austin_dern

Too busy with Christmas things to write. I mean apart from Reviewing _Popeye and Son_, Episode 8: Olive's Dinosaur Dilemma, over on my humor blog, where Olive faces no dilemma. Sorry to spoil that but it's true. Anyway as there are not two lemmas for you, please instead enjoy two doses of Gilroy Gardens pictures. You're welcome.

Climbing the steps to the Train Station, no longer obscured by the Circus Tree here.

Train arriving ready for our tour.

Did I mention the carousel rooster set atop a pile of hay for some reason? Because they have a carousel rooster set atop a pile of hay for some reason. And it's a good bit back of the public-accessible area, so you have to zoom in to photograph it.

View of the back of the swinging Banana Split ride. Could you resist an attraction like that forever?

Here's the Garlic Twirl, the ride that made us realize this was a really wonderful place.

Another view of the Garlic Twirl ride.

View from the train of the Arch Circus Tree, the one guarding the entrance to the antique autos ride.

And here's the channel the train takes within the Monarch Garden, the building that the monorail also passes through.

Looking up, inside the Monarch Garden, towards the pedestrian trails within.

And here we're done with the ride and getting a look at Spiral Staircase #2 from the other side, with the obscured carousel behind.

Another look at Spiral Staircase #2, before we start walking the path to ...

Yes! The ride that's on everyone's lips, the Banana Split.

Trivia: Apollo 8 emerged from its transearth injection and at 89 hours 28 minutes 47 seconds into the flight (on Christmas day, 1968) achieved two-way radio phaselock. Two-way voice communication was not achieved until 89 hours 33 minutes 28 seconds, however, and telemetry synchronization was not achieved until 89 hours 43 minutes 0 seconds. Source: Apollo By The Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-4029. Among the problems is it appears the spacecraft was set for high-bit-rate transmission, erroneously, so that a configuration command was incompatible with the carrier power. The line ``please be informed there IS a Santa Claus'' was delivered about a minute after two-way voice communication came back.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, January/February 2024. Editor Sarah Hamilton.

When the Merry-Go-Round Museum in Sandusky, Ohio, was organizing in the late 80s the fashion was to describe the ride as merry-go-rounds. In recent decades ``carousel'' has become the classier word, for some reason. (Some have tried retrofitting a distinction between merry-go-rounds and carousels. Ignore them.) But they've stuck with the old name and made MGRM their logotype. So why, on the receipts from the gift shop this year, did they give the name of the business as the Museum of Carousel Art and History?

We don't know. It wasn't mentioned. From appearances that Halloweekends Saturday the Merry-Go-Round Museum was carrying on as it traditionally does. It was busier than usual for one of our visits, as a pack of a dozen or more people who all look like my mother's friends got there just ahead of us and were taking the guided tour. bunnyhugger often remarks to me how she could give the tour, and there wasn't anything to this year that suggests she isn't still able. Possibly more able: the docent gave the impression that there's no brass-ring-game carousels operating anymore, when bunnyhugger and I have ridden on three of them, one as recently as four months before. Or the docent was simplifying for the sake of my mom's friends.

The crowd does seem like a good thing for the museum, though, which in our annual visits had seemed to be getting sparser attendance up to the pandemic. And there had been some word of a big part of their holdings --- on loan, as these things often are, from a collector's estate --- going back to the estate. bunnyhugger will make very clear whether they have or not. The floor itself seemed well-stocked with exhibits, some of them new or somewhat new to me. Maybe a better indication of the museum's health is the gift shop, which after a couple of skant years was stocked with plenty of stuff, including new back issues of merry-go-round trade magazines.

They also had, for what they say is the last time, raffle tickets for a carousel horse. This is the same one I had thought they were raffling off New Year's Day 2023, but apparently they've given the last horse one more year and this will be the last. Of course we hope every year to win but now if we win we'll have to hope the horse doesn't fight with bunnyhugger's rabbit.

The Merry-Go-Round Museum decorated for Halloween in a way I don't remember before. They got bunches of skeletons and many of them were riding the horses around the place. Fun bit. I hope this all suggests the museum's on an upswing.

On the drive back to Cedar Point --- which we feared would be packed, as Saturday was not quite as warm as Friday but it was still, like, low-50s, extremely comfortable weather --- we made a stop. This is because at 1538 First Street in Sandusky is a mysterious brick building that's fascinated us every time we drive past. It's your standard style abandoned industrial place, surrounded by empty fields. But a no-longer-working lighted sign atop the building and built into the brickface are light-colored U's, inset in a circle, speaking boldly of the building's history as having been at one time something. We've called it things like the Underdog Building and the Power U Building. After years of swearing we'd someday stop and get good pictures of it, this time, we did.

