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“We just need to wait for it to be 40*.” So, Heather and I met up at a local theme park yesterday. It was freaking FREEZING, but the weather ended up actually lending us a new catchphrase. It’s a long story that serves as an extended metaphor so bear with me… I promise it worked better in person
We went into one of the restaurants to warm up, and we ended up having a loooong discussion about the A&E interview, a few points we found interesting, etc. A solid portion of the discussion was about the points outlined above, and my infernal eternal optimism. (For the record, I’m not a fan of my optimism and would prefer to be where RG is! It’s not a voluntary thing, it’s just how I see it!) Because the weather was so cold, when I got to the park, a number of the rides weren’t running. At first it was just the flat rides, then shortly after the park opened they started running their wooden coasters… but anything with steel track was down. There were two rides Heather and I really wanted to ride, both newer additions to the park, but they were both steel and therefore not operating. We looped the park a few times, and on one of the loops – shortly after the discussion on why I’m not convinced we’re out of the game here – we noticed some activity on the loading platform of the coaster. “Hey, are those people on the platform?” I asked, and Heather laughed and said, “Yeah, but I think it’s just the workers.” I shrugged and said, “It’s still a good sign,” and then we laughed about how apparently my optimism carries over to things other than the show. For the record, at this point I had long given up riding either coaster as a lost cause, as I’d been at the park since the morning, and it was now late afternoon, with nary a sign of life at them except for the odd employee on the platform. A little bit later, we noticed that the other coaster had a train sitting on its lift hill – not cycling, just sitting there – but it’s not a normal spot for a train to be stored so we took it as “another good sign” that the coasters might open. At some point, we theorized that maybe there was a “magic number” they were waiting for the temperature to hit before they could run the coasters. (If the coasters get too cold, they run more slowly, which means they risk not having enough momentum to finish the course and valleying out near the end, says the coaster nerd in me.) A bit after THAT, we noticed that both coasters had begun cycling empty trains. “Maybe this optimism might actually pay off!” we said, “SEE!” In the end, both coasters did open and we were able to ride both. When we got in the line for the first one, there was a monitor that had the temperature on it – 40*F. And so, we hypothesized, they had just needed to wait for it to be 40* to run them, and all of our searching for signs that the coasters WOULD open were not quite so insane after all… because they did. It worked as an extended metaphor in that moment, and so we decided that “waiting for 40*” would be a perfect thing to adopt. If SF is endgame, what we’re looking at now are the signs of life on the platform – they might be a nothing, they might just be the staff that was scheduled on the clock anyways so they’re sitting there just in case. Or they might be a something, they might be waiting for it to be 40* so that they can run the darned thing and it’s a matter of waiting out the inclimate weather until that desired event happens. (The irony with the Frozen arc didn’t hit us until later – and I truly don’t think he’ll be back immediately after this arc, I think we’re playing the long game here – so it wasn’t really intended, but it IS funny.) So, then, the question we have to ask is… is it 40* yet?
I had to quote this and shout out a big old PREACH since I was part of it and also admit something that I haven’t really talked about much here. I actually subscribe to DSB’s theory that this story isn’t over. Even not watching the show I can see the signs that something is still there and that ‘shipping the dead guy’ isn’t so far fetched if you really look at the show. At the same time though, I really don’t have much faith in the two trolls to do ANYTHING good with this story because of how badly they’ve seemed to butcher everything else lately. There are ways to write a show with an endgame couple and not screw up everything else and they just aren’t doing that right now for whatever reason, so while I can totally see DSB’s point and share in her optimism, the cynic in me is so disillusioned with the two trolls that it just hurts my heart to have any hope that this story isn’t done yet. Welcome to my quandery and why I don’t post much about the show anymore, LOL 😉
Back to my laundry and catching up on this thread….. 😀
#MoreBOOMLessGloom