue has this poster on the wall, nice basic advice for anyone hoping to play pinball. The bits about nudging and the 'advanced flipper techniques' are particularly good to know.
OK so now, like, as soon as she reads this blog entry, bunnyhugger is going to yell at me because I did have a good game of FunHouse but still came up short of the grand championship, which you'll recall was a factory-default 15 million.
And I got back just in time to see her being streamed playing Jurassic Park! Unfortunately the stream joined her just in time for her to have a walk-off win so she didn't get to do much.
Trivia: Johannes Kepler built a camera obscura with a convex lens to improve image quality. In 1620 English diplomat Henry Wotton, travelling in Germany, described the camera obscura in a letter to Francis Bacon. Source: Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, Lisa Jardine
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 12: 1950, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.
