Our major question for Saturday was, did we want to go into the park? That is, did we want to use the tickets which came with our room for entry on Saturday or on Sunday? We'd gone to the Merry-Go-Round Museum on Saturday last year, which was wise, since everybody else in the midwest went to Cedar Point producing two-hour waits for closed rides and crashing the local mobile phone network as everyone tweeted that the park was impossibly crowded. But we were here several weeks earlier, and if we went Saturday we could have a whole day at the park ... well, we decided to risk it, and go in Saturday.
Probably a good decision. One of the crowd entering with us included some Asia Pacific-looking young adults, who looked up at Magnum XL and Top Thrill Dragster and such and squealed with that delight that comes from being overloaded with excitement. Who doesn't want to be around that kid of delight? With our early-admission tickets we got rides on Top Thrill Dragster --- the only Cedar Point roller coaster I hadn't been on, one of those 16-second rides where you're accelerated fast and go up 400-plus feet, and go back down again. It's not so big as Kingda Ka, of course, but it does show off a readout of your ride speed on the ascent, which we both failed to look at. On the bright side, my camera remained securely in my pocket through this, proving the coaster-camera concept nicely.
One of 
bunny_hugger's favorite little traditions of staying at Cedar Point is going out to a dinner at a marina-side restaurant. I unfortunately spoiled the chance for that last year because I didn't dress well enough. This year I was dressed much more like a grownup and could go into a real grown-up type restaurant where they have far more plates than you can use. bunny_hugger considered this an extension of birthday-fussing for me, which was so very flattering, and wonderfully satisfying. Plus we went to dinner early, and so missed out almost all the rush of people with loud children coming in.
Among the restaurant-related curiosities was the player piano, electronic of course, and the mysterious ``140'' displayed by its keys. It couldn't have been the beats per minute, and since it was that number the several times we passed it that couldn't have been the selected song. It's a weird number for a volume control. But what was it, then?
And something we spotted on the way into the restaurant was a snake in the road. It was making its way across the brick-paved road towards, we guessed, the bushes beyond. I haven't seen a snake that large outside of zoos. Apparently it made it safely; we had a decent view of his location from inside the restaurant and didn't see anyone stopping and pointing at snake carcass later on. It was just one of those little park oddities.
Trivia: The Confederate Congress passed a bill in March 1862 creating the post of commanding general of the Confederate armies. Jefferson Davis vetoed the measure. (He viewed it as an oblique vote of no confidence.) Source: The Confederate Nation, 1861 - 1865, Emory M Thomas.
Currently Reading: Novelets of Science Fiction, Editor Ivan Howard. From that little stretch where there was apparently something called a ``novelet'', by which they mean like Blish's ``Testament of Adros'' or Clarke's ``The Possessed'', which are certainly two stories which share important properties like being two stories.