Our usual plan for Christmas is to go to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger's parents and spend a couple days there, along with her brother and (often) his partner and play board games and watch some Christmas specials and eat far too much. This was going to be spoiled a little bit by scheduling. bunnyhugger's big end-of-the-year pinball tournament needed to be Thursday if ever, and that meant we couldn't stick around the 26th. Also I needed to work the 26th; I surely could have taken the time off but I didn't think to ask for it. But between that, and the need to get some Christmas shopping and wrapping done the 23rd, meant we couldn't leave before the 24th and we would have to leave the 25th. We did miss out on some of the holiday routines, most importantly watching specials --- no Charlie Brown, no Emmett Otter, no Scrooge --- but we did find time for important things like eating far too much.
It didn't help that we got off to a later-than-planned start, a combination of needing to sleep after everything that was going on, making the last attempt at getting fish in for the year, getting the bird and squirrel feeders topped up, and other little chores getting the house ready to ber let alone. Also catching Athena for her first trip to bunnyhugger's parents and meeting the space that she'll go when we're out of town for a couple days. We were a little concerned about her being in a place with a dog and a cat --- there's fair reason to think she had bad experiences with them when she was living on the streets --- but, well, you know the kinds of neurotic dog bunnyhugger's parents attract. Their cat meanwhile wanted nothing to do with anything and spent the whole time we were there being as inaccessible as possible.
In the hopes of saving some time and giving bunnyhugger's brother and mother the chance to do something besides food prep, they didn't make food this time. Instead we got Chinese food, picked up from ... well, a town twenty minutes away, because it turns out there's none in the small but still college town bunnyhugger's parents live in. This was a great choice, though, providing us with a lot to eat and somehow not actually any more time for doing things. We did well in the Fortune/Not-A-Fortune game, though, with the cookies mostly providing actual fortunes. bunnyhugger's father got one cookie that had four slips of paper inside, two fortunes, one not, and one marginal. (Some ambiguous thing about it being a time you could take a trip or something.) Mine promised I would do better in real estate than in stocks, which is unambiguously a fortune of some kind. I note that this fortune does not promise that I would actually do well in real estate or poorly in stocks.
After dinner and even after dessert, and after ragging on bunnyhugger's father for not living up to his promise of a fire in the fireplace, we once again failed to coax bunnyhugger's parents into playing a game of Betrayal at the House on the Hill. The original edition, though we talked up the Legacy version. I ended up being the Traitor this campaign and we ended up in a haunt that ... seems to have been inadequately play-tested, if you can imagine. There was an important element where we had to move a person and it wasn't at all clear how to do that and, in fact, whether I could at all. Although my play was --- if I may say so --- quite clever, I made a mis-step that, combined with a weird series of bad dice rolls, made me lose.
And after that ... well, bunnyhugger had to work more. She hadn't had time to wrap nearly anything, and we had brought not just the gifts she was giving but also our big canvas bag of wrapping supplies, a thing that impressed all her family. It was a nice Bed, Bath, and Beyond purchase years ago so if we ever break this one we're in trouble. But her wrapping things when everyone else had gone to bed was our least-bad option and it forced her to another late night up alone, just this time in a different house than usual.
And now, the last day of the year, the last pictures of Kentucky Kingdom from our trip back in June. Makes you think, doesn't it?
We headed back for the main body of the park, on the rumor that some rides there were still running. Here's a snap of a small river underneath the Roller Skater that we saw on the way.
This is Scream Extreme, which spins the riders in a circle and rises up so they're spinning at, Wikipedia says, 25 miles per hour, some sixty feet in the air. That ... sounds less extreme than you'd think. We've been on carousels that are faster than 25 miles per hour, although shorter than sixty feet off the ground.
Well, all the rides were shuttered so there was nothing to do but walk back to the car through ... sunny, cloudless skies.
Here we are back at the park entrance and, again, does this look like a thunderstorm is going to hit the park soon?
You can see why with skies like this they didn't want to leave the park open for the twenty minutes or so left to the end of its normal operating day.
bunnyhugger can't believe this is the end of our day already. Ah, but at least we got out ahead of the extremely light rain that eventually drifted around.
Trivia: Ray Bolger was billed in vaudeville as ``Rubberlegs'' Bolger. Source: The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Anthony Slide.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 52: There's a Hole in the Bottom!!, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. So after like a year of Popeye searching in vain for his Poppa, who's gone off hiding so far as to chop up navigational signs and pretend to be a mermaid to decoy everyone, Poppa just shows up on Yapple Island talking with Popeye's Mom like it's nothing and he explains it as he changed his mind and on the one hand, that's an incredible anticlimax even for the most anticlimactic story strip ever and on the other hand, yeah, that's his character all right. Nailed it.