The building shows of its abandonment, with a lot of old, fractured glass windows and a front door that's just the plywood nailed into the back. (How did that carpenter get out?) It's a pretty attractive piece of industrial ruin and it so happens the empty lot adjacent is one that has a view of Cedar Point's skyline. But meanwhile this building sits there, metal shutters rusting and windows getting muddy and cracked, its only apparent remaining purpose being holding a sign painted in the brick pointing people to eat at Lyman Harbor, across the street.

bunnyhugger, using her documentation-sleuthing skills, found the story of the U Building. I forget what the U stands for, but it was, I think, an electrical parts company that went out of business in the early 2000's. So this building has been derelict a while, but not, like, from time immemorial. Just long enough to look lost forever.

On to something that doesn't lok a bit lost: Gilroy Gardens, and our ride on the Rose Garden Round Boats.

Looking ahead at this last stretch of pond before the return station. I think the white dome in the upper right corner is the mushroom swings ride.

There was some kind of backup at the return station, but that gave me time to notice and try taking a picture of the operator wearing the safety harness there.

So there's the people taking our boat after us. Also, a decent image of what the Gilroy Gardens park uniforms look like.

Looking on at another boat making the return to the station.

And here's a view from the bridge over the ride, so you can see a lot of boats ready to or starting to go.

Waterfall, one of many little ones around the park.

Trivia: In 1260 Venetian merchants built a ship with displacement of about 500 tons, the Roccaforte, and within a few years built another of the same size. In comparison the Mayflower, built centuries later, was only about 180 tons. Source: The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World, Amir D Aczel.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, January/February 2024. Editor Sarah Hamilton.

I got running late on Tuesday, because the workday and the pinball tournament took up all the time right up to the brink of midnight, so that's why I had to reschedule some of my stuff from the humor blog this week. The lineup as things turned out was:

• MiSTed: Altered Destiny, Part 17
• Alternatively, This Just Shows Maybe My Bedtime Should Be a Half-Hour Earlier
• Statistics Saturday: Some Local Holiday Traditions
• Reviewing _Popeye and Son_, Episode 7: Junior’s Birthday Round-Up
• Reviewing _Popeye and Son_, Episode 7: Redbeard
• In Which I Admit I’m Running Late Again
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? What’s with the art in The Phantom? September – December 2023
• MiSTed: Altered Destiny, Part 18

And now, Gilroy Gardens pictures. Enjoy!

We were almost in time to make this ride cycle. The poor kid, now, I'm not sure what happened but I think he was in the wrong lane.

Looking up into the 'balloons'; you see how plausibly they look like they could be real things.

And after the ride, here's the baskets back on the ground. The balloons seem to alternate between stars and stripes, which makes sense.

This is another of those blind pictures, taken by putting my hand up over a construction fence and hoping for the best. You can see bits of what look like the tiling for a fountain or a pool or something here, hidden away. Also props of some kind?

And this is the fence all that's hidden behind. It's an irregular shape for the fence; the astroturf region itself is roughly a trapezoid.

View of the far end of the astroturf area. There were a couple people lounging at the end and I think that might have been the tail end of an activity. I'm pretty sure there was something scheduled for this spot that we got to after it ended.

Getting back to Timber Twister Coaster for another ride, and another look at the ride sign, which is a pretty darned good one and which matches the snake-themed car.

Hey, did ou know this about sandstone? Or about Romper, the dog who left 'fossil' footprints in the sidewalk?

Here's those footprints we were hearing so much about.

Close-up of a panel of ride information on Timber Twister, posted at the operator's booth.

Good look at the train during a test cycle. It had gone down while we were waiting and came back before we gave up and moved on to something else.

Picture of some of the track of Timber Twister; it does some good twisting around and you see the timber right there.

Trivia: Between 1910 and 1922 homesteaders established claims on 42 percent of the entire area of the state of Montana. About four-fifths of this was unfit for crop agriculture as the colonizers practiced it. Source: The Story of American Railroads, Stewart H Holbrook. (The colonizers were drawn by aggressive railroad promotion which is why it's in this book.)

Currently Reading: Michigan History, November/December 2023. Editor Sarah Hamilton.

Friday at Halloweekends promised to be our first full day and with the sunny skies and warm weather --- I think it was in the 60s --- probably a crowded one. Still, we used our season-passholder early-admission not to ride something but to find food. Specifically, the burrito bowl place which did turn out to be in the Frontier Town. And, better, which were covered under our meal plan so we could walk in to the empty restaurant, get a lot of food, and take it right back out to eat in a wonderful noontime sun.

