Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Today was my department's holiday party, held again at the nature center near home where we'd gone in the summer. This time there was way more snow on the hill leading up to the building. Turns out the stairs were on the other side of the building. bunnyhugger had to work --- it's a class day --- so there wasn't any chance she'd attend.

So I got some store-bought hummus and brought that, being one of a handful of folks who didn't make something. Other people made, like, this Croatian bean soup or this pumpkin pie-based dessert. Or fried cheese-and-jalapeno balls. You know, Christmas food. The vegetarian options were a little thinner on the ground than back in summer but I could make the difference up in cheese balls.

And there were games, with the centerpiece being Holiday Jeopardy. As often happens with attempts to make a trivia game at home the questions were a bit sloppy. The date of the first known New Year's Eve celebration? Like, how do you define that? The office know-it-all asked by what calendar, and the exasperated question-writer just said ``the Gregorian calendar'' which added confusion since they were looking for ``second millennium BC, Babylon''. A little squabble erupted over ``the number of ghosts in A Christmas Carol''; I'd offered four, which was exactly what the question-writer wanted. The other team's head protested that Marley is the only ghost, as the others are spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet To Come, with the database guy trying to make a distinction that a ghost has to be someone who's deceased. I've never heard this before. So I lobbed a know-it-all grenade into things by pointing out what Marley shows Scrooge an unknowable number of ghosts wandering the Earth. Our team kept the points.

In the White Elephant gift exchange I came out of things with a white ... duck? ... nightlight thing. You switch the thing on and turn it on and it stays on until you squeeze it again. It's cute, but receiving it exhausts all the use that I would have for it. Some folks got cutting boards, which are less merry, but would have fit in my lifestyle better.

And then a bit of pure weirdness wandered through the building. So there's this local furry, name of Elyon Badger, who's mostly putting up signs around town proclaiming he's running for Congress and scaring the bejeebers out of the worthless Republican holding the office. Well, he was walking around the nature center with a photographer and some people with portable lights and his fursuit head. I assume it was taking photos and creating bundles of content for web consumers. He asked if he could cut through the building on the way to other scenic spots and, sure. They also used it as a spot to warm up some.

Will it surprise you to know that Elyon Badger was dressed in a top hat and carrying a cane, to the point the first people who saw him said that is a very dapper-dressed man out there? Or that he was wearing a purple suit, like he was Willy Wonka? We had at this point no idea who this was or why they were doing any of this. I walked over and spotted his collection of pride flag pins, and started to suspect things, before I finally saw he had an Elyon name badge for some reason. So, now I've seen the guy.

So, that isn't how I expected the party to go.

Back to Dolancourt, pictures that we'd have rather had at Nigloland but instead had at ...

Small river running through the hotel's grounds; this was needed for the mill, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were also used for transportation.

Looking back at the hotel grounds. We had Chambre 1, on the first floor way back near where those steps are. The towels hung on the railing are ours.

Stepping here into the slightly feral park on the grounds.

I liked the relief carving on this planter on the bridge.

There's the part of the river leading back to the mill, and the waterwheel. I could see in the breakfast room the mechanism, but without going and checking I'm going to say the photograph didn't come out at all.

More of the riverbank. On the left are steps to get down to the water level.

Trivia: Mathematical physicist John Couch Adams, one of the two men who predicted Neptune's orbit from calculation, was first educated as a child by local schoolmaster Mr Sleep, whose advertisement promised he ``challenged any man in England for Calligraphy, Stenography, or the Mathematics''. Source: In Search Of Planet Vulcan: The Ghost in Newton's Clockwork Universe, Richard Baum, William Sheehan.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 78: Irma th' 'Ermit's Youth Lotion, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

With the weather turning colder, it's finally become time to try out our new fireplace insert. I'd like to say it's everything we had hoped for, but in fact, well, we have the fireplace people coming out a week from Tuesday.

