austin_dern

I'm not sure where I left off in the story of the mice. I mean the deer mice, the wild animals we've been temporarily housing so we can give them a ``soft release'' and their best shot at getting back into the wild and out of our living room. When she first caught the two we'd set in the cage bunnyhugger thought one of them looked pregnant. But a couple days later, the same mouse didn't, and supposed she had been mistaken.

You know what's come next. It was not a happy surprise to learn that the mouse had had babies, since, among other problems, it pushed back our release date by several weeks. The mice were exceptionally tiny balls of fluff that I never saw, but that bunnyhugger was able to return to the wooden birdhouse the adult mice set up as their nest. There's more here but it's sad and we've had enough of that.

This week, we figured, the baby mice would have aged enough to be mobile and maybe come out on their own. And Monday night what do you know but they did. I saw a little ball of brown energy and worry running on the wheel, and before much longer we saw both of them at once, plus an adult mouse, so we know we're not merely misidentifying them all.

Their great cuteness, and unexplained lack of fear of us, makes a strong case for keeping them as pets. Especially considering deer mice in captivity enjoy a good lifespan of up to eight years --- this is as much as quadruple a house mouse's --- but they would be a lot of trouble to keep as pets. Given how much emotional wrenching we've dealt with lately --- the past month and the past decade --- having a couple balls of happy little running fluff has been rejuvenating.

All going well we'll scout a place to set them soon, and release them soon after that, and they won't live to be eight years old but they'll have more than a couple square feet to be mice in, and things to do besides tear apart toilet-paper tubes and run a wheel. Why can't something ever be just the good parts?

Closing out now our visit that day to The Arcade, when the dream of a new league was a mere fancy. Now, what might be coming up next on the photo roll? We're in October, so amusement parks aren't really in season, but more pinball right after this? What could possibly happen ...

And what's this? Why somehow Velveteen the disapproving plush rabbit is here! That's great!

Here she is, encouraging you to be very tempted to hug but afraid what might happen if you do!

And here's Velveteen hard at work destroying castles on Medieval Madness. You know this is a thoughtful composition because the pinball machine is going straight up, indicating how doing well in the game is an uphill struggle.

Velveteen surveys the game floor from the balcony, where the furries gathered with food and costume gear and stuff.

And here she looks out over the decorated balcony. We can't quite say she likes what she sees, as there isn't a FunHouse below.

The Arcade hosts a lot of parties with a lot of kids who don't see any reason not to push the bright shiny button, such as the one to start a game, but also no reason to walk away once they're bored, strategies that work fine for a video game where you eventually lose your last life but that turn pinball games into a long wait of wondering where the four-player group that finished ball one has gone. This sign is definitely not a futile way of dealing with that.

Trivia: International Latex Corporation's initial, July 1965, contract with NASA was to supply two suits built and sized to astronauts Richard Gordon and Dave Scott, for a price of $89,981 total (something like three-quarters of a million in today's currency). Joe Kerwin and Michael Collins would be added later. Source: Lunar Outfitters: Making the Apollo Space Suit, Bill Ayrey. Gordon, Scott, and Collins would all fly to the Moon, though never on the same mission; Kerwin would fly Skylab.

Currently Reading: Walt Kelly's Pogo and Albert: Dreamin' of a Wide Catfish, Walt Kelly. Editor Mark Burstein.

Fresh update on the deer mice situation. Since we caught two of them and put them in a bin, anticipating future release somewhere outside return distance, we have ... not caught any more. We also haven't seen or heard evidence of any more. This seems improbably small a family but perhaps between being set in the garage, and the outside getting warmer and more pleasant, and bunnyhugger stuffing rather unpleasant metallic clutter in what seem like plausible ways to get into the house the mice outside have decided they don't need to be in our breakfast nook that much.

The mice indoors we've been keping so that they come to see one or both of the birdhouses as a safe stable home, so when we relocate them we can leave them with a food cache and they'll have somewhere to serve as a base while they set up in actual nature. They took a couple days before they seemed interested in doing anything with the house. Mostly they would, if they thought no one was around, come outside, sometimes, and hide if detected.

