Dirty old river, must you keep rolling, rolling into the night

With each day I am 24 hours nearer to being with bunny_hugger, which is good for the obvious and abundant and sufficient reasons. But it also means that I'm running out of time for things that I have to do, like, pack. A lot of that is figuring out what I don't need or want or what can go off to someone else somewhere --- and I was delighted that nearly all the furniture I had unaccounted for was wanted by my sister-in-law or her mother as soon as they saw pictures of it --- but there's still big chunks that I have to make decisions about and that I just don't have the time to deal with.

So, that's why on Sunday instead of facing the responsibility I instead drove off to the Silverball Museum. It'd been weeks since I was last there, after all (since my last haircut) and I thought I'd just play until I had my fill. I didn't quite do that, although I did manage to play about half of all the games there before feeling like it was late enough I should really get back home. It was nearly all a day of playing electromechanical games, partly because that's what most of the machines they had were, but also because I didn't want to wait in line for the people playing Scared Stiff and Medieval Madness to finish. (Not only are they long games, but the people on the machines were hitting the 'start' button --- the Silverball Museum has games on free play --- immediately after finishing the old game.) So this turned into a theme.

They've been rearranging the games a lot, of late, and particularly seem to be clustering together games that have similar motifs. There's now a little row that's just games based on billiards, and then another that's nothing but card-based games. These latter intrigue me because there've been a lot of card-game themed pinballs and I don't think any of them has ever worked, in the sense of making a good pinball where there was some connection to the card game's theme. And yet for that it was one of the card game pinballs that I did best on. Relatively, anyway. There were several games on which I topped the Under-13 high score, or came near it, but there weren't any where I did very well for the board or for my own scores.

Since it was in the afternoon that I went out, and after sunset by the time I finished, I had the chance to photograph some of the window-facing games with less glare than average. If I figure out Livejournal's new photo system I may post my proof that I was there.

Trivia: The 1783 Peace of Paris guaranteed to the United Kingdom navigation rights on the Mississippi River. (They were quashed following the War of 1812.) Source: Cod, Mark Kurlansky.

Currently Reading: The Liberty Bell, Gary B Nash.

PS: Getting This Existence Thing Straight, and the question of whether we can say unicorns actually exist just because we know something about all of them.