austin_dern

When we got up Thursday I discovered the shortage of conditioner, a problem as my hair is now long enough to need special care and maybe an animal wrangler. We happened to leave our room just as a housekeeping person was going into the next room and asked for a refill. She gave us a bottle. They have the system where there's bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and body lotion in a mount on the wall. I couldn't open the mount without assistance but figured we can put it on the shelf there. Briefly I thought about just taking the bottle in case another hotel was out, but thought, eh, what are the odds of that? One hundred percent it turns out.

Since we wanted to get to the park for opening we had got up early enough to also grab breakfast. Not to eat at the hotel, but I scooped a lot of scrambled eggs onto a bagel and, given the time it took to get onto freeway driving, long enough for this to cool into a hand-manageable egg sandwich. Really good plan here and I made two for myself the next morning. The drive to the park was a bit longer than the drive from the hotel we had used in 2019, but it also gave us a longer view of the approach to the park.

Then it turned into a frustration dream. The satellite navigator gave directions, like it does for Michigan's Adventure, to the management office of the park. This took us onto a small road with the gate entrance in view and the sign that park attendees should use the entrance on Jane Road. OK. I followed the sign, supposing this would take us to the exit we should use, and it spat us back onto the highway at exactly the intersection we had turned off the highway. So I continued on the way we had been going and we saw the amusement park receding behind us.

I drove into a parking lot while bunnyhugger searched for the Jane Street entrance and yeah, it was back the other way. It turns out that both of us, watching for the entrance to Canada's Wonderland, had missed seeing the left turn we should have taken. I grant my flaw in trusting the first thing I jab on the satellite navigator to be the right thing, but I still think they might have cleared things up with a couple more signs. Ah, but now that was all cleared up and we could park.

Then it turned into a frustration dream. This started, as often does, innocuously, with one of the parking lot toll booth lanes a little shorter than the others, one car instead of three. It will not surprise you to learn this one car was having some complicated issue with paying for parking. After a great while of talk the gate attendant handed the credit card reader to the driver, who handed it back, and then after a wait ... the gate attendant handed the credit card reader to the driver, who handed it back, and then after a wait ...

This went on four or five cycles and bunnyhugger began to fume, from her own frustration and from sympathetic embarrassment for the person who was having some awful credit card-related problem. But finally they cleared up their issue and drove on, moments before I was going to back up and go to another lane, and we happily handed bunnyhugger's Platinum Pass, good for free parking at any Cedar Fair chain park, to them.

The attendant told us the card was from 2019. No, I explained, we last used it here in 2019, but we renewed it for this season. And bunnyhugger and I both remembered this one time in 2014(?) that Kings Island was having inexplicable trouble with our season pass and we had to go to guest relations to get it sorted out. (It turns out these incidents might be related.) We're accustomed to a little trouble with our cards, since they are now ten years old and have, like, a different bar code and even number scheme than the modern cards do, but we don't intend to give it up until they force us to. It's possible they were going to force us to.

Finally and after a wait that felt like karmic retribution, the card worked and we were cleared to go in. But the attendant recommended we check with guest relations to be sure there's no trouble with our cards. We were confident, though, since we'd already used the cards at Michigan's Adventure and at Cedar Point this season.

Then it turned into a frustration dream.

I have an awkwardly slight number of photos of Livonia Spree left to share. You know what? Let's share them all. Here they go.

The Roundup ride had the name Zero Gravity and a sign that did not look at all sketchy or low-rent.

Super Cyclone rising toward the evening sky and looking good for it.

Swinging claw ride --- which we did not ride --- against the setting sun.

Sure hope that cloud of black smoke behind was supposed to be there. There were several puffs of it and then it stopped. It seemed to be coming from some kind of carnival-related building, although since the area was fenced off there was no guessing what. The smoke stopped, is the important thing.

And here's the midway, seen from the Super Cyclone platform, in that twilight glow.

Looking back at the line for Super Cyclone, to the right here; it runs up to and bumps against the Balloon-o-Rama attraction. Still, it was only maybe twenty minutes or so.

Swamp Gator was a kiddie coaster and I just liked the ride art with its bug-eyed furry style.

