This weekend we visited ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger's parents. Unfortunately obligations on SpinDizzy Muck kept us from being able to go Saturday, and Sunday had the requirement that we leave around 10 pm to get us to bed soon enough. And we ended up late, in part because road construction has resumed and we can't turn onto US 127 south from the natural route. Can't come back, either; I discovered that in the night when the temporary barriers made the lanes even narrower than I'm comfortable with.
An hour or two after we arrived bunnyhugger went out to walk her parents' dog. Both usually enjoy this because bunnyhugger uses it for her daily half-hour walk and the dog doesn't often get to spend so much time in the nearby park and all that. This was a little less fun than usual because after quite a while of warm weather we were back to near-freezing and, turns out, raining, so by the end of the walk they'd both had enough.
I decided to go for a walk myself, separately. But after a couple blocks my bluetooth headphones died. Though I'd charged them up last Tuesday they went into the low-battery warning cycle, where every minute it interrupts the audio to tell me ``Cease Charging''. Cease doesn't make sense here but it's what I hear. Maybe they're trying to say ``Needs'' charging? Anyway, it gives these one-minute warnings when it's about five minutes from being out of battery rather than, say, giving one warning every five minutes starting from when there's an hour of charge left. With no podcast, and with a near-freezing drizzle setting in, this wasn't so much fun so I headed back.
I did along the way see an upright piano someone left on their extension. When I mentioned this to bunnyhugger's father he seemed stunned and disbelieving of the concept, and asked several times where it was, so there's something like a 35% chance he's dragged a lightly-rained-on upright piano from the next block over. (Maybe not that high. If he had bunnyhugger's mother would likely have said something to her and I'd have heard of the trouble I'd instigated.)
There were two substantial goals to the visit. One was eating all the reuben sandwiches. Did we succeed? No. Despite our best efforts bunnyhugger's mother made one more sandwich than we could eat, which we took home to be a lunch.
Ah, but the second and more important goal: playing our first round of Aftermath, the board roleplaying game that the guy who made Mice and Mystics did next. Did we succeed? No. This in part because of our late start and early end. But more that Aftermath comes with eight hundred thousand token things that need to be punched out of cardboard and put into the separate baggies for organization. (The game provides the baggies, which is a great touch.) Also many pieces that need to be assembled into dials with pointers and stuff like that. bunnyhugger needed an hour or so just to do that and there wasn't time for gameplaying given that. However, we did have the time to look at the game and marvel at how well-produced it looks. And to get some idea of what the goals of the thing are and who the player-characters are.
We're intimidated by one of the rules, that if we ever fail a specific adventure we're to restart the entire campaign. Given how often we had to replay Mice and Mystics chapters the idea of starting everything over and over seems un-fun. On the other hand, surely the game would be designed so failing out and restarting from scratch was rare but fun, right? Oh, did I mention bunnyhugger brought not just the book but also a set of annotated rulesheets that the board game fans pass around to clarify ambiguous or mysterious rules in the actual book? (You can also, of course, ignore the restart-from-scratch and the game even has official provisions for that.)
So maybe next time that'll be what we finish the night on.
And for my pictures tonight? Still more of Kings Island Wednesday, and pictures of the ongoing evening now.
Got back to that little park and I took a handful of more photos. Here I wanted the Racer-themed Miniature Miniature Eiffel Tower lined up with the antique carousel.
And a little father in is the Orion-themed Miniature Miniature Eiffel Tower.
Looking back the other way picks up The Bat and the ... uh .. I'm going to guess Diamondback Miniature Miniature Eiffel Towers.
And then we get to the setting sun and this wonderful triangle of glow above the midway.
View of the entrance gate, or the exit gate I suppose, in the evening sun. But what really interested me was this ...
Looking back at the Moon and the Miniature Eiffel Tower in the reflection of the windows of the main gate.
Trivia: Hours before WLW was to make its initial broadcast in 1922, owner Powel Crosley, frightened that the antenna location meant the station's new 50-watt license would not provide enough reach, had the antennas raised. Rounding up employees from the radio factory they added a twenty-foot section of downspout to each tower, elevating the antenna height to sixty feet, and added a counterpoise to balance the new structure. Source: Crosley: Two Brothers and a Business Empire that Transformed the Nation, Rusty McClure with David Stern and Michael A Banks.
Currently Reading: Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside-Down, Editor Tom Standage.