With that done --- and I didn't feel seriously hungry the rest of the day so this might be our best meal option at Cedar Point --- we could get into riding and Halloweekending. The Mine Ride was the nearest ride and I noticed the signs on it still list the Quicksilver Express, at Gilroy Gardens, and could point out how we'd been there.

And after that, the Sky Hawk, the rigid-pendulum giant swing ride that brings you a hundred-plus feet up in the air. Almost no line, too, a surprise given it's a good ride and it is a good thrill. Part of the joy of it for me is that it's one of the few rides giving a few moments of free fall, at the top of the swings. This was quite disconcerting to some of the kids in the row past us but, you know, they'll come to love it, I'm sure.

After the Sky Hawk we noticed something that must have been there forever without drawing our attention. This is a little building --- it's got swinging doors like a cattle barn --- that sits between the maintenance shed for the Mine Ride roller coaster and the parkgoer-accessible areas. I assume it's some convenient spot for maintenance stuff for that part of the Frontier Town, but I'm not sure how it never attracted our notice or exploration before.

At Halloweekends we always try to ride all the roller coasters at least once, sometimes excepting Woodstock Express as a kiddie coaster that's not so fun when you have adult knees. Also sometimes excepting Top Thrill Dragster, because it always has a huge line for a 16-second ride. Not a problem anymore, of course, but we could see where they were building the new tower for Top Thrill 2. And, as bunnyhugger asked, wondering if that's really the name they're going with? You get the alliteration but nobody called the ride Top Thrill for short; it was Dragster or TTD. But they've got the merchandise out with that name and logo and surely they wouldn't be doing that unless it were the name they're going with, right?

Also: we spotted some nature! A chipmunk, particularly, with cheeks stuffed full that we saw in front of one of the better gift shops. I could get one okay picture of the chipmunk before they vanished. bunnyhugger I think wasn't even able to get that.

After rides on the two operating carousels --- bunnyhugger hugged one of the rabbits on the Kiddie Kingdom to break the news more gently about her Bayol carousel rabbit --- I noticed something curious among the kiddie rides. They have a Junior Whip, a too-small-for-adults version of the early 20th century ride. (Cedar Point had a full-size Whip at some point, but the Tilt-A-Whirl has taken its place for providing a similar sort of ride experience, while taking up much less space.) A full-size Whip is a sort of rounded rectangle track, with cars at the rounded edges rotating and being whipped back into place before resuming the straight parts of the path. Their ride, the Roto Whip, is a circular ride, little cars (still Whip or Tilt-a-Whirl shaped) going around in a bigger circle. Well, this time I noticed the tracks, showing the metal worn down by many, many rides, is not a circle. Or even a ring. It's a pretty well-defined oval or ellipse. I don't remember noticing the Roto Whip being ridden --- the Kiddie Kingdom rides share operators and only a couple run at a time --- and we wouldn't see it run. But now I'd like to understand how it moves that we get this wear pattern in the metal it runs along. Although I guess I don't want to understand deeply enough to check YouTube for ride videos.

Put aside my wondering at the mysteries of the Roto Whip. Enjoy some of the spectacle of Gilroy Gardens as we knew it.

Riding on the Panoramic Wheel, the park's Ferris wheel. It's not much larger than what you get at a county fair which might be part of why bunnyhugger was warm to riding it.

Looking in on the axle of the wheel. I believe we got the ride to ourselves.

Looking down! You see some of the forests we went through to get into the queue.

And now a look out across the amusement park ... which you can barely tell exists, from here. Quite the view. You might see a little clearing area at the center-right of the picture (where the darker, shaded trees start). If I have my bearings right, you're going to see that again and from a different angle.

Looking over at one of the buildings where they hold events and activities and educational stuff.

And I think that's the building that the monorail and the train also run through, over there.

Trivia: By 1901 the British population consumed 259 million pounds of tea annually. India and Sri Lanka were able to produce this, plus another hundred million pounds of extra tea for surplus. Source: Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, Roy Moxham.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, November/December 2023. Editor Sarah Hamilton.

PS: Reviewing _Popeye and Son_, Episode 7: Redbeard, an episode I like more than you were maybe expecting me to say.

Thursday at Halloweekends. First thing we noticed checking in at the hotel was the signs now said the Hotel Breakers would close Monday at noon, not Sunday. We had never imagined staying over Sunday night, although I guess if we didn't need to be anywhere Monday and the extra night didn't cost anything it might be nice to sleep instead of closing a ten-hour day with four hours' driving. But it did also mean that we didn't necessarily have to move the car Sunday morning for when we would finally leave; we could, and in the end did, cut through the Hotel Breakers to get to it.

