austin_dern

So last night we settled down to watch The Flophouse's live FlopTV stream when I saw something running on the rug in the living room, and I called it out: ``Mouse!'' One of our pet mice was running loose.

What had happend was the mice were running one of their wheels and it was squeaking just this small persistent bit. Rather than listen to that noise through the event, or take the time to oil it, bunnyhugger grabbed the wheel out of the mouse's bin and set it on the floor, and told the mice she'd make it up to them later. It was a couple moments after that I saw the mouse running around.

I got up maybe faster than was wise and tried to catch the mouse. In this I was a little helped that the mouse was surely confused as all heck about what was going on, and also carefully exploring and retracing her steps to the one thing she was sure existed, the running wheel, so she wasn't making distance as fast as she could. bunnyhugger --- who at first thought I was talking about a wild mouse that had got into our house --- told me to throw something over the mouse, which yeah, was the right way to catch her. The only thing I could find was the Christmas tree skirt that we somehow hadn't put away yet, but, I dropped that on the mouse and didn't see anything escape from it, so that was good. I peeled the skirt up and got worried when I didn't see anything underneath, but finally found the mouse, turned upside-down, feet caught in the fabric of the skirt. The important thing is I could grab her safe and sound.

I handed the mouse --- one of the brown ones that turns out has grown up without our being able to tell them apart --- so bunnyhugger could apologize to her. And she did, but took a moment to admire the bits of gold in their fur that we never get to see. She also, more sensibly, took a moment to count the mice in the pen, just in case it turned out she'd accidentally taken two mice out. Everyone was where they belonged.

A wild accident, of course, and caused by our just assuming that the mice, who ordinarily skedaddle as soon as anyone reaches for them, would jump off the wheel when it was picked up. Either the brownie mouse was feeling brave or was so confused by the wheel being picked up that she didn't notice, and with our having the lights out for the podcast event we didn't see her until she was having her rug-exploration experience.

Good episode of the Flophouse's FlopTV, too.

These pictures are from our anniversary, yes, but more important they're from Six Flags America, now closed for good unless something bonkers happens. Let's look.

The parking lot! Which was more empty and more shaded than we expected, but don't worry, it was still a million and forty degrees.

Welcome to Six! The theme park based on the hit Broadway musical telling the story of the wives of Henry VIII!

Oooh, Six Flags America, I see. The park traced its origins to the early 70s which is why it looks so American Revolution in architecture. It also looks so much like the original midway from Great Adventure (opened 1974) that I felt like I was back in New Jersey a while.

Just inside and hey, look, a replica Liberty Bell! This is two we've encountered at amusement parks, neither of them in the same state as the actual Liberty Bell.

The main midway, with a couple of gift shops and stuff like that. We never did found the souvenir we really wanted but there were places to search.

And oh, did you know June 30th last year was National Ride Operator Day? Well, it was, and we celebrated it by riding things.

Trivia: On joining the International Olympic Committe's five-member executive board in 1921, Sigfrid Edström (who had competed for Sweden, running the 100-meter sprint in the 1896 Athens games) countered the traditional Scandinavian opposition to separate Winter Olympics Games by letting the IOC patronize the Wintersports Week held in Chamonix, France, in 1924, which have since been recognized as the first Winter Olympics. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle. He also fought against compensating athletes for the time spent away from work as that would ``open up the floodgates'' to lower-class professionals. The IOC eventually agreed athletes could be compensated for their expenses for up to 15 days. And let's not get started on how weird he was about women in sports.

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

Meanwhile some happy news, on the mouse front. Crystal, our mouse coming up on an estimated two years old, whom we feared was in her last days a couple weeks ago? She seems fine. She's wobbly, and fat, but she's becoming more tolerant of being yoinked out of her cage to be sat down in a travel carrier with a bit of meloxicam-infused sugar cookie, and some days she doesn't even try to bury it to never be bothered with the thing again.

Question that bunnyhugger has raised, and that we can't answer, is: is she happier now that she has three other mice sharing the space with her? On the one hand, female mice are social creatures and it probably feels good to have something you understand to interact with. And we do see that, like, they all nest together. On the other hand, she is old and the three sisters are young and energetic and you can almost see her closing her eyes hoping this nonsense quiets down. And we had to start taking her out of the bin to give her medicine because when we give her anything, anything, another mouse comes along and grabs it. It looks like bullying --- occasionally she even peeps in protest --- but she also doesn't try getting it back, maybe because she's aware that another treat will come along while other mouse is busy eating the first.