They've been getting a little more used to the current state of affairs. bunnyhugger got a small running wheel that we don't know they use. And found that they will chew the toilet paper off a cardboard tube, but do nothing with the tube itself. Nor with paper towels; they want the softer stuff. They have also reached a state where they're comfortable staring at bunnyhugger rather than hiding.

Today, though, bunnyhugger discovered they are not content to live in a cage until we set them loose in a couple weeks. They've chewed on the plastic surrounding one of the storage bin's latches, and if unimpeded would chew their way to freedom soon. bunnyhugger caught that, though, and has stuffed some more of that unpleasant metal stuff around the hole dug out. Also we've advanced slightly the vague schedule about when to release them.

In pictures, now, let's get back to the Jackson County Fair.

There were a variety of fairy garden displays and here's one with a large chicken or a small raccoon.

bunnyhugger looking over one of the exhibition rows while underneath a 4-H sign.

One of the larger exhibitions, a vegetable-sales stand. That's a heck of effort and money to put into a competition but it did win a blue ribbon and a payout of, I think, like $11.

The local ham radio people had stuff on display but weren't set up when we happened to visit.

Ah, but there's the second-most important thing, the rides, in the evening-to-sunset sky. But first ...

Bunnies! We couldn't miss taking a good look at the animal exhibits.

Trivia: The first airship to reach the North Pole did so in 1926. Source: When Giants Ruled The Sky: The Brief Reign and Tragic Demise of the American Rigid Airship, John J Geoghegan.

Currently Reading: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), Mark Cooper-Jones, Jay Foreman.

PS: What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Why _were_ the Grungey Boys following Mark Trail? February – May 2026 in woodsman action and such nature as Las Vegas has to offer. Enjoy!

Taking a moment from Pinball At The Zoo to update you on the deer mouse situation. We've still got them. bunnyhugger's plan is, since the garage doesn't seem to be far enough away to stop them, catch the mice and relocate them somewhere with more nature and less of a chance to return to us. Which is challenging since apparently two miles is the minimum distance you need to move a deer mouse to be sure it can't find its way back.

The catch is just set a mouse somewhere and it's probably dead. The less bad way is to give it a halfway house, some base it can use until it establishes a new one. Which means getting a space a mouse can find as an acceptable home while exploring its new climes. And, in this case then, one we can set out in a sufficiently wild place without great loss of time or money. It's easy enough get them; Michaels sells tolerably cheap wooden birdhouses meant to be craft projects and you could drop one off in the middle of the woods and not feel the loss.

But to make the birdhouse a place the mouse considers home means giving them time to see it as something theirs. And so bunnyhugger spent some of this weekend carving air ventilation into a couple plastic storage bins, and setting birdhouses in them, and then waiting for the mousetraps to catch deer mice.

She's as of my writing this caught two, the mother we'd seen earlier and what we assume to be one of her children. We think the child is female and so have the two together. If we're wrong, we're hoping that we'll be relocating the pair before this causes a new litter of mice in our home. bunnyhugger has another cage at the ready too, in case we get some definitely-male mice. But we do still have the questions of how many mice we have to relocate, and are they able to get into the house still? All we can know, though, is that we have to take care of these temporary pets and hope we end up not seeing anything suspicious for a while.

And now, let's wrap up pictures of the Fairy Tale Festival. I took more pictures but they turned out to be mostly boring, things like photos of the tents people were selling stuff from, that help me remember being there but just look like any street fair except on the lawn.

Here's the Turner-Dodge House, which this year did not have an inflatable dragon on the balcony upstairs. Maybe there was one in the ballroom; we didn't end up going inside.

They did expand on the fairy-tale festival by adding a couple scenes of other fairy tales, like the Three Little Pigs here.

Some bits of humor for the brick house. In the distance you can see the remains of the straw house, on a bed of straw meant to protect young grass.

