It's been cold this winter, which you could say about most anywhere in North America this winter. It's got us thinking about how the first weekend in freaking October we went to the beach and had a perfectly pleasant day. But to my point, it's been mostly hanging out between 0 and 10 Fahrenheit and if that weren't pleasant enough, we've been getting a fresh snow, a dusting to a half-inch, most every day. Usually right after I've gone out and brushed the snow off the sidewalk and as much of the driveway as still clears anymore.
So what has mildly annoyed me has been that the city never got around to plowing our street. We're a tertiary road, meaning they only get around to plowing us once every three major storms or so, and you understand them not going crazy over every little quarter-inch snow refresh. But you'd think they'd eventually have a light enough day on the main roads they can get the neighborhood streets, right?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger tells me no, and why not. Turns out Lansing, like a lot of northern cities, has a shortage of rock salt this winter. (Never mind that the standard formulation doesn't do a lot of good when it's this cold this long; it'd still do a little good if we could get it on a sunny day.) Apparently the southern states bought up all the rock salt this year for some reason? Like, I get MAGA states wanting to screw the sane people but that's a lot of money to put on the line for a prank that only pays off if it's a really snowy season. There's some dots here I'm not quite connecting but there's probably a confusing article about it on web site that calls their articles ``thinkpieces''.
Anyway this apparently connects to the conscious choice not to plow the side streets. There's a layer of ice down there, underneath the ever-refreshing snow, and annoying and slow as it is to drive on slush it's safer than driving on ice. Remove the slush and you remove the thing that makes people naturally drive slower, so in the absence of a clean street, this is the next-best thing. It's clever and I should admire the clever but I'm also really tired of it being this bitterly cold for this long.
Back to Kennywood. With very short lines for Exterminator we went back around a couple times and once I even photographed what was in the queue.
This may look like nothing, but that's why I photographed it: there used to be a bunch of old, 60s(?)-era industrial machinery here, part of the theming of the waiting area for the Exterminator (which has a premise that mutant rats have taken over the underside of the city or whatever). It looked likely to have been donated from Westinghouse or someone and I can't think any good reason to take it out, especially to replace it with nothing. It's not like it had to do anything besides be there.
But they did leave a couple pieces! Whatever those industrial equipments are, plus a new TV screen replacing the old tube TV that carried a local news anchor's reports about the mysterious things at the Kennywood Power Company.
See this guy? This guy's the ride operator. Do not disturb this guy. Okay? Why do you want to disturb the ride operator anyway? What's this guy doing that you want to disturb them?
Noticed that the Carousel Burger building now had a National Historic District sign on it, explaining a little something of its history. The building used to house the carousel but it's getting on a century since it last did.
Also a memorial tablet we don't remember ever noticing before, even though it apparently dates to 1928. McSwigan was one of the people that Pittsburgh Railways leased Kennywood to in 1907 when they got out of the amusement-park-operating business. McSwigan died in 1923.
bunnyhugger noticing that good-looking carousel over there and saying ``Hey there, horsies!''
Trivia: 46 BCE, when Julius Caesar reformed the calendar, ended up with 445 days: a Mercedonius of 23 days (a common intercalated month put near the end of February) and two extra months of 67 days total inserted between November and December. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.
Currently Reading: Michigan History, November/December 2025. Editor Amy Wagenaar.