The trouble is, parts keep falling off and that's not a good operating mode for a thing that holds fire. Particularly a very hot fire, much more intense than our old open-hearth fireplace could offer. The big problem is what I believe the manual wants us to call a ventilation tube, that runs near the top of the firebox and that has a couple baffles resting on top. It's not locked in place, or something; it's very easy to knock it by accident while putting a log in and that accidental knock causes it to slide out of place and dangle across the front of the fire. It hasn't, so far, knocked the baffle off, which I believe means the fire isn't doing serious damage to the chimney, but still.

A less serious issue but one that'll need some resolution somehow is that the fan, when it turns on, hits a frequency that bunnyhugger can't stand. I don't know that there's anything to do about that, unfortunately, but maybe we can put a penny on the governor or something.

Apart from the fireplace falling apart and making an intolerable squeal, though, it's not bad. So far only bunnyhugger has made a fire, which involves a preliminary step of getting a bed of hot ashes going and then putting the logs in for the real fire. And it does produce heat; even without the fan on full there's an appreciable warm draft up the stairwell, on the opposite side of the house. An experiment with turning the home furnace off indicated that it could hold the temperature, at least, and it did not make the upstairs freeze over, the way the open-hearth original fireplace did. bunnyhugger was intimidated to go even near the fire, with the door open. I found, reaching in with oven mitts to try and put the rod back in place, that the oven mitts catch fire swiftly.

So if we could secure the good stuff and manage the bad we might have something here.

In pictures. One that I did not share was posing bunnyhugger in front of the gates of Nigloland, doing the ``Walley World is closed!'' pose. This became dreadfully unfunny a couple hours later when we learned that Nigloland was open only weekends that time of year, and our plan to spend Monday there could not have been worse-timed. This explained things like why we couldn't book the night at the park's hotel, and why in those pictures yesterday the gate in front of the hotel was closed.

So, our second day became one of sleeping in and, finally, when we'd done enough nothing, venturing out first onto our hotel's grounds.

The rear entrance to our hotel, which was at one time a working mill and became one of those pampered-resort-getaway places. We were fortunately there in the off-season so the hotel wasn't outrageously expensive.

One of the older buildings on the grounds. Yes, I too was having Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown thoughts on seeing this.

Got a snap of the menu, posted outside, in case it turned out this was the only place to have dinner in town. (It was.) Mostly, though, I took the picture because avocado toast was on it.

Hearth(?) on one of the outbuildings that we noticed. It looks like a kitchen for outdoor events.

A charming little well near the hearth outbuilding.

We have no idea what this building was, but we could see its footprint.

Trivia: The 1889 Paris Exposition had about 1,150 arc lights and ten thousand incandescent bulbs, using three thousand horsepower. The 1893 Columbian Exposition had about ten times as many, on 29 thousand horsepower. Source: Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, Jill Jonnes.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 78: Irma th' 'Ermit's Youth Lotion, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

PS: What's Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? Why was a Nazi crew on that B-17? September - November 2025 and will you be shocked, shocked to learn an OSS guy is mixed up with them?

Thanksgiving was once again held at bunnyhugger's parents, in what's looking to be our new tradition. We started out a bit late, which is an old tradition of ours. But, in a big break from tradition, we did not forget any of the things we needed to bring! Except for A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, but nobody mentioned our overlooking that tradition.

bunnyhugger upheld the tradition of taking their dog for an extra-special long walk, although this time without me. I was a little torn about this because there was a nice frosting of snow on the ground, and they're planning some dam removal and terrain restoration projects that look likely to close up the small river beside her parents' house, and I don't know how many chances I'll get to see it decorated with new snow.

Instead, I used the time to call my parents, whom I'd owed a call because it had been a long while. Also because it was my mother's birthday coming up. Also, on top of that, because my mother's been sick, enough to get put on antibiotics. By Saturday she was feeling well enough to go to church, which sounds like a great turn except for the family story about how her grandmother walked her way through a blizzard because It Was Bingo Night And She Was Not Missing It, even if nobody at church was picking up the phone and every weather person was saying stay indoors, and she contracted one of those diseases of old people in lousy weather. The lore may be false, but it is instructive.