Here's the straw house and a curiously unneeded dig against hippies. In the back you can see a pig set up in a dirt mound with a sign labelled 'Happy as a pig in mud'.

A bunch of witch-themed stuff on a Hansel-and-Gretel-themed place.

There's the front, including a prop kid stuck to the wall.

Trivia: Development work on the paraglider system for the Gemini capsule --- instead of landing at sea it would land on a runway, with an inflatable paraglider deployed in the final approach to give maneuverability --- began when North American was authorized to do so in November 1961, ahead of the rest of Gemini. Source: On the Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini, Barton C Hacker, James M Grimwood. NASA SP-4203.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement, Volume 21: 1959, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Other and sadder mouse news. We've been getting the live traps out to catch the mother deermouse, and what we suppose are children. bunny_hugger has already caught what seems to be the mother and one child, moved outside to the detached garage where they're welcome to hang out.

In getting out the live traps, though, we went to the basement to find one of the tin cats that we had loaned to a friend whose house was, a year or so back, overrun with mice. It was closed, and what we most feared had happened. A mouse had gotten in and, with no food, water, or way to escape, died. This is why we try to leave them open, ideally with some prop inside that makes it impossible to close. We don't know how we failed to notice it was put away unsafe. It's possible our friend gave it back to us closed and unaware a mouse was trapped inside, but that doesn't relieve us of responsibility to open it and make sure it's safe.

You can imagine how we feel, which isn't a patch on how the mouse must have. We buried it near our pet mice, as much kindness as we can offer at this point.

On merrier news, let's get back to Idlewild and fairy tales.

Red Riding Hood pondering whether she dares go into Grandmom's house, which is inducing a delay that's probably just making things worse.

Well, there's the wolf dressed up as Grandmom and in her bed so I suppose things can't get worse than this.

Some more scenes set up but the centerpiece here is an American Elm tree, like you never see anymore. Trust me, that's what the sign on it says.

Here's the Seven Dwarves, of Snow White fame.

And their house. Yes, there's seven little chimneys coming out the top.

And here's Jack B, the nimble one jumping over a candlestick. He doesn't seem to be unscathed quite.

Here's a clock that has both a mouse running up and down it but also one that pokes its head out as the hands rotate.

You can see the other mouse at the base of the pendulum and also see they made their own choice about spelling 'Hickory Dickory Dock'.

Here's a pretty solid Humpty Dumpty. The wall looks like it's ancient, although that probably actually means they rebuilt it from scratch in May.

Here's Old King Cole, with pipe and bowl.

And here's a talking tree; there's a speaker in the mouth there and it reels off, if I remember right, a bunch of tree puns.

The giant keyhole I think is tied to Alice In Wonderland/Through The Looking-Glass.

Trivia: It's estimated that in 1849 Americans ate about 139 pounds of pork per capita. By 1889 this had dropped to 119 pounds. Source: Down To Earth: Nature's Role in American History, Ted Steinberg.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, September/October 2025, Editor Kristen Brennan.

Crystal died sometime today. bunnyhugger found her in the evening, when it was time to give her medicine, curled up inside the little wooden mouse house. It looked like she just stopped, one moment, and that was the end of a sweet little white mouse. It's fortunate her decline wasn't harder, or longer, or worse.

I don't know, have some Hershey Park photos I captioned before finding this mouse news out.

So ... ZooAmerica. Technically a separate attraction, but buying a Hershey Park admission buys you admission there too. So we took some time from the amusement park for that.

We got a hand stamp! Well, a wrist stamp. You can already see it sweating off of me.

The bridge over there is happy to greet you with animal puns.

That's the bridge back to the park, in case you wondered how to get back.

Up first, the Reptile House. Do you see a reptile in there?

Not sure why birds get in the reptile house but you know, ``reptile'' doesn't really have a taxonomically coherent definition and I think ``bird'' is pretty shaky too.

Venus fly traps! You know, just like fascinated you in second grade but you never actually saw because they grow naturally in like one-tenth of an acre of North Carolina and the second they're taken out of that environment they die and people keep plundering them because who doesn't want a plant that eats insects?

