Saturday opened with the strangeness of bunny_hugger needing to get up before me. I'm more often the first to wake, but this was a special case. Both her species SIGs were in the morning --- I'm sure it only feels like they always are --- and while it was odd for them to be a Saturday rather than a Sunday --- which, again, it feels like they always are --- it was obvious that she absolutely had to be at the panel room on time, while it was okay if I needed longer to dry my hair and get my tail on. She would be a few minutes late to the Rodents SIG after all, held in the Zoo, the quiet, secondary meeting space not yet swapped with the Headless Lounge. I would be a few minutes later yet, arriving just in time for the script to get thrown out. One of the Pipsqueakery people volunteered to bring some rodents in, and began with a rat. The rat prowled around the common table, sniffing around, and found a cozy steady home in the paw of a rat fursuiter. It's an adorable image, just the sort of thing everyone with a fursuit hopes for. The rat would disappear sometimes into the folds of the suit's arms and I worried about him falling onto the floor. It never came to that. And then it became more wondrous. Among the animals the Pipsqueakery had were woodchucks. The first brought out was an adult, a female woodchuck with a nerve disorder. She walked around the table, uncertainly, rocking the way one does in a cartoon to establish someone's infirm. We worried so much about the woodchuck falling off the table, but it never came to that. What it did come to, wondrously, was Chitter. Chitter, here, is bunny_hugger's puppet, a Folkmanis squirrel she's had for years and brings to every convention. The woodchuck examined this strange imitation of a tree squirrel, and the ground squirrel opened her mouth briefly. We worried she was about to bite the puppet. The Pipsqueakery woman explained that groundhogs will greet each other by examining one another's mouths. And so --- We always wonder, bunny_hugger and I, about how animals understand other animals. Like, do fox squirrels see red squirrels as their kin? Or do they see them as we see monkeys, something related but bizarrely different? You can see videos of coatis and raccoons playing together and seeming to get along as two of the same species would, but why ? Do woodchucks, a ground squirrel, understand Eastern greys, tree squirrels? And what do they make of a puppet, a very loose imitation? What was this poor epileptic woodchuck think she was doing, introducing herself to a puppet? Was she checking that this strange vaguely woodchuck-shaped figure might, by some improbable chance, someone she should know? There are so many times it would be wonderful to know what an animal is thinking but, wow, how can you not want to understand that ? The Rodents SIG would run out of time, with people drinking in these close encounters with actual rodents, and give way to the Rabbits SIG. Here the Pipsqueakery was no less shy about overruling bunny_hugger's plans, not in ways she was very upset with. They brought to our little gathering two rabbits who were comfortable with strangers and being set on unfamiliar tables. Or being held by a rabbit fursuiter , no less wonderful a scene. And then the woodchucks became even more wonderful: the Pipsqueakery person brought in a woodchuck cub, one abandoned (or orphaned), and still nursing, taking milk from a bottle. This woodchuck was young and vigorous and steady on his feet, though my recollection is the caretaker said he was a bit of a drama queen, crying for attention all the time. Well, we're all a bit like that sometimes. bunny_hugger would try to fit some of her typical SIG discussion points in. And she would succeed some. It's not hard to encourage furries to agree to say nice things about Watership Down . Still, the morning turned out to be all about these animals. And things got stranger yet, with someone who had come to the room for its use as the Zoo, a quiet space, and was attracted to the live animals ready for petting. He was wearing a coati t-shirt. Not, like, those algorithmically-generated T-shirts that banner ads offer after you've mentioned liking coatis on Facebook, the ones where they use way too many fonts to read out a cryptic message like ``In THIS house we love COATIS and SPAGHETTI and MUSIC and we're not TOO SURE about SPAGHETTI''. No; this was a real shirt, with a cheerful, cartoony coati sitting up and waving at the onlooker. On the back was another, less engaging, picture of the same coati, standing on all fours in profile. I had to talk to the guy. He wasn't a coati, or all too sure what a coati was. He had just got the T-shirt in a Furry Mystery Box. He could tell me where in the Dealer's Den they were sold. But the thing with a Furry Mystery Box is --- well, it's a mystery what you get. Some trinkets, yes, like a pin or a picture, and of course a shirt. But you can't buy a specific shirt (you just pick your size). Isn't that just the way? And that was Saturday morning, a day stuffed with strange wondrous encounters. Around that cul-de-sac was this small gardened area, a bit of park that we'd never paid attention to before. And it was worth noticing because, ooh, what's here? A fountain! A little bubbling of water out of this square pillar, and possibly the only decorative water feature of the park with actual flowing water. Taking another peek behind the fence. I noticed this 'Souvenir Shack' for Cedar Point Nights, an event run last summer and that I think was due to return in June. Trivia: The circa-1964 plans for the Apollo Logistics Support System, dubbed ``Molab'' (Mobile Laboratory), planned that it would be delivered to the Moon on its own Saturn V, separate from the main Apollo mission; but it would allow the astronauts inside to live in a shirtsleeve environment for up to two weeks and travel 250 miles on the surface. Source: Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings, Earl Swift. Currently Reading: Chulo: A Year Among The Coatimundis , Bil Gilbert.