On the whole my guess is she's probably happier having the constant stimulation of creatures whose activity she understands, as opposed to waiting around to see whether whatever the heck we are have come to drop off food or hay or are just grabbing her for no obvious reason. As mentioned, we do see they nest together and they don't fight worth mentioning except for the pistachio incident. Just hope she's enjoying things.

Something anyone can enjoy? Kennywood, and even more specifically than that ...

Kenny Kangaroo running --- running, like kangaroos can't do --- over to position for some photographing.

And there's the photograph being taken, by Kenny's handler of hanging out in front of everything.

Wouldn't be a Kennywood visit without going to the century-old Jack Rabbit! We believe the neon has been replaced with LEDs simulating neon, but, well, that's better than losing even the styling of neon.

Also wouldn't be much of a Kennywood visit without getting to Thunderbolt! Here I remember that I can zoom in to make a more dramatic picture than the very reasonable safety barriers would allow me to do.

A twenty-minute wait for Thunderbolt is reasonable and yet by specifying it's 21 minutes I'm forced to wonder about the algorithm that's giving dubiously sensible precision.

Spare train on Thunderbolt which has got riding in it a large husky plush and, looks like in front of them, a carton of doughnuts set on the train's floor.

Trivia: A year after the end of the US Civil War some 2,778 of the roughly nine thousand post offices in the Confederate states had been reopened, but 60,000 of the seventy thousand miles of post roads were re-established. Source: The American Mail: Enlarger of the Common Life, Wayne E Fuller.

Currently Reading: Archaeology, November/December 2025. Editor Jarrett A Lobell.

So, some sad pet news. It hasn't happened yet, as of this moment, but it's coming soon. Tucked behind a cut for people who don't need bad pet health news in their day.

On a cheerier note, how about some Plopsaland pictures? Still on the train ride here.

Nice view of the outside of Heidi: The Ride that the train offers. This sort of banked turn is a signature move of maker Great Coasters International.

Goats! Or goat statues, anyway. We're getting near the Heidi launch station.

And here's the train stop for Heidiland. The train you'll note is billed as an 'Express' even though it makes every stop.

T-rex statue visible from the train ride.

And the tail end of that brontosaurus you might have seen in other pictures. (I forget if I included one that showed it at all.)

There's a dinosaur threatening people who go down the log flume, which is a great way to juice a log flume up a bit.

Trivia: Toyland, Fred Thompson's amusement-park project for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, was not complete until six weeks after the Exposition opened, and ran to something like $278,000 in cost, despite meeting almost none of Thompson's design goals for the site. Less than a week after its opening other investors were ready to close it. Source: The Kid of Coney Island: Fred Thompson and the Rise of American Amusements, Woody Register.

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

The dye that we hoped might help us tell the brown mice apart has worn off, so we're back to thinking one of them kind of looks bigger than the other so that's going to tell us which is which? Maybe it'll be more obvious as we have more time with them.

Meanwhile Crystal, the elder mouse, I watched monkeying around climbing the wire mesh of their cage so she's at least feeling young yet.

That's not a lot to say about what's going on today so please take a double helping of pictures from the Silver Bells Electric Light Parade.

Hager Fox, which does heating and air conditioning, was one of multiple floats to have a Grinch.

And here's the big inflatable Hager Fox!

And here's a festival queen of something or other with plenty of lights around.

The giant rotating head of Ransom E Olds watches the crowd.

And then here's a Wizard of Oz float for whoever did that.

The slippers seem bigger than they appear on-screen.

And this robotty figure is somehow tied to ZapZone, which the pinball map tells me is the nearest place to play the Hot Wheels pinball machine.

Here's eternal favorites the Petoskey Steel Drum Band moving in! You can tell I took a video because the aspect ratio is changed here.

Now imagine this picture but the whole truck is bouncing up and down with the beat.

A small flurry blows through and does nothing to impair anything but maybe one picture of the night.

Sad to say Metro Lansing's only got the one roller derby team but at least it has a purple roller skate float.

And here's a glowing cow. I think this is the one for local convenience store chain Quality Dairy.

