austin_dern

bunnyhugger tested negative today, as we'd expected. We're both more than five days from the onset of symptoms and took our Paxlovid as prescribed. The only lingering symptom we have yet is coughing. I expect this is going to last a while; when I get a cold, I have a cough from it that lingers for about five years, so this should be fun.

But it's an ill wind: because I am still coughing my boss said to work from home this week as well as last. I'm happy to work from home as long as I possibly can and have not told my boss about how I reasonably expect to be coughing from this through to 2028. Still, this is very convenient since it means bunnyhugger won't have to drive me in to work tomorrow just to have a car free for her dental appointment. (Her car is still in the shop.)

In other health news: I have a scheduled colonoscopy appointment, and the time off for it. The preparatory material warns that I shouldn't go back to work afterwards, and while that's probably meant for people who do physical labor I imagine I might not be in a productive state of affairs anyway. I plan to stay on the couch and be a potato. Also, since the appointment needs me in their office at 9:30, this means I have to take off by 9 am at the latest. I asked, then, to take off from 9 am through 4:30 pm and my boss was a bit unclear why I wanted to bother with one hour at work. Well, it's a work-from-home day, so I might as well spend it with my laptop open as not. Also, yes, I'm trying to underscore that I do like this job and want to keep doing it. We'll see if that sticks.

And meanwhile: I also got approval for time off, the first week of July, for our big roller coaster trip of the year! So I've got a bunch of undersized paychecks coming up ahead but that's all right, I feel okay about my savings. Other than that I have to buy a new laptop as mine is getting way too kernel-panicky. But even with that, I'm feeling better about things overall.

Now let's get back to pictures of Pinball At The Zoo, admittedly not our cheeriest moment as we were long done competing while other people were not:

Prizes and merchandise of uncertain purpose left on one of the tables by the tournament area. I assume at least some of this was stuff people were giving away --- there's flyers for The Godfather pinball machine, for example, and the Stern hat and stuff inside looks like prizes --- but I can't explain the Led Zeppelin playfield there.

Rush showing that bunnyhugger could play a very good game on it now and then, possibly because of an understanding with the bunny in the backglass. (Lower right corner, peeking out of the top hat. I assume it's a Rush album cover thing.)

Trophies headed for the people playing at the highest levels that day.

The game banks! To balance things out players couldn't just pick any old game in finals; they had to pick one of these sets of three, ensuring that whoever won had to play across a variety of games and also that not every group was lined up to play the same tables.

Explanation of where the funds raised go, as well as a house rule about what happens if you are AJG and have a supernatural ability to discover bonkers combinations of shots that you alone know how to make and that give you MAXINT points. AJG did not play.

Folks sitting off out of the play area, watching the streamers themselves watching play.

Trivia: Daniel Defoe is known to have published under at least 198 pseudonyms, among them Count Kidney Face, Obadiah Blue Hat, and the Man In The Moon. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel. (Also, for that matter, 'Daniel Defoe'; his birth name was 'Daniel Foe'.)

Currently Reading: Cool Comfort: America's Romance with Air-Conditioning, Marsha E Ackermann.

A couple hours after I got my Paxlovid prescription yesterday I got a strange call from the pharmacy. They had some issue and needed me to call to discuss it. I did, and they tried to figure out what their question was. Ah: here. My insurance had declined to pay for it, and they didn't know how much it would cost me out-of-pocket or even if they could sell it to me without insurance, so they'd have to call back. This was ... baffling, to me, and I was getting ready to start writing and demanding explanations out of Blue Cross Blue Shield for this. bunnyhugger was even more cross than I am (she often is); her understanding was that Paxlovid was supposed to be provided free-of-charge to the patient, and that is exactly what Paxlovid.com says: ``Despite the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) ending, PAXLOVID still remains available to patients at no charge, regardless of insurance''.

Well, a few minutes later we got the notice that my prescription was filled, and that the charge to me was $0.00, as should be for every medication but as certainly is for this. So apparently someone at the pharmacy desk was very confused and got an explanation that you'd think they would have gotten before calling me. And I could start taking my prescription last night. bunnyhugger noted the better detail about what to take --- two tablets of one kind, one of another --- on her Walgreen's-issued box, compared to my Meijer-issued one. Mine just says take twice a day, not specifying the cocktail of tablets. My mouth tastes chalky and a little bitter, but not so awful as to make me envy the ageusiac.

bunnyhugger is doing considerably better now that she's five doses down of her ten. Me, I'm a little improved I suppose, but I hadn't been that horribly bad to start, I'd say.

