austin_dern

Jumping a little ahead, for convenience's sake, I got my teeth examined, X-rayed, and polished. By the professional dentist, understand, not just anyone anywhere.

Not much different to report from last time, though. My extreme good luck in health continues, with no sign of trouble among my teeth and even my gums looking like they're not receding importantly. They tried an ultrasonic device for cleaning some spots of my teeth and that was a novel experience. Not a bad one, understand. Just a different sort of vibration from any I'm used to. The cold water used along with this confirmed I don't have any particularly sensitive spots in my teeth or my gums, good news that will inspire bunnyhugger to kick my shins for being so good at teeth.

My tooth-grinding continues, though. Not because it's made my gums recede appreciably since half a year ago, but I guess they had it in my file and were asking about its progress. I couldn't swear I'd noticed it in my sleep, but bunny_hugger has and I passed that on. They're going to check with my insurance and see whether they'll cover getting a mouth guard and all to say what it'll cost me, besides a couple hours off for measurement and fitting appointments.

The hygienist told me she'd found a couple times she'd taken them out overnight. I think this is extremely likely for me since I'm an active sleeper doing a lot of squirming around. She thinks it's likely I'd lose the impulse to take it out after a couple weeks. bunnyhugger had a different experience herself. But maybe I'll be good about this.

And in pictures, back to the 4th of July and the same fireworks pictures several times over:

A couple lanterns being let go at once.

And here's a nice sparkler shower with a telephone pole coming out its center.

Here we go. Some other town's fireworks plus a couple lanterns in the sky.

And now downtown has its show starting. Or maybe the ball park. Hard to be sure.

But between the city's fireworks and individuals doing their own shows you can see how smokey it gets here in early July.

I believe this is two fireworks shows photographed at once but it's hard to be sure, at this remove.

Trivia: Telephones of the 1880s were extremely vulnerable to background electrical interference, both from the weather and from the electric light and electric trolley services also stringing wires around cities, to the point of being unusable when a trolley car switched tracks or a city electric light sputtered. Source: Telephone: The First Hundred Years, John Brooks.

Currently Reading: Slime: A Natural History, Susanne Wedlich. Translator Ayça Türkoğlu.

The 40th Anniversary, the announcer guy told us, is the Ruby Anniversary and that's probably why Michigan's State Tree is lit all in red (with a white star topper). I don't believe this is the 40th year that Michigan has had a State Tree, but it is the 40th Silver Bells in the City, with an outdoor market and --- for most of those years --- an electric light parade. We were not clear whether they mean this is the 40th time there has been a Silver Bells, or 40 years since the first Silver Bells --- note those are not the same thing --- nor how they count 2020 when they didn't do the parade or market and faked having a fireworks show. Well, you know what kind of people bunnyhugger and I are.

We set out about 5:00, an hour before the start of the show, and somehow were still late enough that we couldn't get a front-row spot to watch the parade from. We didn't have a bad spot, though; we were off behind the main TV camera where they let VIPs into the reviewing stand, so we actually had two lines of sight for okay photographs, one at the reviewing stand and one just past the TV camera, in front of the state capitol.

The parade went much as you might expect; though there were a couple small drops of rain there wasn't anything like the storm of 2016 that we'll never stop talking about. There were ten or so marching bands; I had only counted eight but sometimes forgot my mental count. bunnyhugger paid closer attention and said nothing bad about the bands' synchronized stepping though even I could see some of them were ... let's say unpracticed. Her uncertainty is that the final band, the one before Santa, wasn't announced as Santa's Band so she might have counted an eleventh as the band in the spot of honor there.

I don't know if it was something for the 40th Year or whatnot but there were a couple new floats more sophisticated and stylish than have been the usual for Silver Bells, including ones with animated elements. One, for the Curwood Castle over in Owosso, claimed even to have a working waterfall, although we didn't see it. Maybe it was on the other side of the float. One of the floats had a full Wizard of Oz theme going including giant ruby slippers, and this wasn't even for the roller derby team.