Anyway we did get to enjoy some good time together, and so very much food. Way too much, and I had to go over and sit with my eyes closed a half-hour or so before being ready for pie. This is doing nothing to help my ongoing failure to lose weight but some days are traditionally exceptions. We ended up with enough leftovers to cover our dinners through to Sunday, and we've still got some caramelized onions, biscuits, and pie left over.

We did discover, Sunday or so, that we had way more cranberry sauce than we thought, so we could have had much more of the glaze that bunnyhugger's father likes so much. She keeps trying to explain to him how easy it is to make, but he mostly makes scrambled eggs and ice cream sundaes, so there's a participation energy gap to overcome.

With these pictures we close off what we thought would be our pre-Nigloland visit, and our long first day in France.

Another picture into the parking lot and passageway to the Hotel des Pirates and all.

That, though, we figured to be the true main entrance and it didn't strike us as peculiar yet that the gate to the hotel was closed.

And then came sheep! Grazing along the side of the park and we assume working at keeping the grass orderly.

Some more grazing. Around this time bunnyhugger noted something remarkable about them ...

Those tails! Look how long some of those sheep tails are! Who knew sheep even could have tails, let alone long ones?

And this sign, we assume, represents the city limits of Dolancourt rather than a warning that the people here are done with the city, although it must be said, in a few short hours we would feel that way about the place.

Trivia: The word ``flaw'' is Scandinavian in origin, and is related to the Swedish flaga, meaning ``flake''. Flaw's earliest recorded meanings in English, before 1400, were as in flakes of snow or sparks of fire, a small thing broken off from or detached. Source: Semantic Antics: How And Why Words Change Meaning, Sol Steinmetz.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 77: The Lost Prince of Effluvia!, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

We're on our first substantial snow of the season today. At least it's looking like it should be substantial. The forecasts had been for something like five and a half inches as of yesterday, although it's been finer and less heavy than that might sound so far. I say this before a freak bit of freezing rain blacks out Lansing for two weeks.

This is the event that got us to finally just about finish winterizing the house, though. While bunnyhugger was getting ready for the appointment to put her snow tires on I went around outside and put the storm windows up on the first floor. There's also one on the second floor, but I'm not getting up on the tall ladder without a spotter. Also this time I managed to change three of the first-floor windows without actually getting on the short ladder; who knew that was an option?

Also I finally got the air conditioners out of the bedroom. The old air conditioner, the one we finally replaced, went into the basement to wait for whenever the Board of Water and Light will have someone over to pick it up; we're getting a credit for replacing a still-working unit with a modern EnergyStar-certified one. The new air conditioner is larger and heavier, so I'd been putting off moving it. I took the mechanism out of the metal box frame, much like it had originally been shipped to us. This wasn't just a quirk of mine. This way, the unit won't be putting its weight on the flimsy plastic curtains that cover the gap between the air conditioner's width and the window's width all winter. Also, it's definitely better to install the air conditioner by putting in the box frame first and then, when that's secure, sliding the very heavy mechanism in place. After I put this away in the attic I realized I still had the screws that lock the mechanism into the frame tucked in my pocket. I should have screwed them back into the mechanism so they couldn't be lost. Instead, I put them in a zip-lock bag with a label identifying what they are and they they're there, and set them on the bookshelf beside the window, so when we can't find them come spring we'll know where they ought to have been.

No telling yet just how much snow we'll have to deal with tomorrow morning, although I've got the snow blower fully gassed up and we trust the spark plugs are still good and whatever. The forecast is for it to stay below freezing for a week at least, which is sure going to make Christmas Tree-chopping next weekend the more fun. But who knows what the weather will actually be that far ahead? We're not even sure how much of the five and a half inches of snow they warned yesterday will actually arrive.

Speaking of arrivals, in my photo roll we've left Paris and are getting to our actual destination so we could enjoy a fun time at Nigloland!

The train station at Bar sue Aube, the place from which we had to arrange getting a taxi somehow to Dolancourt. It sure looks like any old train station, doesn't it?

bunnyhugger was not confident that the taxi would actually get to us.

The street I kept peering down, hoping to see a taxi roll up. It actually came from the street off to the left.