The big crowd we expected for the day, given the weather, didn't materialize. The weather was great, warm enough that we didn't even wear jackets, just our hoodies. The feel was quite a bit like how Fridays at Halloweekends used to be, a decade or more, with only some of even the biggest rides open. Also only some of the food: we had heard rumors of a burrito bowl place somewhere in the western areas and we spent some time walking back and forth seeing no sign of it. It turned out that it was there, and we'd find it easily for Friday lunch. Probably it was closed Thursday night, when only segments of the park were open and running.

Eventually we went to get cheese-on-a-stick and cheese fries for dinner. We'd got the meal plan for next year and that was applied to the remainder of our season. So we could get food for free, although the rules are weird. We can't, for example, just get cheese-on-a-stick, as that's not a meal, by their lights. So we have to get the cheese-on-a-stick plus the fries and then that's already paid for. It's a bit odd to get more food than you quite want because that's the cheaper option but that's where we are. And I guess when we're there all day that's fine. It's not like we have to eat four too-big meals.

We did get to see a good bit of the decorations for Halloweekends, some of which were new. The Boardwalk, for example, as a new development this year had its own original setup as The Bonewalk. Nice. We also saw that the Jack Aldrich Theater was for some reason not hosting any shows this year. The venue usually hosted whatever the Midnight Syndicate's show was. But Midnight Syndicate was performing outdoors this year, on the stage outside the Iron Dragon roller coaster. Given that Midnight Syndicate's shows are often built around using the confines of the theater to build a ghost story I'm not sure how their performances even work in the open. But we ended up not standing around to see one of them, so whatever they did to adapt we don't know. I haven't heard anything about what kept the Jack Aldrich Theater from being used for anything; maybe renovations? But what would have needed the extra weeks of Halloweekends to work on?

A happy carousel discovery: the midway carousel's band organ was running again. And playing a variety of Halloween tunes, different from the ones we'd hear at the Merry-Go-Round Museum. We thought they just had a rotation of a dozen or so songs --- we stood around listening until we heard repeats --- but we were wrong. They had a random shuffle of many Halloween-y songs. An unhappy carousel discovery: Cedar Downs, the racing carousel with the horses that move forward and back as well as in the circle, was closed, not operating all the whole weekend.

When we went past Millennium Force the ride sign promised there was a wait of fifteen minutes or so. That seemed unlikely but also probably the best offer we'd get all weekend, or would have all season. Turns out it was right, too, with a lovely short wait. We had similar luck with ValRavn --- and even got put into the front row, center, best spot to enjoy the seconds of staring down that are the selling point of that coaster. Wild Mouse too; we'd get several rides on it this year, including one on the cheese-themed car. Lore has it that the cheese-themed car spins faster than any of the six mouse-themed cars and I can say, from having observed several test runs (so every car went with empty loads) that yeah, the cheese car does appear to spin more. At least when empty. We'll wait for further evidence.

One of the later things we did was ride the Cadillac Cars, last survivor of the three antique auto rides they have at Cedar Point. This was shaping up to be a regular enough night until I saw a traffic jam up ahead. Turns out one of the cars had broken down! There were ride operators gathered around, looking at the opened hood and fussing with ... things ... while the rest of us waited and watched. I know, you're as curious as I am how you do engine repairs on a car that is stopped in place on a metal rail, right? But we were far enough away not to be able to see clearly. I was fully expecting them to have to take the car off the track.

It looked like they pulled something out and put a replacement in, but given that these are gas-engine cars that can't have been just, you know, replacing a bad engine. I don't know what took place exactly but the car lurched into motion again. And the ride continued to an ordinary conclusion while we tried to figure out what the heck did happen.

This was late enough we had time for one last thing before the end of the night. This would be leaping onto Iron Dragon, getting its last run for the night. Very fine night all around; would do again.

In photos, now, I'm still back at Gilroy Gardens on our Thursday, second, visit. Here's the ongoing proof:

Here's that Circus Tree, the great arch that stands over the entrance to the antique autos ride. But this angle makes clear that, yes, they're decorated for Christmas or at least festivities.

This time around we started on the 1950s side of the autos ride. You see what the cars look like from above here.

Peeking over to the 1920s side. The 20s cars are four-seaters while the 50s cars are two-seaters.

Billboards along the ride. Porcella's, I learn, was a succession of stores originally opened in 1898 and owned by the same family; in the early 20th century it was a dry goods store, and (after a while as a barbershop) became a clothing-and-music-instruments store, then finally a music shop, finally closed in 2020 as the pandemic hit a couple months before the most recent Porcella had planned to retire. No idea if this billboard predates the shop's closing.

