Word Salad II

Last Thursday came the event we'd known we needed to do, but also kind of were okay letting slide indefinitely. But the weather Friday was forecast --- and proved to be --- utterly impossible for what we needed, heavy rains not letting up for hours. This would be the day that, at last, we released the deer mice.

bunnyhugger had scouted out a spot in a not-too-nearby park, one which had a decent amount of shelter from the sky, was not too far from water, was also not too close to the river, and seemed like somewhere we could hide the couple cheap wooden birdhouses that the mice had been using as nests. So we drove them down to the park, walked the quarter-mile-plus to the spot, and then loosely taped cardboard covers over the holes to their houses, where they were definitely holed up waiting for whatever frightening thing we were up to to pass. We wanted the cardboard over the doors so they would have to chew their way out, and so that they would not immediately look at their new surroundings and panic. That's the sort of thing that gets fresh-released rodents killed. Instead, the birdhouses are meant to be stable enough starter lairs, places they can return to for reasonable safety, while they explore the terrain and find a spot that's okay enough.

The locations also turned out to be near altogether too much poison ivy, so when we got home we slathered this stuff that's supposed to repel the ivy's oils and took showers. I've at least not gotten anything noticeable, and while bunnyhugger got a mild case she noticed from her scouting, it hasn't grown worse enough to complain about, at least.

So we set the birdhouses out --- the girls one we had a spot immediately ready; the one with the lone male we actually had to do some last-minute scouting because turned out there were fewer good spots than we expected. (We didn't want them set next to one another in case they don't actually get along.) We set down caches of food, and bowls of water, and even some bits of toilet paper since they so enjoy nesting with that. And set down branches and pieces of bark so that the houses are, if not fully hidden, at least hard for a casual human walking the trail nearby to notice. We know some things from letterboxing that come in useful here.

The disappointing thing is we never got to see the moment the mice emerge into their new lives, ones we hope fulfilling and natural enough to make up for them being much shorter than if we just kept them as pets. bunnyhugger noted that it's possible given the maximum lifespan of deer mice in captivity that they could outlive our pet rabbit, if we had kept them; and, now, that won't happen unless catastrophe strikes Athena.

The next day it rained heavily; possibly the first time the adult mice --- certainly the first time the babies --- experienced it. We hope we've done something that will be good for them.

On to less ambiguous stuff. Join with me now in more explorations of the Cedar Point Museum, roommates with the Merry-Go-Round Museum and filling up slightly more than the Merry-Go-Round Museum's main event space:

1972 Cedar Point-branded calendar --- looks like they closed Labor Day after a buyout day --- and a couple 'credit cards' from the early 90s that aren't explained. I'm going to guess something for park employees to use in the cafeteria or something?

Cedar Point resort newspaper for September 1898, a time when Kennywood was barely a plan for a dining hall.

New York Central club excursion ticket for the park. Also some tickets for specific rides on the right.

A 1910 dance card. The program seems to be alternating waltzes and two-steps, neither dances I could do.

Used to be you could just get anything in glass with the year on it.

Is that one of the horses too valuable to leave on the Frontier Carousel that's since been moved to Dorney Park? No, this is a replica that they have because of reasons. But I spent time looking for evidence.

Trivia: Formosa (Taiwan) adopted a time zone based on the Greenwich meridian in 1896. Source: Time's Pendulum: The Quest to Capture Time --- From Sundials to Atomic Clocks, Jo Ellen Barnett.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, May/June 2026, Editor Erin Bartels.

Monday was the day to return home, and we could enjoy sleeping in a bit since check-out was a luxuriously late noon. This is not to say we had everything out of the room at 11:59 am, but we were tolerably close. There were still a lot of people bringing stuff out of their rooms as we checked out; it wasn't like the old days where we'd see Punk Cat and nobody else. (Also we never see Punk Cat anymore; hope they're doing all right.)

We've sometimes done specific things on the Monday after Anthrohio. Letterboxing (where we saw a wild rabbit flop and realized why they do it), or going to the Olentangy Caverns, one time even the Columbus Zoo for the segment that used to be an amusement park. We'd talked about maybe doing the Zoo again, since the roller coaster had reached an anniversary year and it's been like a decade or so. And one time we took the long diversion to Cedar Point to get some amusement park time in; would you believe we got all the way into June without any amusement parks this year?

But when it came to making the decision, you know, we decided we didn't feel like doing much of anything. The zoo we expected would be packed --- it was sunny and not too hot --- and it's a bit pricey to go in for only a couple hours and not even see most of the animals. And other stuff didn't seem that urgent and we didn't bring our letterboxing gear anyway. In the end it felt more appealing to get home instead.

