Asakiyume mita

Our eldest pet mouse, Crystal, is in decline. We're preparing for the day, likely soon, that we find her dead.

She's been moving noticeably slower lately, and most compellingly she's no longer eating her medicine --- meloxicam atop a piece of vanilla wafer --- quickly. She's also not swiftly eating the treat given as reward for that, peanut butter atop a cracker. She will eat it, so we know not all the spark has gone out, but she goes back and forth over it slowly, like a little mouse vacuum cleaner gradually working a thick pile down.

Besides moving slower she's also moving with more confusion, with this particular characteristic freezing up until she starts slowly exploring her surroundings again. This is maybe proximately caused by her eyes; she's got cataracts and we don't know how much she can see at all. She's also started to shiver, whether from a neurological issue or because she's cold. Her paws and fur are chilly, as I suppose the body hoards its energy to its core. (Her fur at least is still kept orderly, thanks to the other mice grooming her. In fact, one of them is over-grooming her, and the other mice, probably to show she sees herself as the boss.)

If the pet store was correct about her age when we got her, she's more than two years old now, elderly for a house mouse. So there's nothing startling or premature or, in a sense, unfair about this. We got to know her over half her life and have a wonderful time with a sparkling white mouse who even a couple weeks ago was running the wheel for fun. But anytime you adopt an animal you're committing to someday cry and we know that's soon.

To cheerier matters. Here's some Hershey Park pictures, mostly roller coasters.

SkyRush is another new-to-us roller coaster. Its theme is, of course, airplanes? It is; you can see the wings on the row signs, and the station announcements are accompanied by those bing-bong chimes of secret airport/airplane signalling and all that. Believe it or not, it's only in the last decade that Hershey Park has decided all their rides should have a candy theme!

And then in a nearby games hall we discovered a pinball machine! We would have certainly played a game except we couldn't figure a way to buy, like, five dollars worth of games. The conversion to a cashless park has made it impossible to just play a couple games. (The high score tables were appealingly low, but depending on the game's condition that might be because it's impossible to score the really high points we can do at our home venues.)

And now one of the rides we absolutely, positively, must ride when we're there: Tiny Tracks Lightning Racer, the racing coasters!

Here we are after riding one side of the tracks; you can see the Thunder and the Lightning trains. We had, again, walk-on rides to both sides and resolved to make this our last ride of the night, before the fireworks began. We failed in this, because I got us lost and wasted our time.

There's a photo op outside with fake car fronts. You see in the above picture the trains had this old-fashioned-style fence; possibly the photo op uses the design of a now-retired train.

The Wild Mouse was a wonderfully well-run coaster; despite the long line it moved very fast, because they load people and dispatch them fast. The queue also has a bunch of signs from Victor Pest Control that is all ha ha, very funny, selling ways to catch and kill mice on the roller coaster ride. Great.

This moment at the loading station for the Wild Mouse just caught me, somehow. I think just the expressions of the ride op and the person gazing over at the platform and the way the outstretched hand seems to touch the wire and everything fits together somehow.

Finally we got back around for Comet, the oldest roller coaster at HersheyPark. I'd get a shirt with the Comet logo as my big park souvenir; it's a good-fitting one.

So do you think the Sooper Dooper Looper ride opened in the 1970s? Why, what makes you think this corkscrew ride did that?

It did open 1977. I appreciate that they've embraced the 70s-ness of the ride and embraced the earth tones for painting the cars and for the station.

Back to that Milton S Hershey statue for a fresh picture in the daylight.

And here's an elk statue that Milton S himself picked out in 1913. Until 1978 it was at the park's original entrance, near the Kissing Tower; after that it was moved to near the bridge to ZooAmerica, the North American Wildlife Park.

Trivia: Apollo 8's first stage hit the ocean nine minutes after launch, at 32.2040 degrees north latitude and 74.1090 degrees west longitude, 353,5 nautical miles from the launch site. The second stage hit the ocean at 19 minutes 25 seconds after launch at latitude 31.8338 degrees north, longitude 37.224 degrees west, 2,245.9 nautical miles from the launch site. Source: Apollo by the Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-4029.

Currently Reading: The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America, David Baron. This is a really good book, just a delight reading.