Statue of an eagle or something like that along the ride path. Not sure its specific deal.

And here we're coming up on the gas station, the rare common point between the 20s and 50s sides of the ride.

Trivia: Between 1885 and 1905 the number of magazines in the United States almost doubled, from about 3,300 to about 6,000. Given the number of magazines that went out of publication it is plausible that eleven thousand magazines were published in those two decades. Source: The American Mail: Enlarger of the Common Life, Wayne E Fuller.

Currently Reading: Modesty Blaise: The Girl In The Iron Mask, Peter O'Donnell, Enric Badia Romero. So I get to the title story and have to say, it slaps. Some billionaire jerkfaces foiled in an earlier story decide to drive Modesty Blaise insane, by trapping her in an iron hood and dropping her deep in a pit, and they're amazed and horrified to watch --- by TV from their crew recording the whole thing --- that she gets her bearings, climbs out of the pit, and even knocks out the three-person crew on the site there. It's all done with enough cleverness to be believable as a story even if I kind of doubt an iron-hooded person could really climb out of a fifty-foot-deep pit and knock out three hired hands.

The week before Halloween I started on a new big task at work. This was going through the code of one of the two projects I'm on and, basically, cleaning it out. The projects I'm on are ones with broad scope, meant to handle a lot of individual tasks. And it was developed by someone now spoken of only warily as the Previous Developer, someone who was definitely in way over his head, stitching together StackOverflow answers at seeming random and copy-pasting lots of stuff everywhere.

I picked this task as something I could make progress on during a short week, and set down and pick up again without being completely lost for where I was. The three-day week was for a personal holiday: bunnyhugger and I were going to Cedar Point for Halloweekends. And as Halloweekends has expanded now Thursday through Sunday --- it's maybe four years away from becoming just Halloweeks --- we were expanding our trip to match. To get the full experience I was taking Thursday and Friday off. bunnyhugger had no classes those days, as usual, although that doesn't mean she didn't have more schoolwork than she wanted that needed to be done while driving down. We had picked the last weekend of the park season because we like going there closing day, and it was a little cheaper when we booked, and we thought the weather might be a little cooler and less pleasant so we'd have our best circumstance, a park fully open but with only a small die-hard group of attendees. No luck there; it was, once more, a warm and sunny weekend, even on the cool days just getting down to light jacket weather.

More on that to come. The big clean-up project, meanwhile, turns out I'm still doing as of today, when I put in a pull request [*] for my fourth great big change in how things are built. You might imagine it's frustrating finding myself doing the same kind of thing for nearly two months straight. You'd be wrong; I'm finding this very gratifying work. There is something wonderful in finding stuff that isn't needed, or finding that a tiny change can mean you can throw out huge blocks of code. We've long since passed the point that I have added a net negative number of lines of code, and it's continuing. I think I'm at the end of making any big code reductions, but then I thought that a month ago too and discovered surprises.

[*] A ``pull request'' is a thing in content management that really seems like it should be called a ``push'', but they already have something called a ``push'' and it's what seems like what ought to be called a ``pull'', although that's sometimes called a ``fetch'' instead. I may have this wrong, but there's no way to tell.

Also everyone else on the project is really happy with all this code-yeeting. The other programmers, who tried to guide the Previous Developer into better structures, are seeing enough clutter removed to rebuild the project well. Also it loads enormously faster, not weighted down with useless tools like Angular or multiple yet incompatible systems to make confirmation dialogues look prettier. Or trying to load two different versions of jQuery every page. This has also included separating what had been inline Javascript and stylesheets into separate files for each page, a feat mercifully done by a tool a different developer whipped up. But I could go through after that and found all sorts of commonalities that could be put into shared files, taking out a lot of copy-pasted stuff that would make the site difficult to impossible to keep consistent, so far as it's consistent at all. Or discovering little feats of madness.

One of my small triumphs was changing into something that makes sense a bit of style sheet that (renaming things a little to make this harder for supervisors to run across) went basically like:

div.div-show{
   display: none;
}

I realize including stylesheet stuff is a little inside-baseball but if you just read this stuff for the normal everyday meaning of words you'll see why this is bizarre. So it's been very gratifying taking a lot of that stuff out, lately.

And now, what you maybe never thought would happen, the last photographs from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk! Until we get to Thursday's pictures!

Here we are, back on the street, outside the arcade (on the right). Notice they've got a shark up above the door there.