So, we went to a Skyline Chili for vegetarian five-ways --- first time we've been there in ages --- and headed north, making more stops than we did on the way down. Since we had the time we stopped at bunny_hugger's parents, to give their dog the extra-long walk she'd been denied Thursday, and to tell something of what all we had done, and finally to collect our rabbit and the deer mice. With that, it was but the work of an hour to drive home and, neatly, we reached the end of our backlog of Greatest Generation episodes just as we were pulling in to town. It's rare we're caught up like that.

Tuesday, I could return to work, and bunny_hugger could return to summer vacation, apart from the pinball stuff.

Pinball stuff will wait. Now, some pictures of the Merry-Go-Round Museum's roommate, the Cedar Point history museum.

They have so much Cedar Point ephemera, and it's not stuff that used to be in the Town Hall Museum. Here, for example, cans for discount admission from back in the sad days of Cedar Point being a Pepsi park.

Here's a 1907 letter by that G A Bockling sending a railroad line the Annual for that year. There's also what seems like a budget broken down by department, which makes it look like they were spending a lot on cigars in the day.

A century-plus old season pass, and a book of pictures of the park.

A life jacket from the days that a ferry was the only way to get to the park.

Back in the 90s Cedar Point was all ready to name a roller coaster Banshee, and then someone looked up what a Banshee was and they panicked and renamed it Mantis. So there's a little display of the not-used Banshee stuff. (Kings Island, owned by the same people, named a roller coaster Banshee, but that was literally over twelve years later and in the southern part of Ohio, not the northwest.)

Here's a copy of the memo ordering all Banshee-themed merchandise destroyed. If you zoom in you'll see, I'm not joking about ``someone looked up what a Banshee was and they panicked''.

Trivia: 44 percent of the 12,889 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration members in December 1946 were women. Source: The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War, Ben Shephard.

Currently Reading: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen.

Sunday opened up with sleeping in, which I know it sounds like we did a lot but bear in mind we were up to the end of dances and sleeping is nice. But there wasn't anything to get up early for except bunny_hugger dropping her sketchbook off at Artist Alley --- something she could do just by throwing on a kigurumi and going downstairs, a blessing of staying at a furry convention hotel --- and the inflatables meetup at 10 am that, oh, going to bed after 3 am I wasn't ready for.

So when we got up after noon we went to hospitality for a couple quick snacks (they'd be closing at 4 pm, before even Closing Ceremonies), and then another pass around the Dealers Den before going to the Theme Park Furs panel. This is usually held by the same person who was doing karaoke the night before and turns out he wasn't there. Substitue people whose names I didn't get were there and explained the original host had some emergency come up. So the panel, which usually is a bunch of this guy trying to pull up his on-ride videos (taken with GoPro glasses or something so it's not quite as reckless as you fear) instead turned into an open discussion mostly among the people who had worked at amusement parks. Mostly Cedar Point and Kings Island. I never had the chance to pipe in with my ancient and non-ride-operator experience at Great Adventure.

This did let us hear a bunch of fascinating gossip about little park stuff, mostly misbehaving riders. There was a hilarious one of the ride operator seeing security confronting people he'd called them for, over having their phones on the ride; the rider tried insisting there wasn't any rule about not taking the phone out on the ride and the security guy wordlessly marched over to the sign and pointed to that rule there in print. Like a movie. Then there was someone who, they claimed, somehow squirmed their way out of the restraints of a coaster stopped on the lift hill and walked down saying just, he gotta go to the bathroom, bye. You can understand while also wishing you had video of him doing it.

Also the most fascinating bit of trivia: Millennium Force is never turned off! Or at leaste not before a couple years ago when they redid the whole control system. I wasn't clear whether the new control system has the same problem, which is that fully bringing it online takes over eight hours. As a result, during the operating season, the ride is still left powered up and ready to go. They put it in a Ride Park configuration, where it's not just pressing one button to make it go, but if you needed to do a Clark Griswold and make something run, you could do it solo and pretty quickly. Wild. Up to this point I just assumed they always left the support lights on overnight because it makes a beautiful night sky. (Probably they do. I would imagine ride lighting and ride operations are different systems.)