Trivia: Señor Wences performed as a juggler until the management of his theater (the Casino Theatre in Buenos Aires) decreed that only acts not requiring musical accompaniment could appear, so he adapted a ventriloquy routine he had last performed in school eighteen years before. Source: The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Anthony Slide. He'd picked up juggling as a way to rebuild his hand strength after a bullfighting accident.

Currently Reading: BBC History, July 2025. Editor Rob Attar.

When last I reported on the mice they had just got a couple new toys, a bridge and a balsa-wood house. They still have them, and they're enjoying them a great deal based on how they're burying them and using them to hide from the world. They also have a couple small plastic igloo-shaped houses that they keep turning upside-down, so they're more like a bird's nest than a sheltered area. They've done this consistently enough we have to suppose it's a deliberate choice and I think bunnyhugger has given up on trying to set it right.

But they have something new as well. bunnyhugger was satisfied that they were not fighting, at least not seriously, and had settled on what they figure their social arrangements should be. And so that encouraged her to put in the sort of toy that mice might fight over. That is, of course, a wheel, which every kind of animal, not just mice, turns out to like.

The mice took to it quickly, like you'd expect, particularly with the brown mice doing a lot of running. At least one of them was taking to it, at least; we haven't figured how to tell the two apart. We might have to wait until they're grown more and hope some clear difference shows up. But at least one of them would build up a lot of speed and then stop running, letting the momentum spin them around. We don't know whether that's a deliberate choice or just a failure to understand momentum yet. But it's also easy to suppose they find that fun.

Which made it odd that after a day or two they stopped running the wheel. Investigation revealed that they'd gotten paper caught in it, keeping the wheel from spinning freely, and once that was moved mice were back on the wheel and doing well. Besides the brown mice we've spotted the grey one. We don't have a confirmed sighting of our original, white, mouse on the wheel. I know I often saw her running the wheel when I got downstairs at like 7:30 am, but since it's been only a couple days since she had the option I haven't had the chance to observe whether she is running in the morning. I'll have more on this mouse activity stuff as it comes to pass.

Now let's look at a thing that has passed, photos of Marvin's in our November visit. Don't worry, there's another to come.

One of the mechanical contraptions, the ``Michigan Anteater''. I forget whether it was actually working which leaves me wondering just how it was that it didn't hunt well.

A head of Elsie with the explanation that cows have two stomachs and use cud to aid digestion.

bunnyhugger coining up on Attack From Mars. And why was she doing this at this moment? That will be revealed shortly.

Some of those old Chuck E Cheese figures. I forget their proper name and also the name I gave them in jest like a year ago so I won't bother calling them anything.

Another of the Chuck E Cheese figures. They aren't operating at Marvin's.

And this isn't Chuck E Cheese but rather FunHouse's Rudy as the Three Stooges.

Trivia: The United States Lines shipping company was formed in 1921 by the United States Shipping Board as a government-owned corporation. It was sold in 1929 to the P W Champan Company, which soon defaulted, and the government had to foreclose. Source: Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed The World, Brian J Cudahy.

Currently Reading: Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent.

bunnyhugger informs me that I was wrong about Crystal having somehow moved where her stick was hanging. She had moved it for Crystal so the mouse could more practically get at some of the last bits of its treats. Well, she's still an industrious mouse, hard at work on whatever her goal is exactly.

Past that, no time to write because it's been a full weekend. Please instead enjoy a more-than-double dose of pictures from the 3rd of July last year.

Back at her parents' home, setting off store-bought fireworks. Surely nothing bad can come of fun little displays like this?

And here's what a similar shower looks like in the Fireworks mode on my camera.

A couple shot up way high and my camera didn't know where to focus.

And some got up high enough and colorful enough to draw applause!

I have no idea what happened here. I know it looks like a forest fire in the distant hills but I swear, somehow this is just me photographing some ordinary consumer-grade firework, possibly while my hand flinched while the camera was in Fireworks mode or something?

Another shot I can't explain but isn't that something to see? I wonder if I was trying to get a weird wavy trail from the Fireworks mode.

I don't know what I could have been doing in any mode to get this portrait of the Little Dipper wrapped in flames.

From the ``Taco Tuesday'' incident; the mishap of one of the big fireworks being lit sideways.

So I had run over behind a fence when I saw what was happening and I couldn't talk my camera into focusing right, but I think that makes this scene look the more real, even though it really happened like you see here.

Returning now to fountain fireworks but set up correctly so you get a reasonable display like this instead.