And there's the doors to the arcade, dubbed the neptune Kingdom, and offering --- truly --- games miniature golf pool restaurant.

Looking up the street, and along the trolley tracks. I wonder where the casino is.

And back down the other way, including to the spot where we got our tickets and entered the boardwalk. You might also just barely be able to make out Giant Dipper in the distant center.

There's the spot where we entered! Not the only entrance to the boardwalk, but one that's got a nice bright sign for it.

And that's the sign. That's where we spent the day; what do you think of it?

Trivia: Between 1926 and 1935 IBM's sales of punch cards, its main revenue and profit center, grew from $2.6 million to about $4 million per year. Source: Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created 1865 - 1956, James W Cortada.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 30: Popeye and the Evil Echo, Bela Sims, Tom Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Oh yes, I should have mentioned before. bunnyhugger's annual tradition on her Livejournal/Dreamwidth, where she and I try to guess what's on her advent calendar, is now ... eleven ... days underway. But you can join in the guessing game too and see one of the high points of the blogging year.

Had the first day of the big floor replacement today. It went ... smoother and quicker than expected, really. I'd managed to get the whole of the breakfast nook and kitchen cleaned out. My method for moving the Tri-Zone pinball machine worked as well as I'd hoped. And then this morning ---

Well, I needed to call the woman organizing the floor replacement over two issues. One is that we weren't sure we had ever made an explicit decision about the grout color we wanted, which sounds like a petty thing but we know what the place is going to look like in five years and we want to proof against it. The other was to ask about whether they'd be able to do the backsplash tile removal and replacement for when the counter gets replaced. As I was on hold while she looked up our file there was a knock on the door, the tile guys here --- almost a half-hour early --- to start on it. Turns out they were the best guys to ask about that, right then and there, so I could have saved a call. (Two calls, actually; I'd called before she had gotten in.) And while I was talking with them sketching out what they figured on doing my work meeting for the day started up. That's all rather a lot in rapid sequence.

Turns out that the studious emptying of the fridge we'd been doing the last week was ... appreciated but maybe premature. The work they could do today, laying down the new underflooring, they could do with just moving the fridge and the oven around, never needing to put either in the dining room. Possibly tomorrow when they put down tile and the stuff needs a couple hours to set. But they spent a while making measurements, and then cutting things outside, and then laying down new underfloor (above the remains of our bad old floor) and screwing it in place. Then cementing a second layer on top of that. Our new kitchen is going to be a quarter-inch or so smaller, vertically, than it had been. I bet it only shows in how we keep setting things down on the counter wrong.

But it all went smoothly and efficiently. They put down little rails for the edge of our return-air vent and for the threshold between kitchen and dining room. They listened to a completely different Sirius XM radio station of late-70s/early-80s music than I was listening to one room over, and they took the time before leaving to pet our rabbit's head. And yes, they brought out a box of the tiles and we confirmed it's the right pattern and they've got the plan for installing it, with grey grout in channels as narrow as possible.

Tomorrow it's to be bunnyhugger's turn to be somewhere on hand while they work; I have to be in the office. They expect to be done, or close to done, by the end of the day. If they have more to do then I'm going to have to push my boss to let me work from home Wednesday. I can point out, I'd be making a sacrifice to stay at home for this. This Wednesday is the official celebration of everyone's birthdays, which usually involves someone bringing in boxes of fritters for breakfast and a huge pan of sheet cake for lunch. But I'd do it to be there when our kitchen gets to be 80% fixed.

Also tomorrow remind me to go to the counter place so I can make our deposit on the new counter. Thanks.

Now let's get back to looking at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in the waning hours of the day after Independence.

Now there's a brake lever, waiting for the train to return for it to be of any use.

By night, the train dispatches from the station into a void.

Very close to sunset and you start to see how irresistible the place must be by night.

We're here waiting for our last ride ... unless we can get back around fast enough ...

Hurrying back from the exit lane to the entrance and we find ...

It's too late. The day is done, and the ride closed up.

Trivia: The Victoria --- the lone ship to survive of Magellan's expedition --- under the command of Juan Sebastian Elcano arrived in Seville with 26 tons of cloves aboard. Elcano was awarded a coat of arms embellished with cinnamon sticks, nutmegs, and cloves. Source: An Edible History of Humanity, Tom Standage.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 30: Popeye and the Evil Echo, Bela Sims, Tom Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

PS: Reviewing _Popeye and Son_, Episode 6: Surf Movie, in which I heroically try to remember something about this cartoon I just watched.