And now, Dolancourt! Our real destination. We took a walk in the evening, despite our fatigue, to see if we could figure out how to get to the amusement park by foot Monday when it would count.

This road went back the way the taxi driver took us, and we'd seen a sign for Nigloland from the road, so that seemed like the way to start going.

And here's the sign! Hotel des Pirates is the park's own hotel and we were mystified that it was impossible to book a room for that night, but that happens. Now we just had to figure where it was; you would think it'd be easy to find the roller coasters and observation tower and giant Ferris wheel in the middle of a tiny town, right?

Trivia: While president, Richard Nixon reportedly had the White House air conditioning turned to maximum so that he could enjoy fireplace fires through the summer. Source: Cool Comfort: America's Romance with Air Conditioning, Marsha E Ackermann. H R Haldeman's diaries for the start of August 1971 note the struggle Nixon and valet Manolo Sanchez endured trying to build a fire at the President's study in Camp David.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 76: More Private Lives of a Privateer!, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

With the trip to Bronner's and now the Nite Lites 5K kicking off the Christmas season, what did we have to look forward to but the next weekend but kicking off of the Christmas season? This one looks like it might stick, since it's been a tradition of ours since we stopped attending Midwest Fur Fest. I refer to the Silver Bells In The City winter market and electric light parade. Mostly the parade.

We did stop first in the City Hall, for a bathroom break and to get popcorn and hot chocolate. Also to have a look around City Hall for what might be the last time. They finally have not just a deal to replace City Hall with a new structure but have actually broken ground and have things rising from what used to be a dry cleaners. The existing building's supposed to be renovated into a hotel and I guess that'll be nice if it works, but it probably won't be a gathering point and cheap snacks stand for Silver Bells when that happens.

The parade seemed to start even later than usual, although it was not horribly cold or windy so the wait wasn't bad. It was short on the number of marching bands --- nine by my count --- although bunnyhugger had barely got done complaining about how they seem to have dropped the best-band contest when the announcer came on to tell us who won the best-band contest. The bands all looked pretty good, none marching badly enough that bunnyhugger said anything aloud about people being out of step. And there was apparently some coordination between the bands so that there wasn't any repeating of a particular song and I don't think even the medleys overlapped much. The piece I half-remember is the announcer said one of the bands would be playing [ some 60s tune that hasn't got anything to do with Christmas or Thanksgiving or parades or anything ] and then they went and played Margaret Cobb and Bruce Channel's ``Hey! Baby'' instead. (The one with the refrain ``I wanna know // if you'll be my girl'', if that helps narrow it down.) bunnyhugger will surely remember and tell me and I'll feel foolish I forgot. [ Edit: It was ``Twist and Shout''; thanks, love. ]

The tree lighting was done before the community sing, which was anyway two quick songs that nobody sang along to, possibly because I don't know what the second song was but it didn't sound anything like a Christmas song. After that came the drone show, which has been getting a bit more interesting every year but is still basically, y'know, a drone show. For some reason a bunch of the constellations put up were themed to Wicked: For Good. Last year had a bunch of The Wizard of Oz images, in honor of the event's ruby anniversary, so I'm looking forward to this new Wizard of Oz Universe theme they've picked up for the thing. I'm a Hungry Tiger fan.

After the fireworks we went to the shopping village, which had expanded from past years by having grease trucks farther east than it'd had before. We got some veggie falafels from a truck just moments before it closed down. bunnyhugger also got a jar of garlic-flavored cooking oil from a place that we worked out has to be operating out of the neighborhood center a couple blocks from us. We've had it in a few bowls of ramen and it does add a very nice touch.

After all that --- and by then the village was closing up, as it always seems to do just as we've gotten there --- we went back to the state tree to get some photos of it up-close. We were just admiring how they don't seem to need the sort of complex wooden tresle they used to have for these trees; it just stood straight. And then bunnyhugger overheard some kids asking what that thing was and that it was a rabbit. She was expecting a wild rabbit had somehow stuck around the capital grounds through the crowd and noise and fireworks. The truth was maybe more amazing.

