The Marci Rating System

Sunday --- last Sunday, I'm not forecasting this week's --- we went to bunny_hugger's parents. We had several objectives. Dying Easter eggs, for one. This we did very well, including my discovering that if you left an egg in the blue dye forever it would become impressively blue, like the blue you imagine an egg could be. This year we had a glitter-dye kit, where after the dying we'd also smear on some glue and roll it around in glitter making an egg that appears to be more sparkly than usual. This was also successful, but we didn't find any new glitter kits in buying stuff on clearance the days after. Next year might be less sparkly.

Next goal was to replace bunny_hugger's father's universal remote control with one that has fewer than 460 million buttons and --- this is not an exaggeration --- an on-remote menu screen that --- this, too, is not an exaggeration --- has led to bitter fights at more than one holiday. Someone at Best Buy years ago sold him the most fangled remote control they have, and nobody else is able to use it for things like 'turn the TV on' or 'turn the TV off' or 'start a DVD'. He finally yielded to her entreaties to let her buy a universal remote with a normal number of buttons and controls and set that up. So there was some time spent testing out different configurations for things. But this would fail: they have a sound bar connected to the TV, and we can't figure any way to configure the remote to send volume controls to the sound bar but not turn on the TV's audio, so the universal remote is not quite universal enough.

The thing that got bunny_hugger's father to accept he needed remote control help, though, that was resolved. He had accidentally turned on closed captioning on the TV, and couldn't figure how to turn it off, and nothing in the overcomplicated remote seemed to help. It turend out the TV's closed captions were not turned on, which is why they could not be turned off. They were turned on at the Amazon Fire Stick side of things, a separate device not covered by the Too Much Remote Control and governed by a different remote. This, it turned out, was easy to turn off. Also we learned it was very easy to turn them on by accident, which has to be what happened.

We also gave their dog a good hearty walk around the park. I was a little unsure it was wise for me to go along, since I was still getting over some kind of stomach bug, and I was still not feeling quite well. But I hadn't had an extremely urgent and sudden need to use the toilet in over a day and decided to chance it. And I wanted to see the park as it looks in one of its last springtimes; they're slated to renovate the area and tear out some dams that will completely change the waterways. That the place was also flooded, thanks to our getting 112 inches of rain the previous three days, also made it appealing. Here, I did just fine. Their dog, though, she had to poop far more than we're accustomed to; I even had to be dispatched to run back to the house and grab another bag for her droppings. No idea what that was about.

The one thing we missed was bunny_hugger's mother was having some problem with her iPad and reading books from the archive.org library. But she wouldn't let bunny_hugger take a good look at it to see what the trouble was.

Also, I made tea on their new induction stove for the first time. This after her father tried to explain how it was 'kind of complicated', which it's not. You need to use an induction-friendly tea kettle, yes, but the actual process is 'turn the burner on' and 'when the water is hot, pour it into your mug'. I hadn't had any tea last time I visited, and didn't the first couple times they offered this time, which I think led them to worry that I was afraid(?) or something(?) about the new process. Someday I'm just not going to be thirsty and it's going to cause no end of anxiety.

We were eating leftovers that they sent with us through to Thursday.

My pictures continue coming nearer the end of our HersheyPark day. Just watch.

Coal Cracker is HersheyPark's log flume and it's the glorious old-style 70s log flume with the big carpeted roundtable for loading and unloading. You don't see that much anymore.

This evokes so many happy memories to me of riding Great Adventure's log flume.

I tried a panoramic photo before the people behind us got too upset by my dawdling.

Two roller coasters, the Jolly Rancher Remix and the Storm Runner. We'd ride Storm Runner and figure we would come back to Jolly Rancher Remix, a boomerang coaster, when we had time, which we never did. The ride itself we could skip --- we'd been on it in its old incarnation and every boomerang coaster is identical --- but we were curious about this tunnel it passes through with Jolly Rancher-inspired odors. Yes, we missed the odor tunnel.

Eating up so much of our time was the line for Fahrenheit, the more-than-vertical drop coaster that had some maintenance problem that sent it down. We kept getting test runs through just as we were ready to cut our losses, though.

And it finally got running again! So we did get a ride and I think a front seat ride, but the time lost to it would cost us.

Trivia: The first launch of the Space Shuttle Columbia was the 77th human spaceflight, 32 of which were made by American astronauts. Source: NASA's First Space Shuttle Astronaut Selection: Redefining the Right Stuff, David J Shayler, Colin Burgess. Based on this number they're not counting the launching of lunar modules as separate spaceflights, but they are counting the suborbital Mercury flights. They're not counting the X-15 flights that reached the Kármán line, and I don't know whether they're counting the Soyuz 18A flight that failed to reach orbit.

Currently Reading: A History of Fireworks: From Their Origins to the Present Day, John Withington.