Sign telling us why we aren't seeing skunks and say, have flower names become the default idea for naming skunks? Is this Bambi influence?

Some animals of the southwestern United States here. Pretty sure the green round thing on the left isn't an animal though.

Tell me honestly: would having a heat lamp and a craggly stone to lie on fix you?

The big enclosure plus a historical photo of the same enclosure but from the 30s, where it looks ... surprisingly similar, really.

Oh, and then what might be over here, in the southwestern desert after dark?

Trivia: Apollo 8's S-IVB booster was, after translunar injection, sent into a solar orbit, with apehelion of 79.770 million nautical miles, perihelion of 74.490 million nautical miles, inclination of 23.47 degrees, and a period of 340.8 days. Source: Apollo by the Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-4029.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 88: Pappy the Beatnick!, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Yeah, we've finally reached 1959 and I don't know what Noelle is going to do when it reaches one of the select stories that King Features reprints in the endless Popeye reruns it has on the web and theoretically to newspapers, if any newspapers still run Popeye.

Since setting that deer mouse outside Sunday we'd had a nagging doubt. If she were pregnant, and had a nest of babies inside the house, would she get back to it in time? We listened for the peeping of needful baby mice but heard nothing, but if the mouse were any good at her business it would be hard for interlopers to notice them.

Yesterday bunny_hugger noticed in the live trap that she had meant to disable the evening before that the deer mouse was back in it. (Or one looking just like her, anyway.) So she was able to get back into the house and was apparently not shy about traps. And she was even more obviously nursing, albeit not at that moment. So, we set her back loose; she can have the three weeks it takes to wean baby deer mice to live here in comfort before they have to go back to the garage. Which, since by then it'll be warm --- I note yesterday morning it got below freezing for the first time in a week --- they'll maybe stay outside.

If they are there, since we of course lack a needed clarity. The trouble is bunny_hugger spotted the mouse in the afternoon, and deer mice are normally inactive during the day. I didn't hear the trap spring; I thought I heard some rustling around but since I didn't see anything I didn't suspect anything but loose paper by a heating vent. If the mother mouse was trapped from, like, the night before then her babies might have gone without nursing too long to survive. But if she'd been in the trap for only an hour or so, what is a mouse doing prowling around the middle of the afternoon?

So we can't know for sure until we see a large and a small deer mouse together. Our pet mice, being an incredibly different species, able to offer no advice.

In Dutch Wonderland pictures now, I bring you a ride I went on by myself, as bunny_hugger could not be paid to endure it. What ride is that? ... Lock your guesses in please and then enjoy me ...

Starting on the Sky Ride. The miniature railroad is underneath in the corner of the picture and I had seen them stop the Sky Ride so the train could unload and reload passengers and move on.

On the Sky Ride, watching Merlin's Mayhem going through a helix.

Here I look down and can see my feet totally on top of Merlin's Mayhem's track! That's how perspective works, right?

And a picture looking down from above Merlin's Mayhem's track.

Here's a view looking down the lift hill for Merlin's Mayhem and catching the ride almost ready to dispatch.

There's the carousel looking like a toy.

And here's one of the flat rides that I think we passed on, but it's one where you lie down and experience flying.

From above, Merlin's Mayhem's loading station and gift shop don't look hardly themed at all. You can see the monorail station in the background.

View from above at one of the booths with animated marionettes inside. The people there are looking at the quilting bee, I believe.

In the distance here's the Fun Slide, or the Nuf Edils backwards, as well as much of Kingdom Coaster. Also a barbecue place where I think we got a drink refill at one point.

View into one of the performing venues, this one used for diving shows. There happened not to be one when I took this ride; I believe in the 2010 visit I happened to get a picture of someone diving as seen from the Sky Ride. The blue tower is one of the Sky Ride's support towers.

And we come to the end of the Sky Ride, over another performing space with a show we didn't catch a trace of.