Same sort of view but in portrait and with a couple big balls of light among them.

Can't tell you what happened here. I can't figure any flinching of my hand that would make sense for this.

And here's a photograph of WindSeeker showing off its night livery --- er --- sorry, just a firework going up way high.

Another firework nice and high up with the long stem showing how it got that high.

Trivia: Gold discovered in 1858 in the mountains of western Kansas led to a gold rush, with something like fifty thousand outsiders suddenly setting up in the west and, among other things, pressing for Kansas to have a western border of 103 degrees west longitude (which would be in line with what is now Oklahoma and Texas's northern panhandle). Pre-existing Kansans, not wanting to see political control shift to the new miners (or to deal with regulating mining towns) kept the current border, 102 degrees west. Source: How The States Got Their Shapes, Mark Stein.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 58: Let Us Look To Lettuce, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

First, some rabbit news. With Athena not being all that interested in eating again she got a vet visit. This was during my office day at work, so bunnyhugger, on her Spring Break, took her in.

The verdit is we don't know why she hasn't been interested in pellets. It turns out she has some points growing on her molars, the kind of thing that could be an early stage of malocclusion, teeth missing each other in a way that makes it painful to eat. Which would explain her not eating, but is inadequate to explain why she's happy to eat hay and vegetables and treats and cardboard and wood and power cords. The gastrointestinal incident would explain her not eating, but not why the disinterest in eating has lasted given she's definitely not still in it. She's far too energetic (and her droppings too healthy) for that to be the case.

So with medicine once more giving way to idiopathy we're left with some guesses. The first, to Athena's great relief, is that she's off Critical Care. The vet thinks it's not likely to be giving her nutrition she's missing, and having the food shot into her stomach might keep her from feeling like she needs to eat anything. Also, she hates it and if we keep force-feeding her she's likely to seek revenge. She is going to be getting some shots of the gut-motility-increaser, three jabs a day in the scruff of her neck. But while she tenses up at that she doesn't get stressed by it, and she's quick to forgive of that insult to her dignity.

In the meanwhile, she's got a couple days to start eating pellets before another follow-up. And she did eat some pellets when she got home. Just not all of them.

Second, some mouse news. bunnyhugger had opened Crystal's cage to give her a treat and then, distracted by something or other, forgot to close it for an hour or more. Had we lost our mouse? There was an excellent chance we hadn't, since her cage is on top of the rabbit hutch, four feet or so off the ground, and mice do not go plunging into the unknown depths if they can avoid it. But sometimes there isn't any avoiding it, and if she were feeling unusually adventurous she could climb down the hutch or to the record player tower beside it. All we could do is wait and see if we'd ever see her again.

Or we could go looking, and bunnyhugger decided on looking. She poked into the lair Crystal has made of the bedding material in her cage and found it surprisingly solidly packed, resistant to the damage of her fingers intruding. And then that there was at least one empty space inside, with the soft feel of a mouse suddenly having a very annoyed day in there. With the mouse proven to have stuck around bunnyhugger stopped her intrusion, and left a treat, that Crystal was in no mood to stick around for. Pretty sure if there were any more litter left to use she'd have used it to build an even more impenetrable fortress by now.

Very likely that, originally, Crystal had taken the treat and retreated to her lair to eat it or cache it, and never went back to discover the door had been left open. But we can't rule out that she didn't explore how far she could go outside and then returned to the safety of home, rodents being as they are fond of checking back in at home a lot after exploring a tiny bit away. So, we have a mouse who's at least happy enough with where she is to stick around there.

You saw yesterday me closing out the last pictures of our Tuesday at Kings Island, so what was there to see next on the photo roll but our Wednesday at Kings Island. Here's how it started:

Parking lot shot. The Kings Island sign you can kind of see in the middle is about where we parked the night before, to give some idea how much busier it was even though it was early in the day. Mind, the day was also 2,850 degrees Fahrenheit and muggy.

Near the bathrooms up front and about the same location where I took those photos of the guy photographing the reflecting pool that you saw yesterday.

There was a staff-members-only door open nearby and I got this view of the Hall of Fame, which they appear to expect will be expanded upon.

Sculpture of Don Quixote alongside the International Midway. bunnyhugger found that it is based on a specific real Don Quixote sculpture but is, remarkably, not a copy. Just a variation on the idea.

bunnyhugger goofing around with Don, possibly pleading with him to leave the windmills alone, they have enough problems.

