Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

Pinball At The Zoo, the competition portion. bunnyhugger focused much of her time putting in games in the Women's tournament and hit one of those walls that competitors sometimes do. She went hours on Thursday night and an achingly long time Friday not managing to improve scores. It's dangerous. The only thing everyone knows about slumps is they eventually end, so you just have to play through them, but the longer the slump goes on the harder it is to get the clear head and good attitude that make it possible to break out. The pressure that ``I have to make this a good game'' ironically makes it harder to have a good game.

She did take a little time away, to put in some games in Classics and in the daily tournament. And she did strikingly well with those: two top-twenty finishes, one of those on World Cup, which she only played one time. Her top-fifteen finish on Knockout was a game she only played twice. The only game she played more than twice was Mystic and for putting in fewer games on Classics than I did she finished pretty close to where I had.

In hindsight, she would probably have had a better finish overall if she had ditched the women's tournament and spent Friday bettering her Classics, but that does suppose that her subsequent Classics games were good ones. If she hit the same wall that she did in Women's, she'd be cursing herself out for the time wasted in Classics when she could have got into Women's with a couple good games. Maybe the hardest decision a competitor can ever make is deciding when to change strategies. It's bad to to reinforce failure, but it's also bad to jump around plans like Wile E Coyote.

Around coffee time Friday with bunnyhugger's mood cratering I grabbed her away from the tournament to get something to eat and stand outside in the nice warm and sunny weather. And we got to talk a little with that trans/lesbian couple we'd met playing at RLM Amusements tournaments a couple times. (One mentioned the other had celiac disease, but was also the person who remembered all of the first's many food allergies, so from this I infer they're on Mastodon.)

With the break, though? And the sunny weather? And the food and drink? And time with new friends? I can't say it saved her mood but she did seem to be in better shape when she went back to the pinball mines.

She didn't do anything that improved her standing in the women's tournament any. Saturday morning --- rushing to the tournament for the opening bell ahead of me (since we had two cars at the hotel) --- she went in and put in a desperate string of games that improved her standing on Swords of Fury not at all. She would not compete in the women's tournament, missing the highest-value women's tournament in Michigan for the first time in years and making her hopes of playing in this year's state's finals that much harder.

She did get in one game, in the Open tournament, on Wheel of Fortune that did boost her something like ten places; this would get her nowhere near playoffs --- she hadn't played nearly enough in open to have a chance --- but is at least a substantial improvement to go out on. This was as consoling as you imagine.

Next thing we got to in July last year was a little trip to Michigan's Adventure on, yes, a beautifully sunny day. And more amazing, one where the Mad Mouse was running and the line not too long! There's not many pictures but here's a selection of them.

Establishing shot, with my car yawning in front of Mad Mouse from the outside.

And here's the Michigan's Adventure entrance, with the gates they put up so as to funnel people through the metal detector.

Mad Mouse's station, with the view of the Abbott-and-Costello trees flanking the exit.

Here's the lift hill to Shivering Timbers, seen through the trees blocking it off.

And here's Shivering Timbers from near the launch station, where you can see that big lift hill. Also one of the monitors that they've had covered for a couple seasons, but that you can still sometimes hear play the audio of their queue entertainment, like, trivia games or follow-the-cup games.

And we noticed in the wait that celebrity fuzzy alien Stitch was getting a ride!

Trivia: Horatio Nelson rose from lieutenant to post captain in under a year. Source: To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, Arthur Herman.

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

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.