Trivia: As early as 1914 Anheuser-Busch's executive committee considered removing German names from their beer labels in the United States. They did remove them from bottles sold in Australia and Canada. August A Busch took to wearing an American flag button in his lapel. Source: Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent. Gustave Pabst's son, meanwhile, enlisted in the Marines.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 87: Nonny the Equine Genius!, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Oh, this is the story introducing Burlo, the evil twin of Bluto that you totally ever heard of before! And he ... doesn't actually have a lot to do with the story because it turns out the Popeye comic strip survived like 80 years before finally getting a writer who had any idea what to do with a story after its premise came out.

In more other news, we've got a mouse. Not one of the authorized mice who're expected to be here and cared for and all that. But some wild mouse that bunnyhugger heard, and then saw, running across the floor apparently unaware that they're being incredibly obvious. We've had mice get into the house before and we know the rough procedure. bunnyhugger got out some of the live traps and went through the extremely fiddly process of getting them ready.

The one possible complication: what if this is a mother mouse? It's easy enough to relocate one to the garage, but getting the mouse pups with her would be a problem. But, no way to know until we catch them and check their underside. Also no way to know that it's just one mouse, and not several that bunnyhugger has seen one time each.

In the Dutch Wonderland pictures we approached Exploration Island, but have we explored it yet? No? Well, let's see if we don't fix that today.

Here's what you'll find on Exploration Island: dinosaurs!

Oh, yeah, I should specify, animatronic dinosaurs so just in case here's the fire extinguisher!

Exploration Island, as it is, isn't more than a dozen or so years old so these trees have to predate that. I don't know what the island was used for before this.

As ever, seeing dinosaur stuff these days mostly involves me learning there's all kinds of new names of dinosaurs I never heard of before with names I'm not going to remember.

Ankylosaur I know because a sound clip of an automated voice reading ``ankylosaur'' is used whenever the Greatest Generation podcast hosts realize they don't know how to say a word.

Now these guys I know. Animatronic Calvins!

Aw yeah, Stegosaurus, you can't have dinosaurs without these guys.

This one was neat because you maybe see the silvery panel on the right there? There's a bunch of buttons you can press that activate the connected gear, and so you actually make the dinosaur do things. You can get surprisingly lifelike movement with just a little practice!

I don't know the Shunosaurus but it looks like it's been ordered to stay in its little box there.

I know nothing of the Psittacosaurus but you can see the Turnpike ride behind them, and vice-versa.

Here you see a little better the Turnpike auto, and also a cow that's not animatronic but just a Turnpike prop.

The sign means both physically and emotionally touching the dinosaurs. Keep it professional.

Trivia: Gus Grissom and John Young's Gemini 3 was the last American crew not to wear the stars-and-stripes on their flight suits. Source: Gemini Flies! Unmanned Flights and the First Manned Mission, David J Shayler.

Currently Reading: Inspired Enterprise: How NASA, the Smithsonian, and the Aerospace Community Helped Launch Star Trek, Glen E Swanson.

Our elder mouse Crystal turned two years old today! Notionally, at least. We don't know when she was actually born, but it's the anniversary of taking her home and we were told she was a year old then. So, she's made it a healthy lifetime for a house mouse, and we can hope she has a nice stretch of bonus time.

When I left pictures off we were walking the long way to get to The Phantom's Revenge. And how did that turn out?

Finally, we get to The Phantom's Revenge station. Note the Phantom whose heart you walk through to actually get on the train.

From this spot you get a great view of the Turtle, a decent view of Thunderbolt, and in the distance, a view of Steel Curtain.

Here it's all Phantom's Revent and Thunderbolt, though.

We had some great light for pictures that day. Here's the back end of the roller coaster station.

And looking out from the exit queue on the Black Widow, a Giant Discovery pendulum ride that I've been on, without bunnyhugger.

Huh, wonder what ride this sign is for.

Now over near the kiddieland is still the Snack-A-Saurus snack stand proudly using the Jurassic Park typeface. There is a fossil dig attraction nearby so this doesn't come completely from nowhere.