We also got our first home-delivery of a supply of food yesterday, from Meijer. It wasn't a lot, but it was the sorts of staples we might have stocked up on before going to Anthrohio if we'd thought the prospect of getting sick was that likely: bread, cereal, some vegetarian burgers, granola bars. A lesson to have in mind before our next trip. Some of this I had thought about getting last week, but the afternoon I might have used for that --- Wednesday --- I used instead to get a birthday card for my father (he turned 80 this past weekend!) and waiting for a car wash. In hindsight, I should have skipped the car wash and bought Fritos instead.

Trivia: Tallulah Bankhead's father was William B Bankhead, late-30s Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Source: American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put The Nation To Work, Nick Taylor. Specifically from June 1936 through September 1940 (he died in office).

Currently Reading: Infinity Beckoned: Adventuring Through the Inner Solar System, 1969 - 1989, Jay Gallentine.

PS: What's Going On In Gil Thorp? Doesn't Martinez Know You Can Have Two Starting Pitchers? March - June 2023 in an essay I thought was going to be quick and compact and then was 1500 words, somehow.

I realized I forgot something big from our August trip to Michigan's Adventure. It's something special that happened after we got on Corkscrew and saw in the queue after us someone wearing a Kings Island Vortex t-shirt. bunnyhugger called out to him to voice her approval of the ride and we thought that was as much neat amusement park enthusiast stuff as we were likely to get. (Her previous visit, someone noticed her Darien Lake t-shirt and asked what the seats were like on the Man Of Steel coaster.)

But no, we had something more wonderful happen! As the train returned from the circuit, the operator missed one of the brake buttons a little and the ride stopped a few feet forward of where it had been. So the operator told us that he was sorry, we'd all have to go through the ride again. This seemed a bit much --- everybody except the front seat was still beside the concrete platform and could have unloaded safely enough --- but hey, free re-ride! Vortex guy was envious, of course, and the only downside is the ride was a walk-on anyway so it's not like we got a rare duplicate chance at the ride.

Still, that's always wonderful and we had just a few days before talked about this sort of pass-through reride. And how modern control systems, with more computerized and automated braking systems, make this sort of thing less likely or even possible. Great little extra treat on the day.

In other news, I got my bivalent booster shot yesterday. Spent today feeling a bit cranky and sore but, you know, at my age who can be sure what the cause is?

And now for more pictures of Carello's Carousel, at Sylvan Beach but not the amusement park:

This one's a different camel; look at the different horse, in the second row, with ... a bullseye blanket.

You can see some of the lighting here and also the cables that lead to the center pole above.

Carousel Since 1896, the sign promises, and which also makes me wonder how old this building is and, if it's not 126 years old, how they arranged the logistics of building it. (Certainly a carousel can be moved, especially for building a new structure around it. That's just complications is all that I'd like to know more about.)

Here's a rooster up front. Also note the sign warning that your Sylvan Beach ride tickets are no good here.

You can spot the Carello Entertainment logo in back. I like it; it's got a golden-age-of-comics or maybe 60s television studio design.

And here's what the ride tickets look like.

Trivia: Until 1956 clocks in Holland observed two times: the standard railway time (matching the time in Amsterdam Station) and the local sun time. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel. (Steel writes that ``the nation'' joined the standard time zones in 1956 so I assume he means the whole of the Netherlands, but what he wrote was just Holland.)

Currently Reading: High-Speed Dreams: NASA and the Technopolotics of Supersonic Transportation, 1945 - 1999, Erik M Conway. Y'know, growing up in space-enthusiast circles, you hear about stuff like supersonic transport programs being cancelled and it's always presented as the triumph of anti-science forces or sometimes environmentalists with silly ideas like ``air travel shouldn't break every window in Oklahoma City''. I count myself fortunate to have matured to the point that I can look at and consider, uh, why would it be a good idea to rush in to finishing something that doesn't have a lot of the necessary background technologies, which if put into production could do only a slice of what it needs to actually be useful, and incidentally also break every window in Oklahoma City? Also, startled to learn that it was only after the National Aerospace Plane was announced that anyone calculated whether, at the sorts of accelerations you could expect passengers to endure, a Mach 25 airplane was even possible. Turns out the world's too small for anything past Mach 6 to be viable and even that's pretty flimsy.

The strap on my N95 mask --- the one I wore for the first time going to Crossroads Village --- broke on Thursday. I was at the farmer's market, getting our vegetables and candies, and that was annoying. Between the other strap and wrapping my neck gaiter around it the thing stayed on securely enough. bunnyhugger's mask, independently, broke while she was in class on Wednesday. Both in the same spot, where the rubber strap connects to the mask itself.