The German/Bavarian area of the park has dwindled to an Auntie Anne's, but at least pretzels are a German thing. (There's a few other spots but the original premise that there was a touch of World's Fair to the place is all but gone.)

Trivia: The Dutch West India Company in 1630 chose as its main base in the New World a set of delta islands on the Brazilian Coast, on which they would build Mauristaad, modern Recife. Source: A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, William J Bernstein. (By 1654, with the Portuguese revolt against Spain, the Dutch colony was taken over by Portugal. Which seems odd to me as the Dutch were busy revolting against Spain themselves at the time.)

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 56: Uss vs Themm & Thees & Thoos!, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle. Done with Yapple versus Napple and we get to ... somehow ... another College Football Season story?

The most startling thing about ERR's obituary, now that we've read it, is that none of the sides of him that we didn't know from personal experience were at all surprising. If we'd been asked to guess about other aspects of his life the only thing we would have missed was 'builds his own Halloween mazes for the neighborhood'.

In other news it was time at last for our new pet mouse to have her first vet's visit with us. I wouldn't go with her and bunnyhugger to the vet, because of work. But I would be the arch-villain to grab her and put her in the plastic carrier; I'm content to be the bad guy for our pets.

Though she'd been out and about just an hour before it was time to go, she was hiding, locked up tight in her nest, and uninterested in coming out even for the promise of a treat. So I had to go to extreme measures: ripping litter off the top of her nest and sending her fleeing, as she should have, through her secret tube into the plastic tunnel leading to an upper level. From there I was able to stuff her into a cardboard paper tube and drop her into the carrier.

I'm told that at the vet's she peeped in a sad display of surrender terror at being picked up by the scruff of her neck. But climbed across the vet's scrubs when let go of this, and took and ate a treat without complaint. She got a clean bill of health and the recommendation that we weigh her every couple weeks to see if her weight changes from its current 47 grams, as the most available diagnostic of something going wrong.

Going wrong from the mouse's perspective: when she got back she was not deposited back in her cage. This because it was already due for a cleaning and while she was in the travel carrier was the best time for it. So after a day of having her nest ripped open, being trapped coming out of her escape tunnel, being put in a tiny carrier, being held by the scruff of her neck just like she had been grabbed by a hungry eagle, being dropped back in the carrier and left long enough she started building a little nest of that, she was deposited back in a pen where the nest she'd finally got to be nice and secure was demolished completely and her food cache gone.

It does leave me wondering whether she thinks she had a really lousy day, or if after being held as if by a predator and instead getting to live and getting a bunch of treats she feels like she just had the luckiest day of any mouse's life.

Now to a lucky day, Dollywood without having to wait much if at all for stuff:

A break in the trees lets me photograph the graveyard while the foreground whips past rapidly.

And another break lets me photograph people hanging around one of the coffins at the lower end of the graveyard. Remember my photograph of that scene from the ground?

People on the ground waving up at the train. Also you can see that wooden aqueduct again.

Here's that giant can of beans seen from the wrong side. But they did put a back on the label, probably for the audience on the train.

Security gate drawn across the walkway for the train to go past. The park person's waving at us.

And looking across the train at the setup there. I believe this is all part of the Country Fair section, with Lightning Rod the roller coaster in the background.

Trivia: After the solar eclipse on the 11th of January, 1880 --- observed from the United States's Pacific Coast, mainly, when the sun was only 11 degrees above the horizon, and totality lasted only a half-minute --- rumors spread that the intramercurial planet had reappeared. The two ``professors'' who had supposedly seen it --- George Davidson of the US Coast Survey and Edgar Frisby of the US Naval observatory --- had not seen a Vulcan and, in fact, because of cirrus clouds near the sun saw no bodies except Jupiter and Mars. Source: In Search of Planet Vulcan: The Ghost in Newton's Clockwork Universe, Richard Baum, William Sheehan.

Currently Reading: Why War?, Richard Overy.

