Busy weekend.

Ah, the start of reenactment season makes me..smell like burnt black powder. Saturday, Carrie and I went to go see the new "Adventure Aquarium" as well as the battleship new Jersey. The Aquarium, of course, is the former New jersey Aquarium that failed with several attempts to redefine itself after its disappointing start. Their initial angle, at first, had been to try and show all the local fish, which, beyond a few sharks, were just boring brown fish. ho-hum.

The privately run Adventure Aquarium has since popped up in its place with lots of marketing to make things interesting. They made a lot of their indoor Hippo display. It take a lot to make Hippos be something that one wants to go and see, especially in light of having read 'The Peaceable Kingdom', a book about the Philadelphia Zoo. Hippos are looked on in that book as almost a nuisance animal, having zero value to any other Zoo.

Anyway, AA made it interesting by having a tank viewable from the side where one could see the hippos lounge in the water. Certainly beats the partially water-filled pen they used last time I was in the Philly Zoo. Probably the best piece was the underwater shark tunnel where, thanks to the optical illusion of being in a clear acrylic tunnel, one seems to see the sharks approaching very close as they swim overhead. Pretty neat. Overall the place is pretty good, but the Baltimore Aquarium and the Monterey Aquarium kick its butt.

After a short walk in the sun, we made our way onto the Battleship New Jersey. Fun to be in there and I am glad we went when we did. We got to climb into one of the turrets where all the switches and knobs are still in place. They ask you not to play with them but I did turn a knob or two. I can see that those buttons will be torn off by rampant school children with a few years, so I am glad to have been able to see it somewhat close to its active state.

Fun Fact: The USS New Jersey was initially supposed to be the ship that the Japanese surrender was to be accepted on. It made sense, since it had seem more action than almost any other battleship in the US Fleet at the time. However, at the last minute, the USS Missouri was chosen for the honor, despite the Missouri having just been commissioned and seeing no combat whatsoever. The reason? Truman, then acting President, was from Missouri and wanted it that way.

The next day...today in fact, I went to reenact the battle of Brandywine. This battle gets more annoying every year. It used to be OK, but they've added the following things that have made it annoying: You have to park about 2 miles off site and be bused in, along with the tourists, they made a huge buffer zone between us and the audience with massive amounts of yellow police tape. The result was choke points that made it hard to maneuver. I expect that kind of limited space at Germantown, where they have no room to give, but here it is silly. Further, they insist on having the battle on the hill these days instead of around the creek, which made more sense. It means that we have to climb a nasty hill twice. The battle is also run as a you win/we win game, where one side wins the morning battle and the other side wins the afternoon battle. This gets absurd since there is a competing Civil War event taking place and the number of rebels fielding is absurdly small, we outnumber them about 5 to 1. Makes winning easy to pull off, but losing seems awful stupid.

Oh well, at least my musket worked well.

Adding to the stupidity is that a 'member' of the unit who always tries to drag his students into reenacting always brings one or two poorly equipped fools (hey, who needs a coat!) to field. This time he brought 1/2 a dozen. Thankfully, he kept them off the battlefield (they would have been tossed anyway: Insurance). I was having flashbacks to the times he's tried to flop these fools in with the veterans and caused more cracks in the line than in a dropped vase.

Next week is the Battle of Germantown, and despite some folks complaints about the event it is one of the few consistant events that doesn't mess things up each time in the name of one half-arsed 'concern' or another. It is a fair powder burner of an event, so I guess I'll be rolling cartridges some point this week.

Time for shower and maybe bed. Night to all.