We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

Friday evening from the discovery of the lost hat through to early Sunday pretty well sucked, so let's see how much of this I can rush through without lingering.

We discovered the hat was lost just as we were in our hotel room getting ready for karaoke. I don't know if or what I'd have sung then, but we spent enough time in the failed search for the hat that we missed karaoke, and couldn't do much of anything besides go to bed late and sad. (There was no Friday night dance, I assume because of the same events-squeezing that crushed nearly all the panels out of the schedule.)

Saturday morning at least we didn't have to get up and get downstairs for the fursuit parade since there wasn't one. There was a photo session at 11 am to make up for some of that, but we got to bed too late an in too miserable a mood to even consider it. (There was also a red panda meetup that I might have gone to, on the strength of my kigurumi, but it was at 9 am and no. The model trains meetup was also interesting but an even worse 8 am.)

There weren't many things I was interested in on Saturday's schedule, so I put the time into retracing our steps to the car and back, and all over the first floor of the Renaissance Center, and so on. bunnyhugger passed on the Jackbox games --- she loves Jackbox games but there's never enough slots for players, and the con seems to go for games like the T-shirt design one instead of something that doesn't involve sitting for eighty minutes while other people do stuff on their phones --- in favor of Left Center Right, a sticker-swap event. She had seen it on schedules in past years but never got to play.

It was, I understand, a disappointing game since there wasn't really much game to it. You roll dice and based on that pass stickers to your left, your right, or to the pot at the center --- fine so far --- until someone wins the whole pot. There's no strategy of, like, keeping desired stickers or foisting unwanted ones off on anyone, and there's no partial jackpots, just, everyone ends up giving a sticker to one person. I can see where this is probably fun to do but as a game it's not much, since the only choice you make is whether to play.

Around this time I was emerging from the hat search to text people on my phone. There were several friends also at the con, one a SpinDizzy wizard who'd been there yesterday too. We've met in person before, but a long time ago, and while they're a very recognizable person for many reasons, and were often giving updates where they were, we never spotted them. Another pair, an old friend from FurToonia and their spouse, were also there after a quick accidental drive into Canada and I, getting my communications a little late thanks to the poor Internet and somehow worse cell phone reception, was always a little late for them.

After the disappointment of learning the hospitality dinner turned out to be a glimpse of an appetizer, bunnyhugger and I decided to get some dinner. We went out of the hotel, because we'd seen several restaurants driving in, and we ended up at the promisingly-named Pizza Cat. The place was busy and noisy and we didn't feel like waiting for a table through this.

Fortunately they had a kiosk where we could design a pizza and have it made to order, ready to go as soon as it was done. We put it in, got a seat, reassured the hostess that we were just waiting for the text that our kiosk order was done, and waited. And waited. Many people, some furries, came in. Many people left. Sometimes tables were empty. Sometimes they were full. What did not come was our text.

Obviously, it was a busy night, between it being Valentine's Day and there being a furry convention across the street and down a block. But still, there should have been something, right? After over a half-hour waiting I got up to stand by the hostess station and ask her when she reappeared what happened. She did not reappear. Employees would zip past us to the attached bar, and back again, but nobody asked me what I was doing there.

Finally, finally, I went into the seating area and asked a waitress where the order we'd put in 45 minutes ago was. She said something something something heating locker and she would check something something. The place was loud, I may have adequately explained. If I have not made this point enough then let me tell you: it was loud.

And I looked over to the other end of the restaurant and yeah, there was a glass case there, like a freezer locker only hot, with two cardboard boxes plugged into shelves in the middle. I went over to that and waited a moment for the waitress, whom I infer was busier than I was impatient. Someone in the kitchen asked if I'd been helped and I said, with all my reserve gone, that we'd put an order in almost an hour ago and wanted it. He said something about the heat locker too and I saw, yeah, our food was there, with bunnyhugger's name on it.

I do not know the procedure for this and also did not care. I grabbed our food from it and marched back to the other side of the restaurant, complaining as loudly as I could about spending a freaking hour waiting for this. I think I may have warned someone putting a kiosk order in that we were getting this. We marched back to our hotel room to discover that the ranch dressing and garlic butter or whatever that we'd also ordered was not there. Also, having sat in a heat locker for however long had shriveled it all up to a dry, rubbery mass that was worth eating mostly because it was food there.

By the time we were done our friends who'd visited Canada had gt overwhelmed by how much of everything the convention was, and we missed them, this time at least.

While we had some pleasant times at the Saturday night dance --- I found the earplugs I'd buried in my messenger bag for just this occasion --- that was also an hour or so of the very loud EDM that's always played here, the kind where the DJ will talk about one more song and I have no idea how you tell one song from another.

Sunday morning closed out the general suckiness with the hassle of packing our bags and checking out. That's ordinarily just a chore except that we had to get down the 53 stories of elevator at the same time everyone else is. Do you know how many elevators stopped on our floor before I found one that let me in? Would you believe it was long enough that another woman, who'd also been waiting forever with me, was able to be the lone person squeezing into one elevator to go downstairs, do whatever she was doing, and then get back before I got anywhere but more impatient? And she recognized me?

Finally I had to give up and get on an elevator that was going up --- all the way to the 67th floor (of 69 available to that elevator) --- because contra-flow was the only way to get an elevator at all. There's some point where the elevator traffic is so heavy that your behavior has to change to get anywhere and I thought briefly about the thermodynamics of this phase shift, before remembering I hated hated HATED this whole situation and at that moment would not be sad if a meteor wiped Motor City Furry Con off the planet.

Also, I was anxious that with an 11:00 check-out time my key card might stop letting me go up to the guest room floor 53. I knew there would be some leeway, but how much? It too me 55 minutes to do one pass from room to car to room again.

There was enough leeway that we were able to empty the room out, at least, and a mere fifteen or twenty minutes after the official check-out time the elevators were down to a reasonable load, the kind where you could wait for an elevator going your way. So we had that at least.

The long, long wait for the elevators meant we missed the first half of the Sunday-morning panel, ``Trash Animals Meetup'', and while our SpinDizzy wizard friend went to that panel, they found it too crowded and left, before we got there, and we never met up with them at all.

So, you know what sucked about all that? All of that except I guess the dance and the few minutes we thought we were going to have a fresh-made-to-order pizza.

Things got better from there but again, that sucked.

Now to admire a bit of The Wild One and other roller coasters at Six Flags America.

Looking here at The Wild One's lift hill (background) and the returning bunny hills.

You can tell the final helix is extreme because I tilted my camera to make the train rise in the picture as it goes downhill.

Sign for the Musicial Hall offers Live IAZZ every night, that looks like fun.

Among the events we missed was whatever they did for Juneteenth, which I'm guessing was ``get a lot of complaints from very white guys asking if they're doing anything for the 4th of July''.

Way in back of the park is Superman: Ride of Steel, a mirror copy of the same ride at Darien Lake. Here's the lift hill and the gift shop and bathrooms in its shadow.

And the last leg of the queue going up to the ride.

Trivia: In the 1980s astronauts who were serving military officers were considered to be on a seven-year tour of duty, with extensions possible, at NASA, per an understanding between NASA and the Department of Defense. Source: NASA's First Space Shuttle Astronaut Selection: Redefining the Right Stuff, David J Shayler, Colin Burgess.

Currently Reading: The Red Planet: A Natural History of Mars, Simon Morden.