austin_dern

I'll get to March Hare Madness soon. bunnyhugger and I broke our streak of at least one of us getting into finals for the tournament, although luckily it was not our head-to-head matchup on Stranger Things that knocked either of us out.

I am dealing with an annoyance at work. They're replacing water mains or something underneath the street outside my office. And to do this they've blockaded not just the road from the obvious exit to the office, but also a mesh of neighborhood streets all around it. It's more than doubled my commute time, admittedly not a great challenge, and it means that popping out to the convenience store for lunch is going to eat up nearly all my (half-hour) lunchtime. Yes, yes, I could bring a lunch in from home but where will I get a fountain drink? It's not so dire as that; my boss has always been kind about people finishing lunch a couple minutes late as long as deadlines don't go unmet and priorities are kept, and I am excellent at this. He's not going to begrudge me being down the hall in the break room ten minutes 'over'.

There's people at work who all in jest use any inconvenience as an excuse to say ``well we should just work from home full-time then'' and the boss is tolerant-but-tired of this decision that really isn't in his power. (We have to be in two days a week and that's that, and while our department has always been good others cheat.) The extent of the road closing, though --- which might be shut for up to eight weeks --- took him and, I gather, his management by surprise so maybe there'll be movement there.

We spent only a short while at HersheyPark that Thursday night --- the park was only open a couple hours --- so this wraps up my pictures of that. Don't worry. There's so much more to come.

Part of the RMC rebuild of Wildcat was making higher its lift hill and steeper its first drop and here I show how it goes so high it's over the moon.

Close-up on some of the converted track. You can see the wood that underlies most of the structure and that apparently the red piece was labelled HP420L. HP I have an idea for, and the L as well, but the 420? Probably a distance from the start of the track.

One of the new-to-us coasters was Laff Trakk, a (say it with me) spinning wild mouse built indoors. The building has this funhouse theme; here's the path to light the Steps ramp.

The queue area has a lot of festive lighting and funny mirrors to amuse people who have a wait, which we did not.

Now we're getting near the station and the promise of what's to come on the ride: sudden face disassembly.

Here's the train (I swear, it's just dark), with a backdrop of an amusement park medieval kingdom thing.

There's queue space outside Laff Trakk's building too, suggesting they expected a tremendous rush when the ride was new. Maybe it's really packed for Halloween which, considering it's an indoor ride, it probably is.

Evening picture of the carousel.

And an even more evening picture that's from just about the same moment but frames it the lighting is more extreme.

The control panel for the carousel.

And, alas, time to leave, but here's a sign useful if it's not after park closing hours.

We were parked next to the Hershey school's stadum, which has this great ``We Have Los Angeles Colosseum At Home'' energy. I'm not snarking here; I genuinely like how these many arches look.

Trivia: The flight that became Apollo 8 was originally planned as an uncrewed Earth-orbital mission with boilerplate BP-30 instead of an operational spacecraft aboard. The success of Apollo 6 prompted the April 27, 1968 decision to fly it with a crew, Command/Service Module, and Lunar Module. Source: Apollo by the Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-4029.

Currently Reading: The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America, David Baron.

My brother had some startling news. My old boss, at the New Jersey company I worked remotely for for a decade-plus, has died. My brother didn't have word on a cause of death or anything, although given that the guy was someone who'd had multiple freak scuba-diving accidents, I suppose it comes down to hard living. We didn't think he was much older than us, but we didn't really have a clear idea of how old he was.

I have a good bit to be grateful to him for, of course. First for giving me a job when I was fresh back from Singapore and completely unable to find anything. And for giving me just shy of a decade of remote working from Michigan, on a salary adequate to needs and accompanied by so few specific expectations that it was almost the ideal of just working whenever I felt like and taking off on a weeklong roller coaster trip when I felt like. There's few people who'd do that, especially for a programmer as within-normal-boundaries as I am.

I do remember asking him, right after he announced he was selling the company, if he was well, and he insisted he was. Still, I had suspicions then, and I guess it doesn't matter now. Do wonder about the exact circumstances, though.

On to photos. Most of Tuesday was a travel day, so there's only a couple pictures of interest, and many of them are from a supermarket in Rennes where we got some dinner.

The track for Bar-sur-Aube, the direction facing away from Paris (and Rennes). I could not get over how much this could have passed for, like, the Matawan station.

In comparison here's Paris's Gare du ... Somewhere ... and the mall that spits out trains on one end of things.

In Rennes! We had the same hotel as a decade ago and they had the same crest over this stairway mirror that we couldn't quite figure out. Parsing the words was okay, but the meaning eluded us.

The supermarket had this self-service bread-cutter that fascinated me. We didn't see anyone using it.

When FurAffinity happens in real life!

And what we ended up getting, a veggie bacon sandwich called Le British for some reason and crunchy ghost snacks.

Trivia: Thomas Fortune Ryan, who organized the Royal Typewriter Company, had previously formed American Tobacco and the Southern Railway out of mergers of smaller companies. Source: The Wonderful Writing Machine, Bruce Bliven Jr.

Currently Reading: Sabrina the Teenage Witch: 60 Magical Stories, Editor Mike Pellerito.

