mistressofmuses

Last week Alex and I went back to Hudson Gardens, a free botanical garden. We went back in the spring, but at the time it was a little too early for a lot of the stuff we wanted to see. This time we were too late! But it was nice to go anyway.

The gardens are doing a seasonal event, "The Magic of the Jack-o-Lanterns" or something to that effect. It's a paid, ticketed event at night, but you can walk through the setup during the day as part of the regular free admission.

The Halloween setup is pretty cool - tons of carved (foam) pumpkins. (But pretty good realistic fake pumpkins!) Unfortunately, it does block a couple areas of the garden off even more than they already were. (This year they've roped some sections off for reseeding and to reestablish areas that have been eroded. I can't be mad about that, but it's sad not to be able to get to all the usual things. The event stuff ropes some of the things like the beehives off entirely, so you can't approach them at all.)

We were too late for some of the stuff I'd hoped to see, like the water lilies (which we were too early for in the spring), but the roses were having a fantastic second bloom! The single frost we had last month seems to have done away with the Japanese beetles that were devouring them earlier in the year, so they were doing great now!


Always love bees on flowers.


I also really liked this rose. The picture only sort of does justice to just how enormous it was!

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And there were the pumpkins! Like I mentioned above, they are foam pumpkins rather than real ones. They're good fakes, and it makes sense. If you want the displays to last the whole month, real ones certainly wouldn't!

Lots of the displays were things like pop culture figures that I didn't really care about too much, but some of them were really neat.


Edgar Allan Poe was certainly an appropriate choice, imo.

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Happy Halloween to everyone!

I hope it was a day of all the right number of spooks and spoops and was spent doing wonderful things.

We did go see an exhibit of spiders at the invertebrate zoo yesterday, which felt nicely seasonal.

Today was a bit less so, though we went to a couple local antique malls because that was what Alex wanted to do. That was fun, even if it didn't feel abundantly Halloween-ish.
We did not go out to the concert tonight, which I'm mildly sad about, but mostly relieved. I'm tired as it is!

We got a pizza and ate some Halloween candy and watched The Exorcist, so that feels appropriate, at least.

(I also made myself an "everything that needs to get done in order to be caught up on things" list and it is... dismaying, to say the least. True Halloween scares!)

I carved a pumpkin. :)


Pattern picked out by Alex - spooky ghosts in a cauldron. :)

ETA:

I didn't end up dressing up... I was gonna, but then once I did, it felt too silly.

But we did dress CY up, so here he is in his dragon wings.

Maybe the database being taken down is a Halloween trick...

Surprisingly, having the catastrophic database issue made my hell Saturday LESS awful. (Or at least... awful in different ways.)

Less busy than feared, and basically... nothing we can do. All we can do is take down people's information so that we can reach out to them once the systems are functioning again. But since existing customers can't access their accounts either, it just didn't generate quite as much panic as anticipated.

But also, god, we really can't do anything. Class roster? Can't check that. Registration numbers? Can't see 'em. Individual employee's appointment schedules? Nope. What location is your appointment? I also do not know. Running late? Welp, I can't see what time the appointment was for, which location it's at, which instructor you have, much less look up their contact info to let them know.

And since several locations aren't staffed on Saturday (or even the weekends at all), uh... RIP if that's the center in question.

The most frustrating thing was the utter lack of communication from upper management. We got one message this morning telling us the systems were down, and to use paper enrollment forms and take down information for future followup. They also said they'd pull copies of tomorrow's schedules for our instructors so that we could prepare tomorrow's appointments.

(Then I was asked to send out copies of the paper enrollment forms, because no one else could find them...)

And then we got one more email at the end of the day, saying the system will still be down tomorrow, and they'll pull the schedules sometime tonight to send them out.

That's... too little, too late, since the instructors don't have access to the center emails, and will mostly be there earlier than office staff anyway, so they... still don't have their schedules or the student paperwork.
(Super luckily, my drivers DO, because in anticipation of this weekend sucking, we worked ahead and printed that off yesterday, so barring anyone who wanted to cancel and was unable to, we should have an accurate schedule.)

I'm concerned about my class tomorrow, since I can't view the roster, but hopefully it'll be a small class that we can get sorted out.

While I'm sure that trying to actually address whatever this server-destroying issue is absolutely the #1 priority... it's frustrating that we weren't given any real guidance or the minimum amounts of help (like getting the schedules or rosters to us) that could make center operations go as smoothly as possible under the circumstances.

The last contact was just "welp, gonna be down tomorrow too", so we'll see if that means the whole day, or if it comes up sometime tomorrow. I'm not sure which I hope for - if it stays down, it's another day where we can't do much except write down info and try to keep the centers from completely falling apart. If it does come back up, the class will be much easier, and we don't have so many situations we're helpless to deal with.

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We did go to the corn maze! It was super crowded (night before Halloween, last night of the season). We paid for the fast passes, which cost a fucking arm and a leg, but it was worth it not to wait for literal hours in line.

It was definitely fun, though Alex seemed kind of in a rush to get through, when I would probably have walked slower, ha. (One of the first "rooms" had a collapsing platform that lurched sideways that definitely hurt his knee, so that may have been part of it.)

Not to get all "when I was your age..." but I miss the way it was a decade+ ago. It's gotten a LOT more "commercial" feeling, and while I can't fault them for their popularity, the vibe change is unfortunate. The tickets are a lot more expensive, and include far less, and there's now no way to mix the fluffier maze and autumn festival stuff with the spooky Halloween stuff. I VERY SLIGHTLY regret that we splurged as much as we did on the night, but it WAS fun.

(I also miss the mid-haunt queue area where they used to re-space groups, because it was always showing the WORST classic bad horror, and it was fun!)

There WERE some really neatly designed rooms - one indoor "forest" with a spooky witchcraft vibe, and a deer-girl costume that I loved, and another that used fog and LED strips in a way that made it look like you were wading through something, where you couldn't see the floor. None of the scare actors really stuck out to me the way some previous years have, but we were moving through a bit quicker than I would have liked. Several of them had good costumes, and one of them managed a prolonged low growl that they maintained for much longer than I would think possible!

(They DIDN'T give any kind of "rules/orientation" this year like they have previously, which surprised me. Usually we get a "please don't punch our scarers, there are flashing lights, be aware of suddenly moving footing" warnings thing, but there was nothing this year.)

But I forever love whoever it was who threw an instrumental Silent Hill track in the midst of the Halloween dance party playlist that was playing in the line area. :)