'Cause you gotta be my inspiration

The charity at Anthrohio was again the Pipsqueakery, a rodents-and-rabbits rescue. They have a guinea pig focus that I enjoy seeing, and that helped draw me a few curious looks as I walked around with my guinea pig puppet. (Almost nobody was fooled, or at least told me about their confusion. Two non-furries who happened to be staying in the hotel, and then at one time Ed Hyena looked askance at me.) They had a huge variety of animals, including rats, Patagonian cavies, and a lot of rabbits. The most striking of these was a rabbit who'd had half her head shaved off. And, more, had an eye removed, just recently. This was the rabbit's first time out of restraint, post-surgery, so she was fired up and quite active and not apparently any worse off for having only one eye. We'd keep coming back to the rescue's setup and, particularly, this poor wounded rabbit. The Pipsqueakery had even more animals --- chinchillas, for example, and an iguana, and a mother hen with chick --- although we'd only learn about some of them the next day, in remarkable circumstances.

Elevators are always a problem point at conventions, and Anthrohio had a particularly severe case of that. One of the two elevators in the residential wing was down the entire weekend, like, from Thursday onward. The hotel had the service elevator open and accessible, with signs telling people it was all right to use that as well. We were briefly hesitant about the service elevator but that didn't last long; there was just no waiting for the one guest elevator. We gave up entirely on using it just to go downstairs, from our fifth-floor room. I never found the gumption to walk up all five flights, but down is at least easy enough. (Also we kept spotting my car in the parking lot from the window beside the elevator.)

After my failed panel it was already the evening, and we had to think about where to get dinner. We'd gotten more wary about this because so many places have reduced their hours. I did my best, checking local areas for places that promised to be open for two or more hours, and that's when we had the first of our Penn Station fiascos. So we used White Castle as the backup No, so we went to an odd Subway, and I don't know how I got confused because I wanted to talk about that experience, and I will sometime later unless I forget, and took dinner back to our room to eat.

As the evening went on, well, bunny_hugger needed to take her usual half-hour walk, going around the interior of the hotel. I followed a little while and then got distracted by, among other things, seeing mystee. We hadn't known she would be at the con ahead of time, but were glad for it. We'd meet up a couple times over the weekend, part of a weekend that was mostly successful in meeting up with people. I did learn just how early Hospitality was closing, though, or at least running out of bags of snacks and cans of pop. (Name-brand pop, as opposed to the store-brand equivalents, I noticed.)

We did get to the dance, wearing our Stitch and Angel kigurumis. The dance floor was sparser than we'd have hoped, but better than many nights we had seen, and while we had forgotten our stockpile of glow sticks we were there, at least, and got a good time in. We like to stay through to the end of the night but couldn't. For all that I had pleasant timing for my afternoon panels, bunny_hugger had what we feared the most. Morning panels. Not Sunday morning panels, for what feels like the first time ever, but still. We'd need to get up and be going in the morning, which meant leaving not long after midnight. So that's how the Friday of the convention went.

Let's enjoy some more Cedar Point; it's an enjoyable place.

Since the park didn't have paper maps available here, here's a photograph of the park map.

Looking back at Iron Dragon with too long a line for reason, and also the celebration stage where they still had the swoopy curly things from the sesquicentennial show last year.

And now over to the Giant Wheel and to GateKeeper (to the right of those stylized wings). The wall there blocks off the location of Wicked Twister, which is gone and we assume being redeveloped for something we haven't heard about yet.

Trivia: In 1895 the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad built the first main-line railroad electrification in the United States; they were hoping to remove obnoxious smoke and heat from a mile-and-a-half-long tunnel at Baltimore. Source: Engineering in History, Richard Shelton Kirby, Sidney Withington, Arthur Burr Darling, Frederick Gridley Kilgour.

Currently Reading: Chulo: A Year Among The Coatimundis, Bil Gilbert. Ah yeah, explaining how they happened to name the adult male who was somehow living with the females ``Nancy'' but it was totally a coincidence. And maybe so; stranger things happen and nobody would be expecting an adult male in amongst the adult females. Coatis ordinarily keep so rigorous a gender separation that for a while White scientists thought them separate species. Still, my eye quirks.