Happy new year, dear ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger, and here's hoping it is a good one.
We'll get to bigger things soon but for now, some light business around town. Christmas Day was, as for everyone in the United States, warmer than average, though not absurdly so. Sunday, though, saw it astoundingly warm, in the mid-50s and pouring out all the rain we haven't had in three months at once. And then it turned extremely cold, and if you know anything about weather going from extremely warm to bitterly cold means you're going to get all the wind in the world.
Sunday night, then, was one of hearing winds howling steadily and endlessly. And, somewhere around 3 am, some loud metallic object smashing somewhere around our driveway. It was loud enough to wake me up and you have to remember, I'm only woken up by bunnyhugger pushing me and telling me I'm snoring, at which time I fall back asleep. For that matter, it even got me out of bed to see what was going on. bunnyhugger, still awake for reasons which I will not reveal at this time, had no idea. We looked outside and she even took a few cautious steps outside and we couldn't find anything obviously anywhere. With nothing to do I went back to sleep.
In the morning I had a horrible idea: our satellite dish must have fallen off its garage-roof mounting. Nope! It was there in good order and was working fine. A little looking around the front and back yards by daylight revealed nothing obviously out of place anywhere, granting that they had five more hours of extreme wind to blow anything suspicious away. No sign of damage to either of our cars, nor our neighbor's cars, nor (from what we could see) their henhouse.
So what small satellite crashed into our driveway at 3 am and then left again? We'll never know.
I start the new year as I started the last one, with pictures from a big June amusement park trip. Somehow I'm losing ground, but to be fair, Plopsaland De Panne has a lot of stuff and you're not likely to see it repeated around here. So, to pictures:
Ride sign for De Dierenmolen (``The Animal Mill'')/Le Carrousel des Animaux (``The Animals Carousel''), photographed partly because of the nice style put into it and partly because it shows off the attempt at language-neutral informational signs. The +2 means it's for ages two and up.
Next to the Animal Mill were these vending machines and you knoe, if we had change, we might have gone for one of them.
Now isn't that overhead train track interesting? We were looking forward to using it, but ...
Here's a fountain with statues of the lead characters for Nacht Wacht, plus the castle containing its dragon-themed roller coaster.
And on the ground there's a seagull and a suspicious line of white dots. Hm. What could that mean?
Well, back to the K3 Roller Skater coaster. Here's the station and the lift hill, plus some of the very large props for it.
Trivia: One of the Sanskrit words for 'Saturday' was 'Mandavara'. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.
Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.
