Back on normal things. Sunday ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunny_hugger's parents visited, not so much to see the house but as a staging area to get to the garden center. They hung around a little, at least, and her mother got to see the backyard and that somehow a couple goldfish had wintered over in the pond, and her father went with us to the Quality Dairy for ice cream.
The garden center was the main goal. But first, the small farm a long block away, where we found, first, the guy who actually runs the place there and talking in great and convincing detail about the plants he was selling. bunny_hugger regretted she'd got some particular plants the previous week when she saw them available; these were better. Also, we saw what young celery plants look like, a moment which made me realize I had no concept of what celery plants look like. And this in Michigan, once the nation's fount of celery; Kalamazoo used to be known as Celery City. (California's now the big celery state, although Michigan is second place. A very distant second.) Third, we found some of the plants bunny_hugger or her mother planned to get at the garden center so, great, we can buy local. Fourth, word that tomato plants were likely to be ready for buying next week.
(Also nobody mentioned a dead groundhog lying on its back near the barn. It didn't look like it had been preyed on or hit by a car, but I can't say more because I didn't want to ask.)
The garden center was a nice visit, as usual. There wasn't any evidence of the peacocks that were once pets and a symbol of the store, but that didn't surprise me anymore either. It was a hot, sunny, day, and bunny_hugger remarked that the sprawling center would be perfect if only they had an ice cream counter. It would have given her father something to do besides rushing back to the car to sit while waiting for us to finish shopping.
And once that was done, bunny_hugger had only the challenge of getting everything in the ground and watered some before Wednesday. Why that is a story to be revealed soon.
Some more pictures from our October night at New Sparks. Hope you like pinball backglass photos!
The back wall of Sparks --- you can see the backroom open behind there --- has a bunch of video games plus, you can see, stray mannequin hands.
Here's the pinball machines opposite that back wall. Mostly 1960s/70s electromechanicals plus, for some reason, Jersey Jack's Dialed In.
Backglass art for Comet --- so this year we saw two separate instances --- showing the extreme angle that's an exciting dramatic view for the first of the Python Anghelo roller coaster games. Don't look closely at the people in the fourth row.
And late-80s game Party Animals, with that art that shows what furries had to content themselves with before furry art was a coherent genre.
Big House is another game we don't get to play enough. We don't know why some of the characters are funny animal versions of, like, Edward G Robinson and Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre while there's plain old humans in other art moments.
Besides pinball and Pee-Wee Herman MJB is a fan of Showbiz Pizza and Chuck-E-Cheese and has collected and shared things from it.
Trivia: Detroit had something like seven thousand speakeasies, blind pigs, beer flats, and such in 1923, and triple that by 1928. Source: Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent. I admit not being sure how this could be known since there wasn't a single contemporary party lacking reason to exaggerate the number.
Currently Reading: The History of the Telescope, Henry C King.