I think they just didn't have the correct sign to explain why the ... Dizzy Dynamo(?) ... ride wasn't open and put up the ``weather is bad'' excuse and were bluffing.

Crazy Trolley's another kiddie ride we watched several cycles for. It swings a lot like a Moby Dick ride, though smaller. We also noted the Kennywood Arrows there are the older style, fitting the trolley styling of the ride and the picture behind of old-timey folks at the park.

And Leo the Lion's a paper-eater trash bin.

The park explains the history of the Kiddieland, along with the mildly surprising news that this is at least the second Kiddieland.

The kiddie Ferris wheel, which they got in 1924 and so goes back to a previous Kiddieland arrangement.

Trivia: In 1966, to meet the processing requirements of Medicare, the Massachusetts Blue Cross/Blue Shield --- which claimed to have the first fully computerized Medicare in the nation --- had to begin renting time on a second IBM 7070 computer, with employees driving a car packed with decks of cards to Southbridge every evening to run overnight and drive back to Boston in the morning. Source: A History of Modern Computing, Paul E Ceruzzi. They had bought a 7070 in 1961.

Currently Reading: Joke Farming: How to Write Comedy and Other Nonsense, Elliott Kalan.

And now a spot of happy news! It turns out Crystal, our mouse, isn't dying of cancer at the advanced age of maybe two years. It turns out she's just old. Also fat.

bunnyhugger had the veterinarian's appointment, early in the morning, while I went in to another office day at work. And it turns out the vet doesn't think there's anything particularly alarming at work in her innards. To make sure we could get a CAT scan done but for obvious reasons we don't want to put her to that stress.

But she has gained a lot of weight. Something like ten grams, which doesn't sound like a lot until you remember she started at 48. So, she has to stop getting so many snacks, which may be a self-solving problem as the young mice don't see any reason they shouldn't have treats we give her more.

One treat we do have to give her and her alone, though? Everyone's favorite arthritis pain-manager, meloxicam. The catch is that it's hard to give an injection into a mouse's mouth that doesn't threaten shoving it down their lungs. So we're looking to trick her into eating it, by soaking the meloxicam into a bit of bread. This has caused us to realize we're not sure Crystal has ever had a bit of bread and so she doesn't know whether it's a treat. Bread smeared in peanut butter, though, peanut butter being the food mice love as much as cartoon mice love cheese? She's not sure she likes that either. But also impairing things is that we took her out of her cage to put in the travel cage and feed her there, and that's circumstances that put anyone off their diet.

So we have to figure the best way to get medicine into mouse on a regular timetable. If we're lucky she'll come to see it as a special treat she and no other mouse gets to have and maybe that helps her feel not quite so aching and toddling. If not, well, we're old hands at doing stuff for our pets' good that they don't see why we're bothering them about.

Have some more pictures now of Oostende, the far point of our trip on De Lijn and where our last full day in Europe started to end.

Public art outside the train station, a couple concrete benches along with statues in case you want to sit in a faceless person's lap.

Somewhere over that way was a lighthouse. It didn't seem near enough to visit, especially behind fences like that, so we can't say we got any credits with the North American Lighthouse Society European League.

I think it's lovely they have a whole ship channel dedicated to the Mercator projection map!

We figured on the cathedral as the thing to walk to while we were out there and heading up that way discovered a tattoo parlor.

We didn't get anything this time but we were delighted by the Popeye, Betty Boop, Flower, Minnie Mouse, and ... Snuffy Smith For Some Reason ... tattoos they had on offer.

Serious things to ponder on a car painted to look like a late-evening sky.

Trivia: The traditional 753 BCE date for the founding of Rome is generally credited to the calculations of Marcus Terentius Varro, 116 - 27 BCE. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

Happy birthday, dear bunnyhugger.