The first of bunnyhugger's panels this busy year at Anthrohio was Friday in the early evening. (I failed to put in any panels.) This was the Bunnies Meet and Greet, a slight shift in names from the Species/Special Interest Group/Gathering, yielding on this point to the change in common terminology. She also hoped to shift her plans for the meeting some. Usually she's done a round of everyone introducing themselves and then some trivia questions, rewarded with cheap bunny toys, and then prompting things rabbit- and hare-related to talk about. This time, she planned to relax on programming every minute of the panel and instead let folks get up from their seats and go around talking to each other instead. This has been the pattern at more Meet-and-Greets, earning them that distinction from the SIG name.

The room was packed, like every panel this year was. Not quite to crowds lined up standing on the edge of the room --- which up to an hour before had been Artists Alley, causing several people to step in and be disappointed --- but near enough, and far better than her usual turnout. (Granting her usual panel is scheduled for like Sunday at 10 am when nobody has woken up.) Not everyone was a rabbit but most everyone had some rabbit connection, including a good number of people with pet rabbit stories that avoided getting into sad pet rabbit stories.

bunnyhugger did toss out a couple of trivia questions, not so many as she usually would. Besides trying to schedule things less aggressively she also had fewer prizes to give away. She hadn't had the chance to raid stores just after Easter to get bunny-themed clutter on 90% off. The best thing she had left --- a cheap pair of bunny ears on a hairband --- she'd had to try, briefly, to wear, when it appeared that she had forgotten to bring her usual walking-around-the-convention ears. They turned out to be in my bin with my ears and tail and kigurumis, left over from Motor City Furry Con where we'd taken things off and forgotten about them. (She also had her headband, the small ears with a little crown, that she wears as Queen of the Morphicon Bunnies, but the headband snapped and it was beyond repair with what we had in the hotel room, despite attempts.) So the giveaways were fewer this round.

bunnyhugger worried that the just-get-out-and-talk part of the night wasn't as good as other people's panels had been. I don't see it myself, although things were less raucous than the panel that immediately followed in the same room, and that bunnyhugger had to excuse herself for to change her outfit. Coming back down in her peacock kigurumi she went from panelist to simple attendee of the Avians Meet and Greet.

This was a packed, standing-room-only house, maybe reflecting that there's more birds, or at least bird suiters, than you think at these things. It may also reflect that they gave away treats, small boxes of popcorn and gummi worms. One person wearing a raven beak was able even to pick this up in beak and toss it up where he could get it in his human face, if not his mouth. It made for a convincing illusion of eating, though, and eating bird-style.

Several people complimented bunnyhugger on her peacock kigurumi, and I'm glad for it. I don't remember people introducing themselves to the group as a whole, but I'd had to step out for something or other myself and might have just missed my chance.

Over the rest of the evening we did find the second of the cryptid not-necessarily-the-letterbox stamps, and I had the idea to stamp them in my letterboxing book just after the video game room closed, temporarily removing the stamp from it. And bunnyhugger jumped into the Friday night Jackbox Games panel, struggling against the crowd to get into a game at all, and to get into one she might like playing. These Jackbox Games panels at cons always go to the one where you design T-shirts which, she observes, involves about four hours of waiting around before the audience gets to do anything, and then wild hope that someone comes up with a T-shirt drawing that's recognizable as anything and a saying that makes for a joke. But it keeps getting picked by crowds so they must like it. I don't believe she ever got into a game Friday night, but there'd be other Jackbox sessions.

If there's a disappointing side to all the stuff we got around to doing it's that we got to the dance late in its progress. It might have been as little as 15-20 minutes that we were there, which isn't the worst we've done at least. It had been a very full day, though, and if we didn't have enough time at the dance I did not feel like we had wasted any important part of the time we had.

I know you're wondering what's next, pinball tournament or amusement park. The answer is neither: it's a street fair! But before we get to that ...

Mouse. This creature spent a couple days running along the side of our dining room, and then like a week or so running around the humane trap; you can see the combination of popcorn and peanut butter was finally enough. We set them out in the garage where we trust they had an unbothered winter surrounded by not-snow, not-predators, and sunflower seeds falling out of the bird and squirrel feeder buckets.

But here we are at the fair, which included over 3200 vendors selling barbecue and like two places selling things vegetarians might eat (fries).

It may have been a barbecue-themed food festival, really, but you get some idea how many places were set up and how packed it was.

The main drag of downtown was blocked off for --- I suppose it must have been Homecoming weekend; it'd be daft to schedule the fair otherwise. But the streets were lined with vendor tents for a solid quarter-mile or so, both sides.