Replacing the dishwasher's wheels. You'd think this a matter just of taking the dishwasher out, removing the wheels, and putting new wheels on. Well, so it is at heart. A week ago Saturday I took the dishwasher out to the garage, set it on a matt, and turned it upside-down. The matt, and the outdoor placement, so that the residual water draining out wouldn't get on what remains of our kitchen floor. I started taking off the shell of the dishwasher, to get access to the wheels, to learn that I didn't need to do that. I had to take off a (removable) layer of insulating foam but otherwise the wheels where reasonably accessible. All I had to do was lightly tap them with a hammer and the wheels, with stems embedded in plastic sleeves, came out easily.

Of course I knew I had to replace the wheels. And I'd already gone to Ace Hardware nearby, buying a couple of new two-inch casters. I'd wanted larger wheels, on the theory that would be softer on the floor, but they didn't have four of the same kind of wheel. So I bought two packs of two wheels each, the ones I could get, and then discovered one of the packs was a different model that didn't have a stem. So I went back to exchange for one that did and discovered ...

So the old sleeve for the wheels reaches about one and a half inches long. The stems for every wheel I could find reach only one inch. This leaves a gap that just won't do on any surface. This sent me on a hurried search for sleeves of that size. Or, failing that, something that could take their place. They don't make plastic sleeves --- sockets is the proper term and that does not actually make it easier to find on hardware store web sites --- that long. Well, why not take the sleeves off the old and use them for the new? Because they don't come off, I suspect as part of a locking system to make sure the wheels stay securely on when the dishwasher is set right-side up and it's only friction holding the wheels in place.

I tried several clever improvisations to get around this, ultimately going to see what I could do to replace the plastic sleeves with something I could get from Ace Hardware. The hardware guy I started talking to had an idea that was almost there: what about using a vinyl tube or PVC pipe? This was a path that might have worked, but I went with a vinyl tube on the theory that I wasn't sure a half-inch-diameter PVC pipe would fit within the essentially alterable radius of the holes in the dishwasher's underbelly. I also wasn't sure how snugly the wheels would fit in the interior of the PVC pipe. --- And the last issue was how to make sure the pipe didn't slide out when the dishwasher was turned right-side up, a thing I was able to keep from completely happening by using the sockets that came with the new wheels but upside-down.

If this seems hard to visualize, don't worry. It didn't work. The wheel stems, having soft vinyl to lean against, tilted and collapsed under the pressure of being moved. I could barely move the thing, and left horrid black streaks that needed a magic eraser to wipe up. Tolerable for a floor in its last weeks of existence but impossible for the replacement. So I admitted defeat, took the new wheels out, put the old ones back in, and yielded to the inevitable.

The old wheels had model part numbers on them, and a quick DuckDuckGo on them found this string of numbers had never been assembled before. Searching on appliance-part web sites found that these were indeed wheel models for a line of (Whirlpool or something) washers, ages ago, long since superseded by (new numbers). And I gave in and ordered a quartet of supersession wheels, annoyingly more expensive than what Ace Hardware wanted for a couple two-inch wheels. Fine.

Yesterday bunnyhugger found someone on the community buy-nothing group that needed some two-inch casters for a project and we gave it to them. So there's someone this all brought some good to, besides boosting myself as someone vaguely familiar to the Ace Hardware people and building up my confidence that I can just take a dishwasher out to the garage and hammer things out of and back into it.

Tomorrow, all going well, we take the dishwasher out, and bring it back in with new wheels on a new floor sometime later in the week. More on this as it comes to pass.

And now to a thing that has long passed: photos from the 5th of July, Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

Back to the Giant Coaster! You can see the train just returning past the crown, there.

Here's the lining of the walls inside, with old pictures within the arches there. Past the wall is the inclined ramp for most of the queue.

Little control panel for the operator at the end of the queue, where the operator pauses people and if need be scans their wristband or rides card.

Returning train. I'm able to get a little view of the non-romance side in the frontmost cars there.

Snap of the front of the car, and a ride operator letting people know they can get on board now.

At the end of the exit path is this sign, encouraging you to get a ride photo.

Trivia: On the 10th of December, 1973, NASA Headquarters directed Johnson Space Center, Kennedy Space Center, and the Manned Space Flight Center that the Skylab Program would be disestablished in March 1974, with a small group retained to manage the closeout of the space station. Source: Skylab: A Chronology, Roland W Newkirk, Ivan D Ertel, Courtney G Brooks. NASA SP-4011.

Currently Reading: Pogo Puce Stamp Catalog, Walt Kelly.

Over on my humor blog, as you've seen on your Reading page or else in whatever your RSS reader is, it's been a week full of Statistics reports. One of those was my readership report for last month. Two were updates on the project to replace the wheels on our portable dishwasher, which failed. And after that was enough Popeye that my dad texted me to say, enough Popeye already. I'll say when there's enough Popeye.

