And now I can reveal what my errand of yesterday was. Nothing big, I just didn't feel up to writing it up before deadline is all. It was my blood donation, rescheduled from Monday and from Tuesday.
Actually it was a platelet donation, my first time. I'd always donated whole blood before and for not a whole lot of particular reason tried the alternate approach this time. Platelets here are the parts of blood that allow for blood clotting, and they can't be stored more than a couple days, so there's always a steady need for them. They're collected by taking blood from your arm, filtering the platelets out of it, and putting everything else right back in. Your body, all going well, replaces the platelets in a couple days and the platelets themselves go off to cancer, transplant, and major-surgery patients.
The catch is all this takes much longer than a whole-blood donation where they just let you bleed on purpose for maybe fifteen minutes and then stop it. Long enough that they set you up in this reclined, sculpted seat, legs above your chest, with TV to watch and everything. The nurse offered me the chance to pick what I'd like to watch on Netflix, and I thought well surely she's using 'Netflix' as synecdoche for all the streaming services they have and so I could watch stuff on Disney+ or Hulu as on the other buttons on the remote that didn't work for me at first. But no, I've never had reason to think I wasn't basically neurotypical, why do you ask? Anyway she got the remote working and I got to thinking what do I even want to watch that's about 90-100 minutes? A movie? Okay, quick, think of a movie! Not so easy, is it?
Finally I realized I could just pull up a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode, as I've finally started watching the Netflix seasons and I could get to the next one I hadn't seen (Starcrash). Getting on board several years after everyone stopped thinking about it I have to say: unless this season takes a major turn for the worse after this episode I don't see why anyone wasn't thrilled with it. There's stuff I'm not sure I like about it but the movie riffing is so wonderfully playful.
The nurse came back to check a couple times, the first none too soon because my headphones had fallen loose and with needles in both arms I couldn't re-adjust it myself. And near the end I started to feel a pringly, pins-and-needles feeling across my body, a known side effect that would pass once the process was all done. I also got to feeling cold and a little ... nauseous is too strong a term but very weird. A couple juice boxes when I was done healed most of that, and I of course followed direction and stayed in the waiting area having snacks and fluids for a good fifteen minutes before cautiously getting back up and heading out.
As reward for the donation I got a Red Cross Emergency Lantern, a solar-powered lantern that also provides USB charge. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger wondered if this were an ironic statement on their own power outage; no, they'd been planning to give these away the back half of May anyway. We've slowly been getting more sources of emergency lighting in the house an the LED lantern should help. You know, in case something improbable like a massive, intense storm front with tornado-level winds rolls across the lower peninsula a third time in three months or something.
That's all fun, but you're wondering, what did it look like back last summer when we visited Kennywood? Please, enjoy what you see here:
The stairs leading up to the operator's booth on Racer, placed as nearly center as I could get my picture.
Everyone wants to get in on the Racer appreciating. I don't know when the landmark plaque dates to.
And here's the ACE Roller Coaster Landmark plaque, put at a time there were three wooden Möbius-strip racing coasters.
The park's Musik Express, included here because it's quite pleasantly colorful and also there's people who want to see pictures of these rides.
Hair scrunchies tossed on top of a blue concrete-block building you pass on the way to Phantom's Revenge. According to a 2001 thread on CoasterBuzz it houses (housed?) an electrical distribution center for this area of the park. And it's where Lightning Loop, which we rode at La Feria Chapultepec and hope someday to ride at Indiana Beach, was located, with the ride on top of the building, which was also a second park entrance(!). The loop started about where the left end of the building, with the upwards hill to the left of this picture. Its service as a second entrance is why there's the huge Kennywood sign painted on something otherwise just tucked within the Lost Kennywood Municipal District.
Lift hill and one of the mid-ride hills of Phantom's Revenge, seen from the hilariously long queue approaching the station.
Trivia: The Ordnance Survey of Ireland begun in 1824 struggled against the heavy fogs that often would not burn off. Thomas Drummond developed several tools making the survey possible, including improvements to the barometer, photometer, aethroscope, and heliostat; but the big solution to the fogs was the ``pea-light'', a pellet of calcium oxide lime which, burned with an oxyhydrogen flame, produced a light so intense it could be seen as much as a hundred miles away. Source: On The Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks, Simon Garfield. And this is the ``limelight'' of fame.
Currently Reading: The Harvey Comics Companion, Mark Arnold.
