So, Motor City Furry Con '026. It is not one we were happy during, and so far as one can tell only a week out, it's not likely to be one that ages into a beloved experience. Sorry to give you a downer report.
The most important thing first. Somewhere, most likely in checking in, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger lost her hat. The white one with earflaps and pink trim that she could tie under her chin to ride roller coasters while wearing. The one her mother made for her. The one she'd lost before, but been able to find thanks to the heroic work of friends watching out for her.
Sometime during our getting out of the car in the parking garage, getting into the hotel --- the Renaissance Center in Detroit --- and getting to our room --- on the 53rd floor, the highest off the ground we've been together outside of an airplane --- the hat disappeared, most likely falling out of her coat pocket. We discovered this Friday evening and the search for it consumed everything else we might have done that day. bunnyhugger and I retraced our steps out to the car and back without finding it. I went to the con operations and discovered the lost-and-found guy was on break. The hotel check-in booth said they hadn't heard anything but checked in back and advised checking again in the morning when Security might have turned over things.
We both, separately, went to both Con Ops and to the Hotel lost-and-founds Saturday, without success. Sunday too. Saturday I spent a good hour or so retracing my steps completely, including pressing the elevator buttons in the parking garage trying to ensure I inspected both cars. In that I failed; one of them just would not come, but bunnyhugger reasonably concluded that if only one door was operating all day Saturday and Sunday it was probably also the one working Friday when we got there.
The mysterious thing to us is that when we checked in we were, for the most part, around other people. Certainly once we were in the Ren Cen building, and even while we were walking around the edge of the building. If the hat had fallen out, why didn't anyone holler at us? If it fell when nobody happened to see, why didn't someone take it to lost-and-found? If they didn't want to take it to lost-and-found, what did happen to it? We can imagine someone who needed a hat figuring a used, probably ill-fitting one found on the street beats having nothing. But we were never on the sidewalks or streets when we checked in. Who goes to the second or third floor of a parking garage just in the hopes that something useful might be abandoned there?
The story of how the hat went missing itself has missing parts that keep it from making sense.
We were devastated, as you'd think, and there was no hope of the rest of Friday or Saturday being any good unless we recovered it, which we didn't. Sunday was a little better, up to the moments we remembered about the hat, at which point our moods crashed again, and we finally had to leave the convention and with it any hope of running across it.
bunnyhugger's mother says that she can make a replacement hat, she found the pattern and it doesn't seem too complicated. But it won't be the same; literally, the yarn originally used isn't available, and a replacement might not be sold until the winter-hat-knitting season opens in summer. And even a remade hat can't be the original, and will be all the more awful to risk losing by using it as a hat.
Apart from that, though, how was the con? That I hope to tell you over the coming week.
But first, a normal dose of pictures from Six Flags America, grammar not included.
The slightly stoned-looking elephant on the outside of the carousel.
And a black panther or similar medium-size cat.
Ostriches turn up on classic antiques more than you might imagine. This is a very 80s effort and making a modern ostrich.
And here's a camel, which you don't see on many carousels. bunnyhugger got a ride on one of these, I believe.
That same cougar-or-jaguar-or-whatever cat but in different paint.
The chariot is a somehow under-decorated part of the ride. The particular color choice feels like a cake with decorative icing to me.
Trivia: Janis Kipurs and Zintis Ekmanis, Latvian bobsledders for the 1992 Albertville and Savoie Winter Games, and former medal-winners for the Soviet Union, manned barricades in the May 1990 independence movement. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.
Currently Reading: The Red Planet: A Natural History of Mars, Simon Morden.