That closed up with enough time for us to get a last visit in to Artists Alley (for bunny_hugger to pick up her sketchbook) and the Dealers Den (where I got the last possible copy of that convention history graphic novel), and then it was already Closing Ceremonies. We got in in time to see the last bits of the charity auction going and the preposterously large bids put in for funny convention badge numbers for next year, and had great seats to see the con board tell about how enormous the convention was and deliver the figures of nearly four thousand attendees, one thousand fursuiters parading, and the eighteen thousand or whatever raised for the charity, which we completely missed throughout the con. (It's a group matching service animals t children with sensory or other special needs.)

After all that we finally went to the North Market for a last meal --- they would be closed Monday, Memorial Day, when we could have used an exciting farewell lunch --- and I repeated my kielbasa sandwich while bunny_hugger tried something new. A Bahn Mi, I think, but if I have it wrong it doesn't matter. We were there right up to the brink of their closing; yes, they flickered the lights on us. But we also got an ice cream to close out the day and thought how much weight we'd gain over the trip. (We lost weight, maybe from having only one meal plus snacks and spending all day up and around doing things.)

We didn't get to the Dead Dog Dance until about a half-hour into it, which would disappoint us because the DJ was playing a mix heavier into 90s dance music that we sort of know how to move to --- bunny_hugger does, at least, and I could recognize the cadence of songs in way that I can't for EDM --- and we really enjoyed it. bunny_hugger would be offended to see online somewhere comments criticizing the DJ for going ten minutes over his scheduled time. We imagined that the dance probably started ten minutes late --- we've seen these dances start as much as a half-hour past schedule --- but maybe these new arrivals don't know how things used to be. The DJ after that was a bit heavier on the EDM, but still had enough of older style music that we what was going on and were happy for it. The second DJ continued his set to about twenty minutes past the hour when things should have closed.

And then ... that was it, the last scheduled event for Anthrohio 2026. There were a good number of people still hanging around, though, the convention having enough mass now that the lobby and hallways could have crowds even without anything happening. That is a benefit of the con being ten times the size it ever was back at the old Holiday Inn Worthington, granted. Also somewhere around here we realized they had not held a Cake Decorating Contest, the last event that was uniquely and distinctly Morphicon. I hope it's because whoever was supposed to organize it couldn't this year, and that it'll return. It's always hard losing any tradition, but that's the sort of thing to make us wonder what we're at the convention for. The audio people also didn't play Toto's 'Africa' as chaser.

Yet, it was a great time. An exhausting time. A stimulating time. A time when we got to see most everyone we hoped to, unlike the cursed Motor City Furry Con where we missed everybody. Maybe we do have room for an enormous convention in our lives.

But we are hoping to see if Michigan Anthro Weekend this October is the sort of small cozy event we used to go to Morphicon/Anthrohio for.

And now, some more Merry-Go-Round pictures plus the revelation of what something new has been added to the place ...

Here's a more interesting pan centered on the sea serpent carvings the Merry-Go-Round Museum made in-house.

Carousel horse with a dragon of fire and electricity on its shield.

And then say, why is a skeleton sitting in some kind of ride wearing a Halloweekend 2004 crew t-shirt?

It's because, dear reader, the Merry-Go-Round Museum is now also a Cedar Point History Museum, with such things as this partial boat from the recently-removed Snake River Falls shoot-the-chutes. The skeletons are just flavor.

They had the Blue Streak height ride sign last year, and the roller coaster simulator that's usually turned off even longer than that, but 2025 saw a huge expansion in the old park stuff.

They also had up front a comic poem in tribute to a retiring park employee.

Trivia: Women living with a male partner do on average five more hours of housework per week than single women do. Men living with female partners do an average half-hour more. Source: Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures that Turn Our World Upside-Down, Editor Tom Standage.

Currently Reading: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen.

I only got to the Rabbits and Rodents panel after the whole thousand-person-long fursuit parade ended, and after getting through the dense cloud of people milling around, including fursuiters running back to get out of suit and into something where they could breathe. Finally I got to the panel room where I found bunnyhugger already there; she'd arrived just before, and she too had been late. When she arrived there was someone else who'd taken the lead and started the round of people telling who they were and what their rabbit or rodent thing is. So great thanks to whoever it was saw the gap and took charge, and we had a pretty good time going around, talking, and even managed a much more orderly transition upstairs for the group photo. If we missed anyone, they didn't complain.

We finished at a reasonable time, got back to the room to unload stuff, and went across the street again to the North Market for lunch or dinner or whatever it was you eat at that hour. It was past 4 pm. We ended up going to the Polish counter where bunnyhugger got more and bigger pierogies than she could eat. Me, I felt an irresistible longing from my heritage, and made a rare exception to my basically vegetarian diet, getting a kielbasa hoagie. Vegetarian kielbasa has gotten very good but, oh, there is something in the crisp, juicy crackle of the real meat skin being punctured that isn't there yet. We joined mystee and spouse and friends, a semi-lucky break given we'd known they were going to lunch too.