The announcer promised a drone show and an enhanced fireworks show and we're always up for a fireworks show. The drone show was all right, had some clever stuff, including ruby slippers clacking together, which was the prompt I needed to make me realize oh, there's a red theme because of this supposed ruby anniversary. The fireworks were good --- it's a fireworks show, after all --- but I don't know there was anything particularly heightened about it. I was just relieved the fireworks happened, since it had been very windy all day. In the reflected glow of the street lights you could see the clouds of expired fireworks were booking it to the southeast.

After the fireworks we walked down to the outdoor market where we discovered how busy the place can be if you don't go in to City Hall to warm up and use the bathroom for twenty minutes first. There was such a line at the place giving out free coffee, though, and an even longer one at the truck selling elephant ears. We eventually got through the crowds enough to buy hot chocolate, and some edible raw cookie dough that brightened bunnyhugger's day today, and some peanut brittle I haven't tried yet.

After all this we walked back to the State Tree to get some up-close photos. We don't know what all was going on but there were walls of cops marching down the sidewalk telling some people to get moving, and keep moving, and all. I don't know if this was related to the Free Palestine protesters waving signs around near the tree, or if it was just police noticing a bunch of Black people in the crowd, or if even something actually serious happened. While we were at the tree something or other happened a block east (in front of the city police headquarters) and cops ran over to whatever that all was. I can't find any news articles about the incident --- all the ones online appear to be reports about the upcoming Silver Bells --- so since I missed the 11:00 news last night I'll probably never know what was going on.

While this has been a very warm autumn, we finally started getting roughly seasonal weather this week, and after a couple hours in the cold my camera batteries decided they'd had enough. So I didn't get as many up-close pictures of the tree by night as I wanted. But I should have the chance to stop in again; this is only the start of the holiday season.

This morning, bunnyhugger went downtown again to run in the Silver Bells 5K, and by reports she did successfully, apart from walking instead (as planned). She had a reindeer costume of her own making, improving on the gear she'd had last year by making a new partial-face-mask with false fur and clay antlers and some Christmas-y pine branch decorations put in to sell the Christmasness of it all. She got a bunch of compliments about how cute it was and one comment about its spookiness from someone who seems to have mistaken it for a Krampus mask, and then apologized for ``stealing your joy''. But many more people said positive things about her costume than tried to steal her joy, so it was a good bit of work. She's gotten quite good at these partial-face-masks and is looking to chances to make more of them.

Now for some relaxing views of the most visually calm environment known to humanity, Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum:

How about some more establishing shots of what Marvin's looks like above eye level? Yeah, there sure is a lot going on here. I'm not sure what Dr Marvin's Sex Change Machine is --- it's too high up to put a coin in --- but my guess is a mannequin that does a quick change from manly to womanly dress.

There's a very long chain running a twisty path along the ceiling with these big airplane models --- they're maybe two or three feet long --- and now and then someone puts a quarter in the box that makes them lurch forward and progress around a while.

And here's the Jersey Jack game Toy Story 4 doing one of those wonders that are only possible in modern pinball: it's downloading a three gigabyte patch updating the game a major version number and, as you can see from the clock, it's at about 8:40 pm, that is to say, in the middle of pinball league. It happens nobody was playing then but no reason there couldn't have been, and no reason people couldn't have been playing before and after when the game rules had changed in various ways.

I liked Toy Story 4 (it's since been replaced with the Jersey Jack Avatar); here's some of the playfield, including Bo Peep on the lower left and the miniature TV screen that provides instructions and sometimes a backwards map of New Jersey.

And here's the right-hand side of the upper playfield, including that bunny-and-duck plush that were stitched together and a pop-up ramp for that Yes I Canada guy.

Slightly broader view of the playfield. To the left of Yes I Canada! is the Gabby Gabby popup; now and then she appears on the playfield and I don't know, you hit her for some reason. I never got the hang of everything that was going on except that there was a lot going on and it was generally fun.

Trivia: Antoni van Leeuwenhoek got interested in the polishing of lenses --- leading him to creating the microscope --- from the magnifying glasses that he and other drapers used to determine the thread count of fabrics. Source: The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization, Vince Beiser.

Currently Reading: Poincaré and the Three-Body Problem, June Barrow-Green.

Sunday we made our second amusement park trip of the Halloween season, and our first to Cedar Point. We hoped for our usual sort of six-hour Sunday trip --- bunnyhugger had Monday off for reasons of academic calendars but I did not (and won't have this coming Monday off either) --- but ended up at the park about a half-hour late. The construction zone that blocked off our access to US 127 South has grown a side blockage to keep us off the other path to 127. There was a literal stoppage on I-96 East. And turns out there's construction all along US 23 between I-96 and Ann Arbor. I assume someday there's going to be an end to this construction zone, but I know there won't be. There's similar problems with the other side of 127 that bunnyhugger needs to get to and from work.

It was a busy day at the park. Not so packed as Columbo's Day Weekend will be, but still, it was sunny, cloudless, and in the low 80s, a fine late-August/early-September day except for being in early October. Despite this there were weird lines for things. At one point Millennium Force's electronic queue estimated the wait time at 30 minutes, and from what I could see of the queue it probably wasn't even that. That's just freaky. GateKeeper, no less freakily, had a wait of 30 minutes or so according to its queue. When we first saw that wait, it was because the ride had been down for maintenance and most people were waiting it through. But later on, after the ride was going again, the line was still almost as long. Again, quite freaky.

But most freaky of all? And wonderful? And that would have got us going to the park even if we hadn't already planned to go? Remember how the carousel at Michigan's Adventure was dubbed the ``Scare-ousel'' and was running backward? They had the Midway Scare-ousel and it was running backwards. They warned people that it would do this at the start of the ride, I suppose heading off kids offended that the rules of the universe were betrayed by this. And they were still using the band organ --- already in need of tuning --- playing the Halloween/scary-songs soundtrack, plus the theme to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?. Also from the tunes playing I learned bunnyhugger doesn't know the tune ``Mysterious Mose'' or at least doesn't remember it by name. I'd have tried to hum it for her but everything I try to hum comes out sounding like Morse code.

Sadly none of the other carousels were running backwards. I hope Cedar Point's gotten good response to this, though, and will break their rules and let other rides go backwards. We would return to the Midway Scareousel for our last ride of the night, and thought we might get two rides in a row, to catch the last ride of the night. But we and a couple people ahead of us in the queue were cut off, told that they were full up for the last ride. There were many seats left, including the chariots. We have no explanation for this and the ride operator offered none. My guess is that while the ride can get to, or close to, its usual speed in reverse it can't do that with a full load. Otherwise the operator just wanted to turn away the kids in front of us who were dressed in wolf costume. I don't see why he'd want to do that, though.

There's more to share. I'll get there.

Next on my photo roll ... pictures from walking around the neighborhood a little, for good reasons. I was going to say it was nothing special but you'll see the first picture is rather special after all.

And here's the special thing: the three-foot solid chocolate rabbit of Fabiano's chocolate. This year it sold for $750; I believe their past years' rabbits were more like $550.

The chocolate rabbit and other, much smaller chocolate things, to give you an idea what the place looks like. A couple weeks later all this would be sold or melted down. (Apart from the three-foot rabbit, given to charity.)

Street outside the chocolate shop. The trees haven't got to their blooming yet.

They were about to start a major project rebuilding the streets and sidewalks. Here's a sidewalk in so need of reconstruction that they've spray-painted warnings on its edges.

A bit of the neighborhood. In the background you can see the local Papa John's, which is unrelated to the evil company and did manage to shoo them out of town.

The streets around here could use reconstruction. But you can see peeking out underneath the old roads, like these brick- or cobblestone streets. There's a fair chance someone in there are trolley tracks.

Trivia: The novelist J B Priestley wrote of W C Fields, ``Nobody could suggest the malice of objects better than Fields. At his best moments, an ordinary room, empty of other human beings, could turn itself into a mined mountain pass.'' Source: The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Anthony Slide.

Currently Reading: The Emerald City of Oz, L Frank Baum. Marvel Comics adaptation by Eric Shanower, Skottie Young.

My photo roll now jumps ahead to the last day of February and also the last regular day of operations for Archives, the more antiquarian-minded bookstore in East Lansing. We got to it after work, in time to be --- I believe --- the last two paying customers before it closed up apart from by-appointment openings while stock gets sold online (I imagine) or moved to its sister store.

A warning that the parking is only for Archives, the bookstore, and Dino's. There's nothing there named Dino's and there hasn't been all the time I've been in town, yet the sign looks great, possibly because they hung it up behind the power lines. (There's no reason that would have anything to do with anything.)

We were not the only people who came to Archives for last-day photos. I believe the guy taking the picture here has two cameras.

Tabooli is a local microchain (two restaurants) of Mediterranean-style food, for people who want a hummus wrap built your way like Subway would do. This spot used to be a coffee shop and there was a door to pass through into the bookstore.

And here's what the sign looked like. Today, seven months later, it ... still does, actually.

The last day that would be out there, except by appointment.

Setting sun, closing bookstore, do you get it? Huh? Symbolism? BETTER SAY YES.

And here's what it looked like inside, which is your usual sort of used bookstore arrangement.

Some of the vintage magazines, from back when The Saturday Evening Post existed or Collier's existed or people in Southern England enjoyed leisure.

Aisles half-blocked by aged cardboard boxes full of other books, not because of the closure, just because used bookstores are always like this.

Someday someone is going to file an ADA lawsuit on behalf of people with mobility issues and it's going to decimate the used bookstore industry. In the back there the shelves are boxes full of postcards, I believe.

Your usual used-bookstore arrangement, here of books about Canada. Surprised that text about Upper Canadian politics of the 1850s didn't move sooner.

Archives was more into antiquarian and rare books, which didn't mean it lacked for science fiction, just that the section was smaller than its sister store in downtown East Lansing has, and it includes things like those Gentry Lee Rendezvous with Rama sequels. Also note they have a book by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley that isn't universally panned Hugo winner They's Rather Be Right, assuming that's not just another name for the same book. (It was.)

Trivia: The British 46th Division's capture of the St Quentin Canal --- making possible the breach of the Hindenburg Line the 29th of September, 1918 --- was preceded by a creeping barrage of about 126 shells for every 500 yards of German trench over the course of eight hours. Source: The First World War, Hew Strachan.

Currently Reading: Comic books.

The thing we had to get to the Saturday after bunnyhugger got back home? The Calhoun County Fair. She hasn't missed going in ages. But she hadn't put any photos into competition this year, as our original plan to be away for my family's thing and then her brother's wedding would have left us unable to get there the day they took entrants. (bunnyhugger floated the idea of her parents dropping off a set of photographs but they were anxious about whether they could find the buildings and fill out the cards and all.) And between the travel and Roger's illness and the lack of show entries, and pinball league Wednesday and reading group Thursday and evening rains on Friday, we just forgot about the fair. bunnyhugger remembered only because of an ancient calendar notification that the next day she'd need to pick up her photos.

We decided to go anyway, figuring that three hours at the fair was better than none. This left us with a hurried visit, one where we didn't even get to see all the animal exhibitions. But we got to the ones most urgent to us --- the chickens and turkeys and the many Californian rabbits. Also a couple other rabbits, one of whom had very well chewed up their ribbon for being a good roaster. Also two guinea pigs who, as ever, looked like they weren't sure why they were in this meeting.

The photo gallery was, as usual for Calhoun, threatening to overflow and consume the whole exhibition hall. The winning photographs for various categories all looked like reasonable choices, nothing that seemed like a clear miscarriage of justice. But one of the organizers for the photo exhibition talked with us about the tale of woe they'd had trying to organize it this year. Particularly one of their key people resigned just two weeks or so before the event started, and another had ... I forget if it was a heart attack or a stroke but something serious of that magnitude, that knocks you out of the project. And their spouse had to bow out because of dealing with that. We were shocked to have all that going on all at once against them; made it the more amazing they got it all together and, far as we could tell, in good order.

A small shocker in the rides section: the zipper wasn't there! bunnyhugger takes a picture of its complicated blend of vertical and rotational and linear movements every year for Summer Fun or Last Year's Fair categories. We don't know why it didn't get in but this is going to really tax our feeling that we should ride one at least once. Its movement, in a small cage cabin that's often rotated upside-down, is a challenging one.

We got only a couple tickets, just enough for a few rides like on their Scrambler-like ride or the Merry-Go-Round. (They still have the one that does five rotations per minute, the speed where a carousel starts to get thrilling.) But this would be all we could use: about fifteen minutes before the scheduled end of the night a light mist turned into a serious rain and into an outright heavy rain that had us wishing we had umbrellas. We dodged our way to an elephant ear stand as the very close of the night was wiped out, and we ordered three, figuring to share one and bring the other two to bunnyhugger's parents. They gave us four, something we kind of hoped they might do with it being the end of the last night of the fair, but we didn't figure we should count on. By the time we got the elephant ears the rain had let up enough we could get back to the car, and to bunnyhugger's parents, where we spent two hours or so describing the fair and letting her talk about the trip to her brother.

And that made the close of the 2024 Fair season, as we would know it.

Going to take in a couple more holiday-themed trees decorated at the Potter Park Zoo Wonderland of Lights last year.

Kwanzaa gets a respectable-looking showing here.

All right, Three Kings Day is certainly a thing that we learned in Mexico City is a much bigger thing in Mexico City.

Chinese New Year seems to start earlier every year, doesn't it?

Oh, yes, Bodhi Day is certainly one I ... don't remember hearing about before.

Wikipedia tells me Las Posadas is ``celebrated chiefly in Latin America, El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and by Latin Americans in the United States'', because Wikipedia can only edit by shoving more words into a sentence.

Finally Yule gets some appreciation this December season of decorating trees.

Trivia: Belgian miners would, until after 1900, still take time off at the right season to look after their potato patches. If necessary, this would be done by an annual ``potato strike''. Source: The Age of Capital, 1848 - 1875, Eric Hobsbawm.

Currently Reading: His Majesty's Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine, S C Gwynne.

My humor blog this week has featured a touch of memoir, and a touch of me being offended by The Lockhorns, and me being thrown by how a word was pronounced once in 1940. Also, I think, a pretty solid story-comic plot recap for a comic making fun of Elon Musk. And not a word about area code 661 somehow! Here's what's been on my mind:

• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 2
• In Serious Consideration of an Historic Day
• Statistics Saturday: The Twelve Most Iconic Songs Of The 70s
• In Which I Am Thrown by 1940
• In The Dark About All This
• What's Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? How can Elon Musk steal the Moon? June - August 2024
• Something Has Gone Wrong in Culture
• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 3

Going to do a short photo selection today, wrapping up the bringing home of the tree plus one bonus picture taken with my iPod and everything in the field.

bunnyhugger snipping loose the wrapped-up tree for downstairs. It's spread out a little but is still returning to its normal shape.

She pulls twine loose to help it billow out and not at all to make it spin on our tree spike.

And here's our bedroom tree, set up in a corner where it'll get in the way of nothing but our books.

Note the plush coati wondering what's all this about, then.

And here's the tree unfurled and ready for decoration! To the right, the attic.

So on the westside of town is what's always been known as Giraffe Meijer, after a large giraffe statue put on the roof of the gas station outside it because there was a quarrel with a contractor in the 70s and these things happen. When the store renovated the statue was taken down from the gas station and everyone in the metro area panicked, despite Meijer's insistence that they were just replacing the roof and would put the giraffe back. Well, they did put the giraffe back and, more, they embraced the theme of Giraffe Meijer. Both the front entrances have a balcony with these non-gas-station giraffe statues. And, like, the signs inside the stoor to do stuff like communicate Pharmacy hours or tell you about a sale have a stylized giraffe on them. So, awesome stuff. That's what we hope for.

Trivia: AT&T maintained a nine-dollar-per-share dividend from 1921 through to its three-for-one stock split of 1959. (The post-split shares paid $3.30 per share, or the equivalent of $9.90 for one old share.) Source: Telephone: The First Hundred Years, John Brooks.

Currently Reading: His Majesty's Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine, S C Gwynne.

Going to get to Motor City Furry Con reporting soon, I swear, but I wanted to share some local stuff that I'll forget if I let it wait any.

One is that Saturday night as we were collapsing into bed we heard an extremely loud exploding sound from somewhere in the distance. And then another and, a few minutes later, another one. I did what I could: I looked out the bedroom window and saw nothing going on, unsurprising for many reasons including that our bedroom looks out the other direction from where the noise was. I quipped something like ``who would be setting off fireworks for Weed Day at this hour?''

