Now going back one holiday, or ahead one: Silver Bells in the City! We have made a tradition of visiting every year and kept it up though this threatened to be the first really cold day we've had this season. We were having 70 degree (Fahrenheit) days earlier that week so getting to below-freezing weather without acclimation time was not a lot of fun. Even if we had gotten to acclimate to normal this would still have been maybe the coldest Silver Bells we've been at, at least for a long while. It was in the 20s by the time we got there and it didn't get any warmer, but it did get to snowing, sometimes pretty heavily. Not enough to make the roads slick, but enough to threaten to freeze our feet.
Somehow we didn't get over to the Christmas Shopping Village. I guess we were a little late getting to the parade location, but not terribly late. And I suppose every time we have gone after the parade we've found it a depleted and slightly sad remnant of things closing up. The only thing we'd have really needed there was to pick up the year's Silver Bells tree ornament and we got that already. They didn't have a normal pickup process for some reason, but they were willing to let me come to the Lansing Center (the exhibition hall) a couple days before and pick it up myself. That went as you'd expect, if you expected the doors to all be locked at 2 pm and for me to be let in only because someone wondered why I was trying all the doors, and then we got everything sorted out.
Making a happy return to the proceedings: hot chocolate served at City Hall! Though when we went back for more after the parade and to warm up our feet they were out of hot chocolate and we had to settle for coffee that, for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger's cup, had grounds in it. That's all right; it gave us time to hang out in City Hall, which we keep worrying is going to be demolished or renovated out of all its charm. (The building is about 70 years old and has had about 70 years of maintenance deferrals to catch back up on.)
The centerpiece of Silver Bells is, of course, the electric light parade, featuring up to eleven bands playing ``Jingle Bell Rock''. This turned out to be a shorter parade than we expected, only something like five bands, and only two of them played ``Jingle Bell Rock''. That's all right, though, as one of the community-singalong songs for the end of the show was, you guessed it. And here I put the over-under at four playings of ``Jingle Bell Rock''. We might have had a chance to know this ahead of time: while in City Hall having our pre-show hot chocolate we found a detailed rundown for the parade, possibly for the TV crews? Or the emcee explaining things to the live audience? We don't know. I took one photograph of this artifact; bunnyhugger photographed the entire program.
Also returning to the parade, by the way? The Cata-pillar. That is, the bendy bus that the local transport agency dresses up as a bug. They had two decorated buses this time, one of them the smaller van used for special needs and that they dubbed the Lady Bus, and the other a new-model bendy-bus. On this --- called the Cata-Bug, I think, or something like that instead --- the face was a large mask on the front, rather than eyes programmed into the bus destination signboard. I don't know why the name change but the emcee at the parade and the people on TV rejected the name and called it the Cata-pillar anyway. Still absent are a couple floats we're not sure we've seen since the severe storm destroyed the parade of 2016, like the Turner-Dodge House float or the Accident Fund Insurance Building float. Don't know if they've decided not to participate anymore or whether the floats were damaged or what.
Immediately after the parade they lit the tree --- no, of course not, they puttered around for a while with the community sing. All right. It included two rounds of the first verse of Silent Night, for some reason. But they lit the tree, this year done up in white and gold, and went right into the fireworks. Or, no, they didn't; they went right into the drone light show.
The aerial drones, they said, had twice as many figures as last year, although I couldn't tell the difference. While the speakers played strange, ethereal tunes they traced out, yeah, some cute figures, bells swinging slowly in the air or abstract figures rotating. Santa in his sleigh. The University of Michigan logo, booed so loudly you could hear it on the TV. (Mind, this was before University of Michigan made Ohio State University's football season perfect for everyone besides OSU.) The Michigan State University logo, as loudly cheered. (This even though MSU has been having the kind of football season that Rutgers dreams of.) The words 'LOVE LANSING'. It all seems okay enough but it's not exciting and once again we have no idea where they think we're supposed to be watching this from. The whole crowd kept moving south of the capitol building trying to find a place where you could see them over the tree and the capitol building and downtown and stuff.
Ah, but after that the fireworks came, for the first time in years, and if the show was shorter than I remembered from past years, it was more intense. And the thing ran long enough that the whole show overran the DVR's margin of time, so when we watched the recording we couldn't see the fireworks. That's all right. We have pictures.
Well, bunnyhugger has pictures. My camera decided about an hour in that the battery was Critically Low and it refused to go on further. This even though I had the thing fully charged before we set out. I suspect it's something in the cold that it didn't like, but that bodes ill for going to Crossroads Village or the Potter Park Zoo for their holiday light displays this December. Maybe it was a fluke. I have enough things that I need to repair or replace already, I don't need my camera joining the list before I have income again.
Boy was there a lot of snow considering how little of it stuck.
Stepping back a holiday or arguably two now here's some of the decorations people in our neighborhood put up for Halloween. No fair using this to dox us, now!
Little witches hanging around the front yard, and it looks like there are lights in the bush but since it's not quite sunset there's no telling.
And a neat little pocket graveyard with a nicely decorated front porch.
Spirits hanging around as sunset rolls in.
Now we're at night and get to see the people who went in on the lights. I don't know that the red figure at the lower left is a snake or something like that but can't rule it out.
Folks with porches got to do so much.
Closer look on the same porch so you can see the ``Happy Halloweens'' sign. (That final 'S' is actually another jack-o-lantern face, like the one to the left of the 'H', I'm just making trouble.)
Trivia: The year has decreased in length by about 12 seconds (0.00014 days) since the time of Hipparchus of Nicaea (c 190 - c 120 BCE). Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.
Currently Reading: Our Space Environment: Opportunities, Stakes, and Dangers, Editors Claude Nicollier, Volker Gass. Ah, there's the Tsiolkovsky quote! Been waiting for that.