It was a domesticated rabbit, one on a leash, hopping around a little bit and sniffing around and eating the occasional leaf or blade of grass. An angora, which their owner explained was why they were so chill. Angora rabbits have to spend about fifteen hours a day being held in a lap and groomed, so they're used to contact --- and many people came up asking if it was safe to pet them --- and being restrained by things like leashes. We were amazed, and delighted, to meet a rabbit like this but also couldn't help imagining, gads, one excited dog and it's an awful day. The owner did say a quick bit about sometimes dogs are trouble but I guess she's confident in being able to gather the rabbit up fast. Oh also the rabbit is nine years old, which is outright old; they're doing very well getting around for being such a senior rabbit.

I won't be surprised if we never see that rabbit again, but it was wonderful encountering them at all. Made for a great way to send off the introduction to the Christmas season.

This time at the Musée I got pictures of nothing with a carousel in it. Yet is this entry still tagged 'carousels'? I don't know, it depends if I remember when scheduling this to post.

Some fairground-style attractions here now, including totally legitimate artwork of three of the caballeros and whoever Douce is.

The docent explains something about the ball-throwing gallery here.

Here's the figures that you would throw balls at,

Display of some of the ball-rolling tables with a scenic backgrop to give it a period appearance.

Something we did not get to see demonstrated, tragically: a fairground ride that gives you just a little push up and then slide back down. I feel like we saw something like this at Rye Playland ages ago but couldn't swear to it.

And, probably from a carousel, a pig-shaped mount to ride in.

Trivia: Five miles of beachfront in Russian-occupied Crimea was stripped down to clay foundation and the sand sold on the black market. Source: The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization, Vin Beiser.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 75: Grand Poobahr of Smoochistan, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Couple weeks ago I went to donate platelets. I've fallen into doing that this year, and it's kind of nice. It takes a couple hours, but they set up the TV for you to watch something and it's let me catch up on Mystery Science Theater 3000 some. Plus there's an almost unsettling number of gifts given for donating.

What takes a couple hours is that they can only remove the whole blood from you, so they do that, filter out the platelets, and return the rest to your other arm. And when I went to do that the start of this month, I had a curious failure. The needle in my left arm, taking out blood, was doing fune, but the needle in my right just wasn't making contact. The saline they were trying to inject wouldn't get into my vein and it just produced a small bruise. They tried a couple times but couldn't succeed. So I went home with a failed donation.

Thing is you can donate platelets in principle every week, and especially when there's nothing but the need for my elbow to heal up, and I went back in last Monday. Since I'd had the failure last time I figured the thing to do was draw blood out from my right arm and put the filtered blood back in my left, and give things the chance to balance. Getting the return needle in went just fine; apparently my left arm is really good for this stuff. But the right arm? They could figure where there were two veins either of which were viable but they bent off in weird directions, apparently, and while they finally got a needle into one of them, they also picked up some debris material so that none of the blood could get into the needle rather than make another bruise. The other vein might have been workable but it was too close to the already-present damage so there wasn't any using it. So that's two failures in a row and I'm plum out of arms to try donating with.

They did give me the Red Cross Pac-Man socks that are the gift for people donating platelets through to December 7th, though, which is kind.

More pictures here from the Musée des Arts Forains from our layover in Paris:

Swan-boat chariot on the the carousel with the fine steps. You can see hooks that I guess were once for reins, like a swan would let you get away with reins. That or it needs readers.

And a sheep, another rare animal for carousels.

Couple of figures on balconies that, it turns out, would move and 'sing' along to a massive organ, making this part of a huge mechanical performance.

More of the mechanism, part of a show that we got to see.

And a comic foreground, ready for you to poke your head into.

Looking back again at the carousel. You can see the sides of other chariots hug on the walls in the background.

Trivia: Shortly before accepting the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the quantum-mechanical model of atomic structure, Niels Bohr received a telegram from György Hevesy and Dirk Coster, who had just isolated the element hafnium on their first attempt, sifting through zirconium which Bohr's model predicted would have the not-yet-discovered element's closest chemical analogue. Bohr announced the discovery at his acceptance speech. Source: The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements, Sam Kean.

Currently Reading: The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, Kevin Baker.