I only got to the Rabbits and Rodents panel after the whole thousand-person-long fursuit parade ended, and after getting through the dense cloud of people milling around, including fursuiters running back to get out of suit and into something where they could breathe. Finally I got to the panel room where I found ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger already there; she'd arrived just before, and she too had been late. When she arrived there was someone else who'd taken the lead and started the round of people telling who they were and what their rabbit or rodent thing is. So great thanks to whoever it was saw the gap and took charge, and we had a pretty good time going around, talking, and even managed a much more orderly transition upstairs for the group photo. If we missed anyone, they didn't complain.
We finished at a reasonable time, got back to the room to unload stuff, and went across the street again to the North Market for lunch or dinner or whatever it was you eat at that hour. It was past 4 pm. We ended up going to the Polish counter where bunnyhugger got more and bigger pierogies than she could eat. Me, I felt an irresistible longing from my heritage, and made a rare exception to my basically vegetarian diet, getting a kielbasa hoagie. Vegetarian kielbasa has gotten very good but, oh, there is something in the crisp, juicy crackle of the real meat skin being punctured that isn't there yet. We joined mystee and spouse and friends, a semi-lucky break given we'd known they were going to lunch too.
Afterwards we went through the Dealer's Den, finally getting a sense of what was there. And bunnyhugger got a promise from an artist to do a sketchbook sketch, but the artist wanted to take her sketchbook only Sunday morning and return it that day. This gave us the time to return to our room and rest a while.
Because we had three panels left in the day. One to go to: the con history guy was doing a panel Con History: From Costume Masquerade to Fursuit Parade. This was in a much smaller room, packed so full we only got seats by climbing over a row of attendees and also someone deciding they were leaving. It was in some ways an expansion on one thread of his discussion the previous day, with a lot of pictures and stories, not all of them about Forrest J Ackermann being all like that.
This was great, but we had to leave as it was nearing the end because come 8 pm bunnyhugger had her next meet-and-greet to run. This was for birds, and bird-adjacent creatures like gryphons and such. I believe a couple dragons also popped in because you can't keep dragons out of things. This was a smaller group, probably because of the lateness of the hour, but the downtime we'd had before heading out did mean bunnyhugger had the chance to change into her peacock kigurumi, putting her on theme. She'd been annoyed she hadn't had the chance to bring her squirrel puppet to the Rabbits and Rodents meetup. This got things a little better at least.
Also for the photo someone in a really tall suit joined in. I don't know what kind of bird they were representing, but something with enormous legs, performed by their walking on stilts. This added just a foot and a half or so to their height, but that is a lot of height, especially on a thin body. Everyone was impressed.
Then came the last of our meet-and-greets, me running the Mustelids panel. I started out admitting that a member of the raccoon family isn't technically a mustelid, but then neither are all the skunks here either. They're in the Mephit family, a thing taxonomy has been clear on for decades and that hasn't filtered into the public consciousness as well as the ``rabbits are not Rodents'' classification has. However, both the raccoon and the skunk families are part of the Musteloidea superfamily so there's at least some relationship there. I was able to also correctly bring in the red panda suiter, as that family is also Musteloidea. I did go and blow it by saying the otters weren't mustelids either, but no, the otters are a subfamily of Mustelids. I was apparently inventing families inside the weasel superfamily and not even bunnyhugger called me on it.
Anyway, when all of that got finished fine, and we happened to notice out the window there were fireworks going off. Professional fireworks, so we knew it wasn't something like a major political figure turning up dead. No, it was just Memorial Day weekend, probably around the AAA baseball team. (Columbus's team is called the Clippers, after the mid-19th century sailing ships designed for oceangoing speed that I don't think could possibly get to the center of Ohio?)
We would spend time after this back in our room, rebuilding our energies. When we ventured out again there was some point where I ended up in the video game room alone and playing Tetris far better than I would have thought I had the reflexes for. (My secret is not accelerating the piece's drop because you can use the time to figure what to do with the next piece.) We would spend some time at the dance; we'd also eventually get to the karaoke, which was moderately well-attended but half of everyone called to a song was missing. It turned out the waiting list was something like 90 minutes long and you can understand people giving up and wandering off. And we were there when there were under 30 minutes to the scheduled end of the event. The karaokemeister said he intended to stay until they kicked him out; but we didn't stick with it. bunnyhugger, taking her daily walk, happened to be past there about 90 minutes after this and found the room empty. We do not have the information to determine whether they exhausted their singers or got kicked out.
Good dance, though. We were getting to sleep something like 3 am, so it was a good thing there wasn't anything happening Saturday morning we really needed to be awake for.
In pictures, now, we're carrying on with the Merry-Go-Round Museum, as mentioned packed with more things and I still haven't even hinted at the really big addition. It's coming.
And here's the sea dragon from the point of view of someone about to be licked up by them or snorted into their nose. Enjoy!
The brass ring game arm, here, plus stairs such as one would use if one were loading the rings.
Happened to catch the side of this horse you can see the lighting from. Yes, they're hollow. I bet you can think of two good reasons for that.
Here's a close-up look of the hollow. The main body is built around a box.
Unpainted lion that's on display in front of the brass ring arm and stool, probably limiting the number of people who climb up top of the stool.
Did a little panning shot of the carousel and got a good in-focus view of the other chariot while everything was in motion.
Trivia: In 1940 the average auto worker salary was $1.04 an hour. Steel workers earned 95 cents. Coal miners made 99 cents, but worked ten fewer hours a week than factory workers. Source: A Call To Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.
Currently Reading: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen.