• MiSTed: Altered Destiny, Part 15
• Statistics November: People Still Turn to Me to Explain _Judge Parker_ to Them
• Statistics Saturday: How Replacing the Caster Wheels on the Portable Dishwasher Is Going
• Reviewing _Popeye and Son_, Episode 5: Junior’s Genie
• Reviewing _Popeye and Son_, Episode 5: Mighty Olive at the Bat
• What’s Going On In Olive and Popeye? Who’s the guy capturing Popeye in a bubble? September – December 2023
• Statistics Wednesday: Special Caster Wheel Update
• MiSTed: Altered Destiny, Part 16

Let's enjoy a full twelve pictures from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk now; I enjoyed taking them.

Here's dear bunnyhugger on the carousel, ready for her ride.

And there's the target of everyone's tossed rings, the clown face. Toss it in the mouth and the eyes light up and the thing makes a big whooping noise and everybody applauds. At the top of the picture you can see the ring dispenser. Grab a ring from the claw at the end there while the ride is in motion and you get your chance.

Close-up on the clown mouth. You can see how people are more likely to shoot late, so the ring falls to the left of the mouth, than they are early.

And here's the claw. Other ring machines put in one brass ring with a bunch of steel rings, and the one grabbing the brass ring gets a free ride. With pay-one-price parks that's not much of a prize so the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk's alternative is having every ring be steel and you just toss it in to the clown's mouth to make some fun happen.

I like this picture of a kid eagerly climbing onto a horse.

And here's the third and last of the band organs, the Wurlitzer 165 Duplex Orchestral Organ. This one's on the inside of the building, flat against the wall and behind the ring arm.

Plaque designating the carousel as a National Historic Landmark.

And here's the plaque explaining the Wurlitzer 165. As has happened to many band organs it's been converted from music scrolls over to MIDI players.

So, something I realized only slowly. Who are those benches for? The fence closes all around this side of the carousel, so it's not possible for people to get in the way of where people are throwing steel rings, but that also means nobody but an employee could be there. My best guess is they're there so the floor doesn't look too empty?

Action photograph! Someone's just grabbed a ring and is ready to throw it. You can see the next ring is already loaded into the claw, too.

Snap of someone who's just missed the ring.

Success! Someone's grabbed the non-brass ring!

Trivia: By the late 1930s newsreel cameramen participated in group-insurance coverage, paid by their companies. The life insurance provided for about four thousand dollars per person. Source: The American Newsreel, 1911 - 1967, Raymond Fielding. (Newsreel cameraman was regarded as a particularly dangerous job.)

Currently Reading: The Tale That Wags The God, James Blish. Editor Cy Chauvin. So in an essay praising Poul Anderson, Blish mentions he had once tried to describe Anderson's stuff as ``hard copy'', stuff crafted so well that it looks solid whatever angle you take on it, and this idea mutated into ``hard science fiction''. I haven't seen this claimed origin, or credit, before. (I knew about Blish having a claim on the term ``gas giants'', for planets, though.) Also in another chapter/review, ``Music of the Absurd'', he goes on a multiple-pronged rant about John Cage and how this sort of thing is destroying concert music as a possible art form.

Sorry, I didn't have the chance to write my blog today because I somehow thought I'd have time between getting out of work and the start of pinball league. I know, you'd think by now I would have learned. In the stead, please enjoy reading about What's Going On In Olive and Popeye? Who's the guy capturing Popeye in a bubble? September - December 2023.

And here's some more walking back and forth on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

Another picture of the front of the dark ride, with the doors that you vanish into on the right.

Another snap of the seahorse dragons guarding the Fright Walk, which I don't think we had gone on just yet.

The Rock-and-Roll is a pretty normal example of this ride; I think that's even a standard backdrop in the far background. Still, it looks great in the sunlight like this.

Stopping here for a picture of the lift hill to Giant Dipper.

Here we're looking up to the apex of the lift hill.

And here's what comes after the lift hill for Giant Dipper.

Trivia: After the failure of Vanguard TV-3's launch attempt sell orders on the Martin Company reached such a high level that the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading, from 11:50 am to 1:23 pm. At the resumption of trading it was at 36 ³/₈, off 1 ³/₈. At the end of trading it was at 35 ¹/₂, off 2 ¹/₄. Source: Project Vanguard: The NASA History, Constance McLaughlin Green, Milton Lomask. NASA SP-4202.

Currently Reading: The Tale That Wags The God, James Blish. Editor Cy Chauvin.