Center of town! The bar-restaurant on the left is somewhere we'd often go to eat with bunnyhugger's parents, at least back before the start of the pandemic, and we're a little amazed it's stayed open despite the pandemic and the intrusion of hipster restaurants that offer less food for more money down the block.

Movies at the sidewalk theater. I assume The Nun II is a movie, at least, but if you told me it was a band performing I couldn't dispute you. Also we were happy to see they're still doing Rocky Horror midnight shows for events like Halloween.

Trivia: In May 1943 Bell Labs president Oliver E Buckley, speaking on the Bell System's Telephone Hour, introduced the American public to ``radar'', speaking in general terms which revealed nothing but the word about how it worked. Source: Telephone: The First Hundred Years, John Brooks.

Currently Reading: DC Comics Cover Art: 350 of the Greatest Covers in DC's History, Nick Jones. OK, but I do like the gentle covers, like Superman delighted by the geese flying under him, or Batman and Catwoman on a movie date surrounded by Batman cosplayers, or a Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen of Jimmy on his scooter, in the air, held up just by the arm of Superman coming from above frame. Which may all have nothing to do with anything but are endearing and evoke those goofy Golden Age covers where, like, Batman and Robin and Superman are playing carnival games to sell war stamps.

Grand Rapids Pinball League is starting up again. It's the first major Michigan pinball league to hold events since the pandemic started. This is legal, given the loosening of rules about open crowds. It's maybe even not terrible, since the venue --- the Pyramid Scheme in Grand Rapids --- is able to open nearly its whole front to the open air. (It's a former firehouse.) And since concerts are off, many of the pinball machines were put around in the event space, arranged in a flower-like order so that nobody has to be anywhere near anybody else. I'm not figuring to attend, not before Kent County's daily-new-cases rate (the past week, 11.7 cases per 100,000 people per day) drops by at least a half from where it is now. I understand the desire to Get Back To Normal but, jeez, pretending that things are all right does not make them all right.

The announcement that they were starting up made everyone ask when Lansing Pinball League would start. bunnyhugger does not like being pushed to make statements of that kind. But absent an announced plan, people might figure they don't need Lansing Pinball League to run events, especially as nothing is going to be sanctioned by the International Flipper Pinball League for the known future.

So, her decision, which I endorse. We won't start before the 1st of July, which is when the current plan is to lift indoor-gathering restrictions anyway, because everyone is just hoping the pandemic will go away in thirty days. But we're also not going to hold events unless the seven-day infection rate around us is low enough. That low we set at 5 cases per 100,000 people per day. Although, to admit how things are changing, when we set that last week that seemed like maybe the best we could realistically hope for. The rate in Ingham County the past seven days, according to CovidActNow.org, was 5.2 cases per 100,000 people per day. With an infection rate of 0.64, or, rapid decline. We haven't been this low since late summer last year, when Michigan State moved to online classes but too late to actually stop students from gathering in East Lansing.

If we still had the mask mandates I'd be feeling really good about this, like we might get down to 1 case per 100,000 per day. Or even the ideal of zero. We had four days in a row of zero cases in June of 2020 (the 15th through the 18th), but that was back when we were trying to stop the pandemic.

Anyway, people seem to have accepted the Lansing Pinball League plan, and I admit it would be really nice to step back in to the bar and play some games. And if the pandemic continues on the trend it's had since mid-April we'll be able to. But I look at the loosening of pandemic restrictions and think of Odysseus's crew, seeing Ithaca on the horizon, figuring this would be a great time to rip open those mysterious bags surely containing treasure, because what could it hurt?

Back to pictures from May; hope you enjoy.

Our tulips hurrying through the part of their life cycles that make them so appealing to us.

And looking into the backyard. The great dead patch on the right is the shells of spent sunflower seed shells, tossed out by the squirrels.

Our pond, and the upper pond, un-netted since we don't have most of the fish out yet.

And a lovely flower beside the water-filtration tub.

Dragon and bench which mark the spot where past rabbits were buried.

The rabbit sculpture is just there. The mouse sculpture represents where we buried Fezziwig.

Mouse statue there to mark Fezziwig's location. There's also a large flat stone underneath that, set down so as to keep animals from sniffing around the disturbed dirt and finding his corpse. Since this photo was taken in early May, the myrtle around has grown enough to obscure the statue.

More flowers and the fence behind them.

Currently Reading: The Thurber Carnival, James Thurber.