This would always get the neighborhood social media groups excited. But it was even more exciting because that night there'd been a police standoff, the cops surrounding a house where a guy accused of two murders was holed up. So there was speculation that it was something police-related going on.

Not so, according to our city council rep, on Facebonk. While the standoff was nearby the explosions, the explosions were the result of someone setting off overloaded fireworks. Meaning that my dumb joke of a guess was right, which is an insult to dumb jokes of all kinds. Also meaning that someone had the idea to set off some extremely illegal fireworks a short jog away from every cop in the metro area.

I can't say what happened to any of the people involved, but folks were talking about them for a while, at least.

Also on Sunday apparently there was ``a large doughnut pileup'' on I-69, but all I know about it is that it was cleaned up to much local merriment and I haven't heard what caused it or why or how. Sorry.

And now let's roll the dice with pictures again. LiveJournal has still not got back to me with any answer for why the Scrapbook has been so unreliable; if I ever hear anything I'll pass it on.

The inside of the Gravitron, seen right after what I understand will be the last time bunnyhugger ever rides a Gravitron for the rest of her life. It was very fast.

Here we're descending from the Gravitron back into reality.

Back at the carousel, looking over at the inner row in the distance like that.

And a more centered picture which shows you some of the chariot. I like the different bands of light in this.

But I think this is the real good shot, where for once I have the foreground elements of the entry gate and operator's corner framing the background elements of the whole carousel.

And looking back from the carousel gets this view of the midway.

Trivia: The diode valve, as a vacuum tube, was invented in 1904 by John Ambrose Fleming. Source: How The World Was One: Beyond The Global Village, Arthur C Clarke.

Currently Reading: Deck Us All With Boston Charlie, Walt Kelly.

Sorry but I have to share something from today. No pictures because I'm writing this after pinball league and don't have time.

This morning about 11:30 we were gathering for one of the usual team touchpoints where everyone says what they're doing and why and it's all fine. I, along with the other people assigned to the new building on the west side of town, were gathered in one conference room. Other people, who aren't permanently assigned to the new agency or are working remotely for whatever reason, were to join online, so we get none of the advantages of in-person or remote conferences. Anyway, the guy with the master laptop pressed the button to put the remote-attendees screen up on the room monitor when --- to the second --- the power went out.

Not just in the room, or the whole floor, or the whole building. After a couple minutes we heard emergency generators whirring into action at the strip mall across the parking lot. Checking the local power utilities found there were 16,000 in the area without power. Calls went in fast to ask, uh, what do we do?

After about twenty minutes of this they declared, everyone go home and resume the day remotely. If you didn't have power --- something that, if it happened, would affect only me or the business analyst of the group as we live in town --- then stay home and the day will get counted as administrative leave.

It happens power came on about twenty minutes more after that, but it's nice to have a rough idea what the drill is for this sort of thing. (Also, it's tomorrow, as in Wednesday, that we're scheduled to have the tornado drill. Will I shelter in the conference room that was formerly a bank vault, or in the bathroom?)

When I did get home bunnyhugger was initially upset that anyone was coming into the house this time of day. Then, finding my car there, just wanted to know why I was coming home in the middle of the day. Then, learning about the contingency for if we'd lost power at home, was upset that some folks might be getting a day off when I wouldn't. I didn't feel slighted by this.

The power outage, which the noon news said reached 26,000 customers, dominated the noon news as you'd imagine. And the main anchor got to delight in something he said he'd always wanted to do --- put his fingers to his earpiece and report, ``This just in''.

As you might have inferred, we never lost power around here. I'll take the half-day of working from home if I can get that.

Trivia: Engineer James Buchanan Eads testified before Congress in 1874 that ``disasters and serious accidents'' were ``always evidence of bad engineering''. And, particularly, humans were fully ``capable of curbing, controlling, and directing the Mississippi, according to his pleasure.'' Source: The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America, Kevin Rozario.

Currently Reading: Retail Gangster: The Insane, Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie, Gary Weiss.

PS: What's Going On In Dick Tracy? Why is Dick Tracy all about Little Orphan Annie again? You deserve to know!