See what I mean? Aren't those cute animals?

A last look at the carousel; I tried taking a tracking shot as it spun and this one came out.

Trivia: The 1868 botanical guide Gardening for the South, or How to Grow Vegetables and Fruits, claimed that garlic caused the patient to sweat, leaching out disease the way bloodletting would; and also that ``the juice is good cement for broken china''. Source: Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine, Sarah Lohman. (Lohman's experience did not agree about the broken china.)

Currently Reading: An Awkward Truth: The Bombing of Darwin, February 1942, Peter Grosse. I appreciate the guy's tone of going back and forth over bits of evidence and record and why he comes to these particular conclusions about just what happened (which is, as you might expect for a chaotic event at the far end of the organized world, confused). Not being snarky here; I appreciate his laying bare why he finds one source more credible than another.

Our trip began with a traditional prelude, that of bringing our pet rabbit to bunnyhugger's parents. We spent the whole day there, naturally, eating too much and getting a heap of leftovers we decided to save for an easy meal the day of our return. (And then ended up not eating until the day after we came back, because it was too hard even to reheat that many leftovers.) We made another try at that Mice and Mystics bonus chapter and failed again. And bunnyhugger worked on getting her father's new, not-2G, phone set up. If I reconstruct his issues rightly, he couldn't set it up himself because he got partway through the tutorial it gives you when you first turn it on and then gave up. (Laugh if you want; I have to replace my 2G phone before the end of the year myself and am not looking forward to it.)

Our original itinerary was to drive from Lansing to Toronto, then from Toronto to Rochester, then from Rochester to Sylvan Beach (near Syracuse), and drive back from near-Syracuse to Lansing in one day. That last struck me as a little bit too far, even with bunnyhugger driving relief. So we rescheduled: Lansing to Toronto, then Toronto to Sylvan Beach, then Sylvan Beach to Rochester, and for the last day, Rochester to Niagara Falls to home. Apart from the Rochester-surrounding legs all these would be drives of five or more hours.

I got my antidepressant prescription filled the morning we were to set out. Its instructions warned about drowsiness being a side effect. Mm. I know hese are not guaranteed effects, but that's still ominous. So that's how I chose to take my daily pill at about midnight. If it added to my drowsiness, I still can't tell; it takes a couple days to recover from a trip like his anyway.

Novel to us was filling out paperwork ahead of going to Canada. Part of the faded remnants of Covid-19 fighting is that Canada demands the filling out of ``ArriveCan'', a declaration that one has been vaccinated and has no known symptoms or recent exposure, and a plan for what to do in case one must quarantine. This has to be filled out within 72 hours of entering the country, which presented the interesting problem that we planned to enter twice, once last Wednesday and once again on Sunday. We could fill out the Wednesday one already, but the Sunday one we couldn't do until we were already in Canada. In the event, we actually filled it out Saturday and there will be a follow-up to that.

The actual driving ended up unremarkable. At the customs checkpoint going into Canada the officer turned away our printed-out ArriveCan receipts, telling us they were linked to our passports anyway. All right. Did ask us what was going on in Canada, which is the sort of open-ended question I don't really know how to answer. Like, I'm aware Ontario recently had a provincial election won by the Make People Suffer party but it would be very suspicious if an American knew that. We offered, tourism, Canada's Wonderland, and felt the need to explain that we like riding roller coasters. Customs person also asked what we do for a living and I ended up over-explaining how I'm hoping to get a web development job again.

But the drive was all about usual after there. Our first rest break stop in Ontario ended up being, I believe, at the same rest break stop we picked when we visited in 2019, although this time bunnyhugger noted the existence of a working pay phone. She's joined a Facebonk group looking out for working pay phones, and while that one is specifically for Michigan phones, she imagined Ontario would be of some interest. I don't know how that's worked out for her. We got to our hotel room in early evening, found a Thai restaurant that wasn't yet closed, and brought dinner back to our room. There we discovered we didn't have any plates, so ended up spilling various curried sauces on the table on my own pants, but, you know, dinner. We were in a good spot to spend as much time as we could at Canada's Wonderland the next day.