So we searched for the bag of, originally, four N95 masks that her father had given us a year or so ago. This turned out to be in the dining room, next to the bookshelf. I had cause to make an extra trip into a food store, started putting it on, and the strap broke in the same way and in the same spot.

bunnyhugger has not yet tried on her remaining mask.

Not much to talk about right now, so, have even more pictures of the Turner-Dodge House. Well, I want to talk about a bridge being taken down, but that's not much of a story, so I'll save it for Monday. Now watch as everything happens and I can't get back to it.

Peacock-themed endtable in the living room.

More of the living room, with the palm tree that one of the volunteers keeps in his yard during the growing season and is allowed to move into the house for the winter months.

The family piano, with notes about its history. The dark-wood piano was got painted in the 1940s, and then was stripped and shellacked during a restoration in the 80s. The jar has a bunch of shellac in it.

Wedding music that was put on a table not the piano. The biography in the background discusses Angeline Dodge (1812 - 1890) who was mentioned as among the first women in the United States to earn a college education.

A peacock pillow on the living room sofa.

And back out of the living room. What might be up these stairs? We'll just see ...

Trivia: The Winter Olympics of 1952 were opened in Oslo by Princess Ragnhild, granddaughter of Norway's King Haakon VII, as her father (Prince Olav) and the King were in London, at the funeral for George VI. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.

Currently Reading: Asteroids, Clifford J Cunningham.

Back in October the Wharton Center at Michigan State University put tickets on sale for the travelling company of Cats. The pandemic was still there, of course, but the ever-rising rate of infection seemed to have petered out. It might be thinkable that three months out we might even be at an end, especially if a booster for the general public were approved and we could wipe the disease out. And so we got tickets for the show. The Thursday show, which bunnyhugger thought likely to have the smallest crowd. Just in case.

As you know, western society decided to go ahead and have as much Covid as possible. By the time of the show, daily infection rates were six times what they had been in October (and, today, they're eight times). Forcing us to decide what to do about our tickets.

The Wharton Center set out its rules. Everyone attending had to show proof of vaccination or a negative Covid-19 test. Everyone in the building had to wear a mask. We were vaccinated, of course, and boosted. We have N95 masks. We ... decided to go, after all.

The first reassuring thing was getting to the parking deck, a structure that could really use a few more direction signs from the road. The deck we entered on wasn't crowded at all, suggesting that the place might not be too busy. And it wasn't. bunnyhugger had bought cheap seats, in the back of the auditorium. The whole upper deck seemed to be maybe one-tenth full. Even the main floor seemed to be only about one-quarter full. And people were generally good about mask discipline. Think of being in a place where people understand that a mask needs to cover your nose. It was like that.

We, sitting in the center of the second-most-distant row of the theater, were looking over the cards they gave us in lieu of programs, as a pack of five or so young women, some wearing cat ears, shuffled in. They came up to right next to me and seemed embarrassed to have the seats next to ours. bunnyhugger and I were both readying, as best we can given our knees, to get up and give them space when they shuffled down a few seats instead. This was all probably inevitable.

I'll talk about the show as an experience tomorrow. The closing thought is the one anyone's forced to deal with after doing anything, to wit, was this a good idea? We seem to have come through without getting infected, and haven't got notice of being exposed if they're still trying to report known exposures. But it has been a good two weeks of thinking, is this ache just an indignity of age or is it the first symptom? Am I tired because there's been no source of simple joy for 22 months now or because those women had the virus? The moral luck seems to have been with us, this time.

And it's really hard not to feel ... look, we've been good. We have sacrificed over and over and over. We couldn't go see the Sparks Brothers in theaters. Couldn't see Encanto in theaters. We'd have to cancel pinball league five days later when the daily infection rate would have risen fifty perfect (and I don't have hopes for the league night set for the 25th). I'm not sure Motor City Furry Con will happen in any tolerably safe form in two months. We deserve something that could be nice and pleasant and fun before we go back into a long dead time.

Almost done with the Potter Park Zoo's Wonderland of lights here. I'll be on to other lighted stuff soon.

A couple more lovely splashes of color against the night sky. I'm not sure what the building in the center is, but it is the one with the light-wrapped fence around that I shared a couple days ago.

Here's that set of incandescent bulbs, on the right, reflected in the ice atop that pond, along with the LED set beside it.

