Back Where We Started

While we were basically untouched by last week's storm front and still-increasing tornado count that doesn't mean we haven't been affected. Here's a trivial but still annoying one for you. I was scheduled to donate blood Monday after work. A couple hours before I got a text and a voice mail that the appointment was cancelled, please re-schedule. I rescheduled for Tuesday and mid-Tuesday got the same message, although this time the voice mail was from some guy in Idaho? Information communicated to me for some reason?

But what happened with the appointments? My paragraph opening tells you the essentials --- the local donation center was still blacked out --- but not the thrilling details. That part of town, only a couple blocks north of us, got hit far worse than we did. One street that's basically what ours would turn into, if it continued through a park, had every tree shredded or destroyed. That's not what hit the Red Cross center, though. Or other things nearby, including the grocery where we pick up stuff it's not worth going to Meijer's for. (Meijer's has far more fake-meat food and variety of pop, so don't @ us.)

A pedestrian overpass for one of the four-lane roads there collapsed in the storm, screwing up traffic for a good while and gathering a lot of road crews. And apparently it's been enough of a mess there that they claimed they'd be getting the power back sometime Tuesday night.

I've rescheduled my appointment for Saturday afternoon. We'll just see what happens.

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Happening now, back in July? Kennywood. Last you saw were pictures going into the Old Mill ride. And now here's ...

The refurbished Old Mill signage, which looks kind of like if you had something almost plausibly 1901 design but still new. (I feel that's a font you wouldn't get in 1901 but I can't justify that claim.) The skeleton figure in the other Old Mill sign turns up in a lot of the scenes inside.

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Now here's the Sky Rocket, which we rode for the first time this decade. Here it's paused on a brake run.

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Good look up so you can see the underside of the coaster and also the wheels underneath and on the side of the track which make it so difficult for a train to fly off.

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You'd never see a train derailment if Amtrak could run on this system!

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Train is out of here. The wild thing is this is just the slow speed of a train released from the brakes and rolling into the station.

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And here's the operator's console for Sky Rocket. Not even twelve buttons to the whole thing!

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Trivia: In the early modern era, the Flemish areas of the Low Countries preserved farmland vitality with a seven-crop rotation cycle. Source: Food in History, Reay Tannahill.

Currently Reading: The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, Evan Friss.