With the hour of early admission we got we headed first for Top Thrill 2. This rebuild of Top Thrill Dragster officially opened last year, but spent all but parts of two weeks down for Problems. After a shaky start this year it's been running decently, but we were in the strange position that we had ridden the next coaster --- Siren's Curse --- before we ever got on Top Thrill 2. We hoped this Halloweekends to ride Top Thrill 2 at all, and to ride Siren's Curse at night, and to save you many paragraphs, we succeeded.

Now to give you those paragraphs. When we got to the Top Thrill 2 entrance --- an oval, like you're entering a portal but without being transformed into sehlats or something cool --- the queue sign promised a wait of 0 minutes. This seemed optimistic but we figured it couldn't be too bad. The coaster, like Siren's Curse and Steel Vengeance, allows you to have nothing on but your clothes, and has small lockers you can put stuff in for free. So we tucked everything away, went through the metal detector that confirms you didn't keep anything on you but your metal belt buckle, and waited in a line maybe twenty minutes long. We realized we hadn't ridden Top Thrill at all since before the pandemic began and maybe not since 2018, if not longer ago. And we had a nice chat with some people near us in line about just what was changed and how it might be different.

The big difference is that instead of one huge burst of speed getting you up the top of a 420-foot tower, you get three bursts of speed, one getting you a fair bit up the top, then fall back downward and get another burst of speed sending you up the reverse spike, then fall back forward and get a last burst of speed to hurtle over the top. There's minor differences that I like. Particularly, you load in the station on a track that switches into the main back-and-forth segment, so that a train can launch while another loads and a third unloads. This combined with the nothing-in-the-pockets rule mean it can handle people really fast and that promises to maybe keep the line going well.

And the ride ... well, the acceleration is nothing like what the original Top Thrill, or Kingda Ka (RSVP) had. It is strikingly like what Wicked Twister had. (Though Wicked Twister's top speed, about 72 miles per hour according to the Roller Coaster Database, is what Top Thrill 2 manages in a single burst.) But it also adds these moments of being vertical --- facing upward, and then facing backward --- and floating, hovering weightless in the seat waiting to fall back down. Weightless moments haven't been in fashion for roller coasters for a while, but Top Thrill 2 and Siren's Curse both feature it and wouldn't work without it. I'm really glad to have it again.

If that weren't enough the top of the hill feels faster than Top Thrill Original offered. Certainly you feel more like you're in danger of being thrown out of the seat which, by the way, doesn't have a belt. Just a sort of barebones cage around you that nevertheless feels quite secure. bunnyhugger tells me this is because the new trains ride higher on the track than the old, so there's just this extra burst of centripetal acceleration on the top of the hill and, particularly, on the spiral as you start heading back down. It feels great.

The new Top Thrill is a remarkably better ride than the old. In many ways it feels like the good parts of Wicked Twister merged with the good parts of Top Thrill 1. The old Top Thrill we were content missing if there wasn't a short enough line; this, I think we're likely to find reasons that the wait isn't too long for us. There will be a sequel to this essay, don't worry.

Next up? ... Kind of a slow spot for photographs, actually, even before I lost my camera at Motor City Furry Con. Our next big event was getting our first pet mouse since Fezziwig's death and the first pictures are of her arrival.

When Crystal first arrived she quickly set up a small, uncovered nest to figure out where she was and what might possibly be safe. So we got to enjoy a few rare moments of a mouse curled up unprotected.

Here she is, making almost as small a bundle as she knew how.

That's not to say she can't be long!

Meanwhile Athena didn't see what all the fuss was about when it wasn't about her.

She takes a curious sniff and listen at my camera.

And she decides she's out of here. Bye!

Trivia: In 1540, Vannoccio Biringuccio summarized the explanation of how gunpowder propelled projectiles: fire took up ten times as much room as air, air ten times as much as water, water ten times as much as earth. So when earthly powder turned to fire, air, and moist smoke, the elements immediately expanded, exerting pressure on the ball. Source: Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics: The History Of The Explosive That Changed The World, Jack Kelly.

Currently Reading: Comic books. And speaking of reading the comics ... What’s Going On In Prince Valiant? Why is _Prince Valiant_ in reruns? I give disappointing answers to this and more!