Here's more photographs of Livonia Spree and the unexpected delightful surprise at its center.

Piglet racing! Each of the piglets had a name that was something punny, but I didn't have the time to write any of the names down. All were cute, though.

After the second race the PA played ``Who Let The Dogs Out'' and we had a race of wiener dogs wearing hot dog costumes, which was as funny as you'd think.

One dog really didn't feel like running and so puttered around in costume.

Piglets jumping over the obstacles of a later race.

Wiener dogs, not in costume, trying the same trick.

One dog got mixed up and started running the wrong way around, to the crowd's approval and delight.

Trivia: John Watkins Brett, who financed and oversaw the first submarine telegraph between the United Kingdom and France, was a retired antiques dealer. Source: How The World Was One: Beyond the Global Village, Arthur C Clarke.

Currently Reading: An Awkward Truth: The Bombing of Darwin, February 1942, Peter Grosse. The header says ``Special 75th Anniversary Edition'', by which they mean the 75th anniversary of the bombing. The book was first published 2009.

PS: How July 2022 Treated My Mathematics Blog, or, somehow I am suddenly popular in Romania?

It hasn't been much of a secret that my mental health has been like this lately. After a particularly dire conversation following my rejection for that Columbus job I wasn't even sure I wanted, I promised my mother I would see my doctor about whether my depression is bad enough to need treatment. I could not live up to this: my doctor was booked up for several weeks. But there was another available, last Tuesday, and that meets the substance of the promise.

The verdict is, yeah, I need something. The prescription is for a month's worth of antidepressants, and also for counseling. The antidepressants I got Wednesday and started taking then. The counseling I need to find yet; I wasn't able to last week, for reasons that this journal will shortly make clear. They provided a bunch of local counselors and information about what health plans they work with and what ones they don't. But it is darkly funny to give some depressed introvert the challenge of calling a bunch of strangers to try finding one who'll work with their insurance company.

The heck of it is I am feeling better now, worlds better than I was three weeks ago. That's surely too soon for the antidepressants to have an effect; again, events which will soon be revealed may explain some of that. And even if it is the antidepressants, well. I also remember being on a small, private, traumatically awful muck whose residents spent so much of their time talking to each other (not me or bunnyhugger) about how sure, every one of their previous prescriptions wore off after a month or two but this time they've got the one that will keep them feeling great for ever and ever. Still, I could hardly turn down a month or two of being normal again.

My fundamental problem of having no income or savings left is still there, and if anyone wants to toss me a couple thousand dollars it'd do me a world of good, although not for ever and ever. I imagine something will turn up, and supposing that something will turn up is a big step forward, must admit.

So the next batch of pictures? Technically not an amusement park. It was a county fair --- well, a city fair that's pretty hard to tell from a county fair. Join us now in June at Livonia Spree 70, celebrating the 72nd anniversary of the incorporation of this Detroit suburb.

We arrive at Livonia Spree for a Saturday evening of fairground attractions!

The promise of the Wade Shows: the Greatest Carnival on the Planet.

And here's the thing we most wanted, the Super Cyclone. It's a travelling coaster and would have been bunnyhugger's 250th coaster, when we visited the Spree in 2018, had the ride not been closed by the time we arrived the spree's last day. Instead, it is her ... 282nd?

Super Cyclone's train reaches the top of its lift hill.

Among the neat things about the carnival were lamp posts like these, which look like the decommissioned center posts of flat rides. We don't think they were, but they had a bunch that were all similar. We haven't noticed their like anywhere else, though, so we don't know if it is old rides or if someone makes carnival lamps that look like old rides.

So what's your favorite fairground refreshment? For me, it's the Sluhies.

Trivia: Hennig Brand, discoverer of phosphorous, sold the secret of its extraction to Dr Johann Krafft of Dresden for 200 thalers. Source: Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements, Paul Strathern. (Strathern doesn't say when the sale happened but Brand discovered the secret around 1669; Johann Kunckel and Robert Boyle independently found ways to extract phosphorus in 1678 and 1680 respectively, so that's about the time we're looking at.)

Currently Reading: Images of America: Seabreeze Park, Jim Futrell.