And now that it was less crowded we went into the bird house, where we saw a bunch of creatures including these which are not birds. They also had an empty enclosure that one little mouse had colonized, and which we watched scurry around getting things and bringing them back for a comfortable while. There's no photographing a tiny blur at that distance through the glass, though. Sorry.

Trivia: In 1875 the International Telegraph Convention, in St Petersburg, recommended telegraph rates be set per word, replacing the twenty-word ``telegraphic units''. Source: The Power of News: The History of Reuters, Donald Read.

Currently Reading: Pierre-Simon LaPlace, 1749 - 1827, A Life In Exact Science, Charles Coulson Gillispie with Robert Fox and Ivor Grattan-Guinness.

PS: Some Progress on the Infinitude of Monkeys, featuring a comic strip! Also an excerpt from the book I'm reading.

One of the first big things we planned to do, and lost to the pandemic, was Motor City Fur[ry] Con. We'd signed up to run panels and were about to buy our sponsorships when everything shut down. Earlier this year when it looked like people would get vaccinated to stop the pandemic they rescheduled the convention, setting it for Indigenous Peoples Day weekend. And we renewed the offer to run some panels.

Around Labor Day they asked if we were still up for running these panels and it wasn't an easy question. I ended up answering that, provisionally, if the pandemic didn't get significantly worse, we might be all right attending and given that, yes, we'd run panels. And the pandemic continued on, this terrible bleeding ulcer. It's not getting better, but it's also not getting so much worse as to make the necessary steps --- shutting everything down and everybody staying at home until everyone who can take a vaccine gets a vaccine --- politically possible. Either way would make the choice easy so we couldn't even get that.

Still, the convention was there, and drawing closer. And made a major, critical announcement: attendees had to show proof of vaccination. Not just that they'd got their shots, either, but that they'd had three weeks from the last shot, so would be fully vaccinated. We thought about going just for the day, just for the panel I was running. (They took my provisional yes as a definite yes and somehow bunnyhugger never gave an answer so they didn't schedule her panels.) Or would that not count as actually attending, making this the first Motor City Furry Con I'd miss, and the first time bunnyhugger had missed either Motor City or its predecessor con, Further Confusion North? Well, there was no space in the con hotel or in the other hotel, across the street, and with their new location there were no hotels in any reasonable vicinity, which settled that.

And then some new spaces opened up in the con hotel. It would be possible for us to stay in the hotel. We'd have a space to retreat to if we felt things were too crowded. We'd be reasonably confident we were only encountering vaccinated people. We could certainly stay masked too.

So, we did it. We booked a room and finally got sponsorship to attend Motor City Furry Con, and to do something where we'd stay, like, in a hotel, for the first time since the state pinball championships a year ago January.

And that's this story.

Pictures of that will come soon, don't worry. For now, some pictures from my visiting the Sparks Pinball Museum, the day I spent waiting for Sunshine's echocardiogram.

The bowling alley that houses the Sparks Pinball Museum/arcade. It was about noon and the place was even quieter than you'd figure for that. Seriously; I've been to our local bowling alley early in a midweek afternoon and it was busier than that.

But terrible news! FunHouse wasn't working. No idea what was wrong, but I trust they wouldn't leave the game off if it weren't serious. Probably just as well. If I were fortunate enough to play it enough to get on the high score table bunnyhugger would be even more envious.

Pool tables and arcade games in the center of the pinball room. The last time we were there, in March of 2020, they had this long counter running along the center where those games are now.

Popeye was working, if you can call it working. I had a pretty solid game, too, considering. Notice the backglass of the game has the original game on it.

Some of the solid-state games, decorated for Halloween.

And a look at the late-solid-state games, plus a nice big sign telling you where you are.

Trivia: The first person to translate ``La Marseillaise'' into German was Eulogius Schneider, a university friend of Beethoven's. Source: Beethoven: The Universal Composer, Edmund Morris.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Volume 13: The Islands of Sunk Sun Acts I and II, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. There's always a certain level of nonsense in these stories but this seems more than usual. Like, Olive Oyl starts out convinced she's a spy but I can't figure if this is all something in her head or if there was a mention at the end of the last story I'd forgotten. Or, there's a good bit where Popeye has Secret Orders, and he finds himself surrounded by dozens of identical Wimpys all asking to see the secret. And then dozens of duplicate Olive Oyls. And even replicas of the hotel clerk. OK, good mystery developing here, so what's the story? ... Well, Wimpy and Olive Oyl explain they hired the detectives who all made themselves up to look like their duplicates. Because they just wanted to know the Secret Orders. And ... what? It's like Sims and Zaboly realized they couldn't follow up on this great idea so they turned it into a punch line at the cost of everybody making even less sense than normal.

Let's see. Regular life stuff. Two weeks ago we had the first Lansing Pinball League regular-season meeting since the 10th of March, 2020. It was the 10th of August, 2021. bunnyhugger set the rule that to play you had to wear your mask through the whole of league night. She was ready for protests and struggling with that and we got ... nothing. Just simple acceptance. Attendance was down; the 10th of March we had twenty people attend and were readying our contingencies for a 21st person (which would require rearranging just how we play the games). The 10th of August, we had thirteen people, one of them a newcomer to our league happy to play even though he wouldn't count for International Flipper Pinball Association points.

And, like, there was some disappointing news. MWS, who's been having a great season, realized he wouldn't be able to play in finals as we've rescheduled them. The night is the same as a Nine Inch Nails concert, and getting to a NIN show outranks even taking home one of our trophies.

Also ... like ... the very thought of that sounded to me like madness. A concert. In late September. As though the pandemic isn't coming back. As though the Delta variant isn't rising, and continuing to rise, and nobody has the political will to do the shutdown we need while it's a small disaster. Instead it has to wait for even Republicans to realize there's too much death, and make this a huge disaster. I kept looking at MWS and thinking ... like ... he knows there's no chance Nine Inch Nails are playing in a public venue in late September, right? There's no chance anything is happening.

I'm haunted by a scene of a TV show I did not watch, but heard described. That there was a moment in the Terminator TV show where one of the future humans, looking around the preapocalyptic present, just loses it at two people having some petty little squabble about something they'd otherwise forget the next day. ``You're bleached skulls rotted in the sun,'' they cried out, or something like that. ``How can you care about this?'' and I keep thinking of bleached skulls in the sun when I think of MWS planning to see Nine Inch Nails.

This tells you where my head was all night. It should have been a glorious, wonderful return to form. Even the auguries were great. We were scheduled to play two of my favorite games at the venue, my group opening on one --- Willy Wonka --- and closing on the other --- The Beatles. And, hey, all through July I was playing like I had something to prove. If this was going to be our one taste of good normal things before the world shut down for six months again it could be a really, really good one.

Despite the masks league started like it should, everybody being a little late and a little disorganized. I made a small mistake, from being out of practice, counting out the slips of paper we use to draw lots and organize into groups. But 7:00 came and we were off to a bunch of good pinball play, we'd hope.

My first ball on the first game, Willy Wonka, I bricked. Drained before I knew what happened. I can deal, I can get it back together, there's incredible heaps of points in this game and when we played it for dollar-game fun a couple weeks before I crushed it. I can get it back. No, I can't. I put up a miserable game, just a terrible one, one of the worst ones in the league. Medieval Madness, on which I kept having killer games for, like, the pin-golf tournament where score doesn't matter, I start to have an okay game, and then fail to collect the extra ball, easiest shot in the game, and something that could easily have doubled my score. This is the only score I have all night that comes close to the median for the league. Indiana Jones is another fiasco for me, although the group I'm playing with has a similarly lousy time of it. Game of Thrones I figure, hey, I just put up that half-billion-point ball with bunnyhugger. I can do a hundred million points on my own, right? I can't even launch the ball well, this game. I manage to creak out 25 million points, which is about what the game gives you by accident. And twenty million points of that are on the video mode, a very basic ``swordfighting'' mini-video-game, where you have to hit both flippers a bunch of times. And I barely won that.

Ah, but, at least I could close out on The Beatles, and finish this one beacon, this lifeboat night, with the game I most want to play and on which I always have a fantastic game. I could how did I lose the ball already? How did I not make a single loop shot? I ... I ... this just sucks. And so it did. As awful as my Game of Thrones was, my Beatles was --- proportionately --- worse.

The night went pretty quickly, all told, and smoothly. Benefits of a small group; the night ends faster, and it can turn into people hanging out and chatting and even doing things like just hanging out with the new guy. Where I started to recover my ability to play pinball at all, and he went running up onto the high score table of The Simpsons. The live DJ was back, playing more music than I would care for, although only a handful of people ever got up and danced, never in groups of more than about three. I suppose we're finding that live DJ music just isn't working, not as a Tuesday night thing. I took bunnyhugger to some consolation games, such as on Guardians of the Galaxy, and had one okay and a bunch of lousy games on it, leaving me feeling all the worse.

Ultimately the problem was me. I went in to the night feeling like, this is it. This is the closest things will ever be to okay for the rest of the year. With the way infections are rising it's going to be murderously irresponsible to hold the next league night, and everything after that is going to be wiped out, for the foreseeable future. (In point of fact, the number of daily infections seems to have levelled out at about what it was two weeks ago, and the rate of infections even --- as of Monday afternoon's reporting --- dropped.)

And, at the end of the night, as we walked home, bunnyhugger --- who'd had a great night, by the way, third-best of everyone in the league, to her surprise --- began to share her anxieties about running the league through another Covid-19 wave, and about the pandemic, and about school starting, and I just ... lost it. I hollered about how this was the end, the last tiny island of fun we were going to see for the rest of the year, and it stank. At least for me; I didn't know how well she had done, and that she might have had fun while I was feeling betrayed by old friend tables didn't matter to me. The 10th of March was no particularly special night, but it was a pretty nice one, a memory I could hold on to and feel good about. This? This was just hot and muggy and lousy and depressing and facing miserable days ahead.

She was taken aback, as you all probably are. She hadn't imagined I had this much emotional charge built onto what was always going to be an ordinary, if rusty, league night. And for all her fears of what would come, she hadn't imagined I had deeper fears or a more pessimistic view of what was to come.

She asked if, given all this ... did we want to call off our plans for Wednesday? Plans which, it turns out, would cause the destruction of my car by flood waters. But plans which were, essentially, frivolous, something we could very easily avoid and that maybe, properly, we should, as not-essential but potentially virus-spreading activities.

And ... no. No. Facing a long miserable sad winter I wanted one more chance. One more good day. Our share of simple recreation before we had to accept the miserable next lockdown. Which is putting on the next day exactly the overloaded expectations and emotional charge that made a lousy game of Willy Wonka such an event. But ... for everything that we gave up? And everything we would have to give up? And knowing how much so many people refused to even slightly cut back on? I wanted this and I was going to take it.

Here, let's stroll some more around bunnyhugger's parents' town. You've see these places before, but in slightly different circumstances, which is all of my photographs anymore.

It's not a packed crowd, at the concert in the park, although that might be because it was 90 minutes into the show and things were probably wrapping up.

The band; I don't know who they were. They were playing ``Purple Rain'' as I took these pictures, though.

Fan getting some pictures of the performers.

Trivia: The first text appearance referring to breakfast as ``the most important meal of the day'' is ina 1917 issue of Good Heath magazine, edited by Dr John Henry Kellogg. Source: Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America, Michael Ruhlman.

Currently Reading: The Complete Peanuts 1979 - 1980, Charles Schulz. Editor Gary Groth.

So I got a Covid-19 test.

I don't think that I have the disease. I think it's more likely that I crashed hard after everything I went through and need time doing nothing to recover. But I couldn't be sure and yesterday I agreed that I would get the test done as soon as I had the energy to deal with it. Today I ... had enough energy to get downstairs and then not really enough energy to feel like anything else was a good idea. But bunnyhugger owned up to her parents about how bad I was doing, and they got concerned that I might have Covid-19, and that they might have gotten it from bunnyhugger visiting them on Saturday, so they scheduled tests.

I used the county's guide to finding Covid-19 test sites near me and got the page of information for the drive-through testing center in what used to be the Sears Auto Center and did not understand how to get an appointment. So I called, which was annoying as the site hid the actual numbers behind Javascript buttons to launch the telephone app on my phone, which in this case was my computer. They asked if I had account with their local hospital complex chain and I did. I made one back in March, when I thought that was the quickest way to get my vaccination, because not being a sociopath I wanted a vaccination as soon as I could. I'd cancelled it when I got an appointment two days sooner through Meijer's. But my account was still there, and I followed the directions to start the 'self-triage'. This amounts to listing my symptoms and whether there's enough of them to be worth screening me. They judged there were. And then ... uh ... I had 72 hours to get my sample taken before I'd have to fill out the self-ordering report again.

But was my report in? I couldn't believe that I could just go over there right this minute. I mean, I should have been able to, because this sort of database work should be (on human-moving-around timescales) instantaneous, but I expect some delay period. So I called the line again to ask if I could just go there right now. And the guy on the line said he'd look up and see whether the request was in, and ... it wasn't.

But what he did find is there were two records with nearly my identical name. One of them had my last name just a bit wrong, replacing the last letter with one adjacent to it on the keyboard. And the guy was just incredibly apologetic about it, talking me through how he was trying to fix this, and warning me that they might try to merge the two records of the same me into one and if there were a problem at the Sears to explain they should look at the other person with my name starting as it does and with the same birthdate. It was the antipode of last Thursday's conversation with that woman at Emergency Veterinary Hospital.

So I drove out, in bunnyhugger's car, pausing just to mail my complaint to the Emergency Veterinary Hospital. The line was only about eight cars long when I got in, and I saw they took two cars in at a time. This is a concession to the Auto Care-center layout they're working from; two cars fit in at once. A woman came out as I joined the line, to confirm I was in the line for a test rather than a vaccination, and also to compliment my space shuttle mission-patches mask. She said she'd made one for her husband using the same fabric.

Inside the auto bay a woman came up and asked what I was there for, and I couldn't think what words I was looking for. She said ``testing, then'' and I nodded. She also asked if my car was on and it was and she said to turn it off. I could do without the air conditioning in the shade of the building anyway. Another woman came around and I offered the printout of my lab self-request; she didn't need it, just my driver's license and insurance card and I hope it's my current card that was in my wallet. Couple minutes later she came back and stuck a blue sticker on the side mirror that I worried would blow off in the wind, but also figured if it does, they can deal with it.

Finally a man came around and put a tissue in my hand. I couldn't process what it was; a wet wipe? A what? He said blow my nose. The second time around I understood what I was expected to do, and after I blew my nose he said the Kleenex was mine to keep. This is a pretty solid line I'm sorry I wasn't in spirits to appreciate. Then he had me lean my head back, jabbed the long Q-tip-like thingy into my left nostril and wriggled it around some, a sensation I have to describe as one of the sensations I've had in my lifetime, now. I can't say it was bad, just, alien. He did something or other and showed me a vial and asked, ``Is this you?'' I recognized my first name and the start of my last and confirmed it even though it was the end of my last name that was the problem. And then I was done.

If all goes well, sometime Thursday or Friday I will learn that I didn't have Covid-19, and that I just feel like a series of small hand grenades went off in every joint in my body before I was ground beneath a cog railway because I cracked under the accumulated stress of it being 2021.

Better things, now. Here's the last pictures of Michigan's Adventure for our trip a couple weeks ago.

Leaving the park after our Dodgem ride. That's Corkscrew on the right there .

A last look at Mad Mouse, which we never did get to ride, as it was running very slow and sometimes not at all, like in the bad season of 2018.

Leaving the park and getting a last look at Mad Mouse.

And a last look at the park entrance before we left for the day.

Trivia: The Chapel of St Thomas à Becket was not literally at the center of Old London Bridge --- it was on the 11th pier from the Southwark end and the 9th pier from the City of London end --- but its pier was also noticeably wider and longer than the others, 35 feet wide by 115 feet long, and projecting out about 65 feet past the line of the Bridge. Source: Old London Bridge: THe Story of the Longest Inhabited Bridge in Europe, Patricia Pierce.

Currently Reading: The Complete Peanuts, 1999 - 2000, Charles Schulz. Editor Gary Groth.

OK, so that's a development at work. Remember how they said they didn't expect any big changes in staff what with the buyout and all? There was a big change. The guy I had always thought of as the de facto office manager even though I guess he was officially just the guy in charge of tech has left. I don't know why, just got the word he wasn't with the company anymore, and don't send my weekly reports cc'd to him, and that's that. I shall have to prod around and see if I can get any insight.

Taking his role as the guy in charge of normal stuff is ... well, the person I've been mostly interacting with in getting my big project done. He's someone I only dimly knew from working at the place (he'd been at the other facility, back when the company had two locations). But he is also always crazy impressed with every single thing I do, so that's probably a good thing to have in the local boss.

Michigan's started, late but at least at all, a sweepstakes for people to get vaccinated. For a month there'll be a daily prize given, $50,000 to someone getting their first vaccination. For those of us who were getting a vaccine as soon as they could from wanting the pandemic to be over there's two drawings, one for a million and one for two million dollars. (There's also scholarship drawings for people between 12 and 17 years of age.) It's ridiculous that people need more incentive than wanting the pandemic to be over but if it works, fine, it works. I'll choke down three million dollars if they want to give it to our household.

Now let's have two days of photos from walking to the river and back, the day after that big rainstorm and the tornado warning and all that. And after that ... there's something different coming. Promise. But my photos now are up to ... Sunday the 27th.

That void space underneath the new parts of the Allen Street Neighborhood Center. I had left my camera on too sensitive a simulated ISO (instead of letting the camera auto-select one) so the outdoor space got washed out, and I like the way it washed out. It's like I have a slice of building component in a white void.

But here looking in you can see the rain was heavy and abundant enough to get pretty well underneath the covered areas.

Something of local history: a sidewalk block we can date to June of 1908. It was one of bunnyhugger's exciting discoveries for her sidewalk blog. She was also able to find evidence that members of the family lived not-too-far-away at least until the last couple years (and might still; she'd just found an obituary for one person who seems to be a Sowa).

Another sidewalk laid down in 1908, this time by J P Sleight. bunnyhugger doesn't seem to have covered this particular stamp yet (I'm surely just missing her entry), but she's familiar with the name.

The Kalamazoo street bridge over the Grand River. And look at those not-at-all ominous, rain-bearing clouds in the sky! (It didn't rain. Maybe a little sprinkle but just enough to make you wonder if you felt something.)

The vicinity of that concrete platform that I'd shared a photo of a week or so ago. So you can see the river's high and fast enough to obscure something that was maybe eight inches above the waterline before.

Trivia: Cyrus W Baldwin's water-balance elevator, invented in the early 1870s, had a design capable in principle of a rise of 1,800 feet per minute. (It is hard to see how it could be braked safely at that speed.) Source: Otis: Giving Rise to the Modern City, Jason Goodwin.

Currently Reading: DC Showcase presents Superman Family, Editors Mort Weisinger, Robert Greenberger.

Conan O'Brien and Stephen Colbert had their last planned audience-free shows Thursday night. Colbert signed off these low-staff, audience-free shows with a spoof of the end of The Breakfast Club, validating my and bunnyhugger's declaration of Don't You Forget About me being the song of summer 2020 and by extension the pandemic shutdown.

I guess that I'm glad to have them back to normal, especially as it's Conan's last weeks in his evening chat show form. I hope that they're right that it's safe to have large crowds of people who check a box claiming they were vaccinated grouped indoors. Let's suppose for just now that it is.

Doing their shows without an audience or any but a skeletal crew, though ... it's been good entertainment, really. It's forced them to be intimate, even quiet. Big and bombastic is exciting and we're always told we should be excited by things. We don't get to appreciate the small and the quiet enough. In the very ill wind of society's failure to manage the pandemic, we were forced into quiet places a lot. Without our days stirred up by going places and doing things we settled where we could not avoid hearing our own thoughts. I suppose this is some of what was so excruciating about it; there's only so much of ourselves we can take and be healthy.

But we need some of it still and I hope in the after-times Colbert recognizes and embraces some of that silence that last night he called his enemy.

So what're we up to in June 2021 pictures? Could it somehow be this week when I went to Preuss for the water pump? How?

Pinball Parlor! bunnyhugger wondered if there were a pinball jigsaw puzzle and she found this one, a collage of many pinball backglasses. It didn't take long to do, with the biggest delays caused by not having a decent picture of what it was supposed to look like, and with some half-dozen or so backglasses being repeated. And not ones on the edges of the puzzle like you'd expect, either. Anyway we're sure this puzzle, featuring art from many pinball manufacturers spanning a half-century --- and including titles Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, Batman, and James Bond --- was possible through a heroic feat of licensing agreements. Just think what kinds of work made it possible to use (in the lower-right corner) the Star Trek: The Mirror Universe backglass that one guy made to re-theme his 1979 Bally Star Trek.

bunnyhugger compares the completed puzzle to the box photograph. That photograph's tiny and incomplete but the best guide she had to the puzzle.

The ceremonial lifting of the puzzle, to see how well it hangs together.

It hangs great! She was even able to set the puzzle back down and only one piece was a little out of line. Didn't even fall out or anything. Really good-fitting puzzle.

The outdoor-pond area of Preuss Pets, with a bunch of water plants and sculptures and koi pond and all that.

Looking at one of the waterfalls and the koi who benefit from its water-stirring energies. You can see the parking lot past the fence line.

More of the koi; they have some big ones there.

I don't know if this connects to the indoor river that the pet shop has. I'd imagine it would, so all the koi have a chance at being fed by customers, but I also don't know how they'd arrange that water flow. Also I'm not sure how the water is deep enough for the koi to be safe from winter and raccoons both, but will trust that the pet store knows its business; they're really big on fish.

Trivia: Acrylic paints bond to steel so well they can be applied before the steel is stamped into component shapes. Source: Molecules at an Exhibition: The Science of Everyday Life, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story, Leonie Swann. Novel about a flock of sheep trying to solve the murder of their shepherd. bunnyhugger was all ready to sell this back to the bookstore when I yoinked it out of the to-be-sold box since I figured when else am I ever going to read a book like that? Also, hey, me reading non-comic-book fiction for once in a couple years, how about that?