Something I did without bunnyhugger, but certainly because of her, while she was in Kingston: go to the Jackson County Fair. She had brought a dozen photographs to enter into competition and while she would learn how they finished anyway --- I had promised to pick them up the day after the fair ended --- she wouldn't know what the field looked like. Only I could learn that and bring her the news. (It happens that when she got online that night, we weren't able to talk about it, because she had misplaced her phone and we were trying to work out where it could possibly be. She found it in the morning, in one of the places we thought likely but couldn't find in the dark.)

The Fair was set up roughly as usual, as best I know usual. The shame is that magician Aaron Radatz was not there, his stage taken up by a band playing the hits of the 80s. So we can't be suspected of low-key pursuing him by running into him (for me) a third time or (for bunnyhugger) a fourth. No; he's getting ready for the Halloween shows at ... Six Flags America, the Washington DC-area park we would have gone to had Roger's health not been so precarious. Uhm.

Anyway. I'm not sure whether they had a different company doing rides or what, but the ticket pricing was way higher than I ever expected. The Merry-Go-Round was a 12-ticket ride. The Gravitron, 15. Many kiddie rides were 9. A ticket wasn't a dollar, like other fairs we've been to, but still. It's clear they wanted everyone to just buy a wristband already, which would pay out after about three rides. I thought about it but in the end decided I didn't feel like there was anything I wanted to ride enough to get one.

The animal exhibits were the collection you might expect. I spent a lot of time looking at the chickens, the turkeys, and the rabbits, particularly, as they're the ones most interesting to bunnyhugger and she'll love seeing my pictures of them in seven months. So very many Californian rabbits, all looking in various ways disapproving of things.

Ah, but to the exhibit house, where once again the ham radio people were set up but this time I avoided because, as a bearded 50-something white guy I have no natural defenses against them. The photos were arranged on temporary walls, a whole bunch of 4-H submissions first and then everyone else's, grouped by categories I didn't know offhand. I spent a good while looking at pictures and not seeing any of bunnyhugger's, before finding finally one of her black-and-white portraits. It did not win. Some more searching and I found another black-and-white, which also didn't win anything. I kept looking around feeling how awful she would feel if there weren't a single win in this bunch when, finally, a fifth-place finish in color portraits broke the dry spell.

From there her finish was much better. She didn't do what she had at Calhoun last year --- get a Best in Class --- but she did get a couple third- and second-place ribbons, the previously mentioned fifth place, and a blue-ribbon first place. I'm not sure the judge's ... judgement, for some of these, as there were pictures she had that were clearly better than the competition. There were also some that were eerily close. Her entry in the Summer Fun category, for example, was a picture of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk's Giant Dipper pulling into the station. Entered by someone else --- who I noticed had entered even more pictures in even more categories than bunnyhugger had --- was a photo of a Big Dipper, the kiddie coaster, models of which are at many amusement parks, pulling into the station. Neither won anything.

Altogether I went around and found eleven pictures and six ribbons and ... got annoyed that I could not find the twelfth. Had I misunderstood the count? No, she was very clear when we went through the process of making the backing boards needed to mount pictures that it was twelve. Finally, finally, I found the twelfth picture, a close-up of plants, that didn't win a ribbon though a similar one get a third place. There's no explaining the judging.

Incidentally, for a vibe check, while I was only at the fairgrounds for a couple hours I didn't see anyone wearing a Trump T-shirt. There were a couple funny ones at T-shirt stands, like one about his being ``saved by god'', and there was the county Republicans booth in the vendors section of the fair, but nobody wearing colors. Which is the more remarkable because Jackson, Michigan, is one of the places with a strong claim to being the birthplace of the Republican Party.

Sunday morning I went back to pick up bunnyhugger's pictures and to look around at what the fair looked like being disassembled. Last year there was a long line, maybe two dozen people long, to pick up photos ahead of me. This year? No line at all. I don't know if they had a better scheme for organizing pictures this year or if I just got there at rush hour last year and not this.

As for the fair disassembly, well, the memento mori is the signs beside the baked-goods and vegetables stands, telling where the dumpsters are to throw out the entrants. Yes, even the prize-winning string beans (or whatever) are now, after a week-plus sitting in the air, garbage. Most of this judged-to-be-exceptional produce would not even go eaten by people. I took a picture of the sign and some blue-ribbon-winning plates but I suspect they won't want that in the photography section next year.

You know what you've never seen around here? Pictures of my workplace. Or, my former workplace, since I was relocated to a new spot. But please enjoy a couple pictures taken because I spotted a few things worth the attention.

First, a thing I could see from my desk every office day: a glitch in the Matrix regarding the Exit sign and its reflection.

Ah, but here's the good stuff. Did you know we had a The Liberty Bell in Lansing? And you could just go up to it and touch it, even knock on it to make it ring. It sounded, eh.

Here's one of the plaques beneath it explaining. This is one of the replicas made after World War II as a bond-raising activity.

Picture from the side so you can get an idea how well it duplicates the real thing, if you've seen the real thing from this angle.

As you can see, it nearly got the spelling of Pennsylvania right.

And here's the setting, in a common area in the basement, where you can have lunch or casual chats or stuff. The montage to the right is a series of photos that reflect the sun setting on Lake Michigan.

Trivia: Western Union spent US$3,000,000 between March 1864 and 1867 building the Overland Line, a telegraph cable from the United States through British Columbia, Alaska, Siberia, and Russia to connect the United States with Europe. It was abandoned, having reached Siberia, when Cyrus Field's trans-atlantic cable finally succeeded. Source: How The World Was One: Beyond the Global Village, Arthur C Clarke.

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