While there's some stuff to talk about, it was also pinball league tonight, so please content yourself with reading about What's Going On In Alley Oop? What happened to King Guz? December 2023 - March 2024. And then get back to pictures ... here's a bunch of water life as seen last July, that day we spent at the state park.

Hey, some bluegills! All but certainly not one of the ones we got from that fish heist a couple years back, but you know, they're there, that's nice to see.

I mean, they were put in a different park, how could they get out unless someone caught them and then returned them to a different body of water, like already happened once?

Now here's a view of the far shore, away from where people can easily get except by swimming. I thought I saw a swimming mammal head this way, but never got any remotely decent view. However ...

There was this bird!

Crane or something hanging around, which is fine, as I'd rather they were here than getting to our pond out in the backyard where they'd eat all our goldfish.

The bird didn't seem to be hunting any, so far as I could tell. Just vibing in the shallow water.

Here's a picture with the bird put even closer to the edges, so you know it's one of my pictures.

And now a similarly edge-hugging picture of the crane, plus enough reflections that it kind of looks like bunch of compression artifacts.

Here I noticed that looking back on the dock was also a great view. And the water looked quite calm with the light coming from behind it.

And look who's back! That turtle returned to the surface to look for stuff to eat and disapprove of.

I felt judged by the turtle in this picture.

And here you see the turtle carrying a continent on their back.

Trivia: When Boston Harbor froze over during the winter of 1844, a particularly bitter one, local merchants cut a channel from the wharf to the sea to allow the Cunard steam liner Britannia to pass. The event was commemorated in a picture popular in New England sitting rooms. Source: Yankee Science In The Marking: Science and Engineering in New England from Colonial Times to the Civil War, Dirk J Struik. (Regular steamship service had only begun in 1838.)

Currently Reading: The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power, Deirdre Mask.

Today let's enjoy a bunch of pictures from that beach day, and maybe identify some of the ways you can tell if a picture is mine.

Looking at the beach from on the fishing dock. And you see some of my usual tricks, such as bringing the feature of interest (the beach) as close to the edge of the photo as I possibly can.

Looking out to the sunset and you can also see how my lens needs cleaning even though I just cleaned it the year before. You may also spot those trees I used for that demonstration of how framing affects the mood of a picture. The camera's a bit off-level and while I do that a lot it's a rather unconsidered angle here. I must not have realized how this was close to but not at level when I took the picture. Anyway, another bit that I love ...

Here we see bunnyhugger swimming, because I like looking at her.

Another of my common tricks: someone at the edge of the frame, looking out of the picture. bunnyhugger says she's read photo instructions that say not to do this and I can't imagine living by that guideline. It's so much more naturally interesting if they're looking at what we can't see.

Now here bunnyhugger looks into frame, and that's still pretty good, but once again she's as close to the corner as I could get away with. Definitely part of my signature.

As bunnyhugger gets to the shallower water she's still taking up an extreme corner position. This is so me.

Enough of my signature for now. We saw a turtle off the dock! Seemed like something around 16 inches, although it's hard to be sure since they were swimming away from any particularly distinct features.

Friend and turtle expert CST believed the turtle was probably hanging around looking for food that I, for one, wasn't going to toss. But other people aren't so good about not screwing up the wildlife. In this case, the turtle seems to have given up on whatever that white thing is and moved on.

Still from a movie I took, showing the turtle emerging from the water to examine plant debris gathered around one of the dock's pilings.

Another still from the movie, showing the turtle examining the plants more.

The turtle now decided to head out. The angle here isn't that exciting, but at least I have the framing elements of the shoreline and the dock as close to the edge of frame as I can.

Before the turtle was gone, though, here's a picture of them fully underwater!

Trivia: Thomas Andrews Hendricks received 42 of the 62 Democratic electoral votes for the election of 1872 (after nominee Horace Greely, who lost, died between the popular and the electoral votes). Hendricks was vice-presidential candidate for Samuel Jones Tilden in 1876 (and lost). He won the vice-presidency in 1884 with Grover Cleveland. Hendricks died in November 1885. Source: From Failing Hands: The Story of Presidential Succession, John D Feerick.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 35: Hooray for Ourside, You!! or If They Want Rooster, Why Take The Pig Out Of The Pigskin??!, Tom Sims and Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.