Afterwards we went through the Dealer's Den, finally getting a sense of what was there. And bunnyhugger got a promise from an artist to do a sketchbook sketch, but the artist wanted to take her sketchbook only Sunday morning and return it that day. This gave us the time to return to our room and rest a while.

Because we had three panels left in the day. One to go to: the con history guy was doing a panel Con History: From Costume Masquerade to Fursuit Parade. This was in a much smaller room, packed so full we only got seats by climbing over a row of attendees and also someone deciding they were leaving. It was in some ways an expansion on one thread of his discussion the previous day, with a lot of pictures and stories, not all of them about Forrest J Ackermann being all like that.

This was great, but we had to leave as it was nearing the end because come 8 pm bunnyhugger had her next meet-and-greet to run. This was for birds, and bird-adjacent creatures like gryphons and such. I believe a couple dragons also popped in because you can't keep dragons out of things. This was a smaller group, probably because of the lateness of the hour, but the downtime we'd had before heading out did mean bunnyhugger had the chance to change into her peacock kigurumi, putting her on theme. She'd been annoyed she hadn't had the chance to bring her squirrel puppet to the Rabbits and Rodents meetup. This got things a little better at least.

Also for the photo someone in a really tall suit joined in. I don't know what kind of bird they were representing, but something with enormous legs, performed by their walking on stilts. This added just a foot and a half or so to their height, but that is a lot of height, especially on a thin body. Everyone was impressed.

Then came the last of our meet-and-greets, me running the Mustelids panel. I started out admitting that a member of the raccoon family isn't technically a mustelid, but then neither are all the skunks here either. They're in the Mephit family, a thing taxonomy has been clear on for decades and that hasn't filtered into the public consciousness as well as the ``rabbits are not Rodents'' classification has. However, both the raccoon and the skunk families are part of the Musteloidea superfamily so there's at least some relationship there. I was able to also correctly bring in the red panda suiter, as that family is also Musteloidea. I did go and blow it by saying the otters weren't mustelids either, but no, the otters are a subfamily of Mustelids. I was apparently inventing families inside the weasel superfamily and not even bunnyhugger called me on it.

Anyway, when all of that got finished fine, and we happened to notice out the window there were fireworks going off. Professional fireworks, so we knew it wasn't something like a major political figure turning up dead. No, it was just Memorial Day weekend, probably around the AAA baseball team. (Columbus's team is called the Clippers, after the mid-19th century sailing ships designed for oceangoing speed that I don't think could possibly get to the center of Ohio?)

We would spend time after this back in our room, rebuilding our energies. When we ventured out again there was some point where I ended up in the video game room alone and playing Tetris far better than I would have thought I had the reflexes for. (My secret is not accelerating the piece's drop because you can use the time to figure what to do with the next piece.) We would spend some time at the dance; we'd also eventually get to the karaoke, which was moderately well-attended but half of everyone called to a song was missing. It turned out the waiting list was something like 90 minutes long and you can understand people giving up and wandering off. And we were there when there were under 30 minutes to the scheduled end of the event. The karaokemeister said he intended to stay until they kicked him out; but we didn't stick with it. bunnyhugger, taking her daily walk, happened to be past there about 90 minutes after this and found the room empty. We do not have the information to determine whether they exhausted their singers or got kicked out.

Good dance, though. We were getting to sleep something like 3 am, so it was a good thing there wasn't anything happening Saturday morning we really needed to be awake for.

In pictures, now, we're carrying on with the Merry-Go-Round Museum, as mentioned packed with more things and I still haven't even hinted at the really big addition. It's coming.

And here's the sea dragon from the point of view of someone about to be licked up by them or snorted into their nose. Enjoy!

The brass ring game arm, here, plus stairs such as one would use if one were loading the rings.

Happened to catch the side of this horse you can see the lighting from. Yes, they're hollow. I bet you can think of two good reasons for that.

Here's a close-up look of the hollow. The main body is built around a box.

Unpainted lion that's on display in front of the brass ring arm and stool, probably limiting the number of people who climb up top of the stool.

Did a little panning shot of the carousel and got a good in-focus view of the other chariot while everything was in motion.

Trivia: In 1940 the average auto worker salary was $1.04 an hour. Steel workers earned 95 cents. Coal miners made 99 cents, but worked ten fewer hours a week than factory workers. Source: A Call To Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

Currently Reading: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen.