It's time we hung some tinsel on that evergreen bough

[austin_dern]

I mentioned, but I did want to reiterate, that since bunny_hugger gave me a red panda kigurumi for Christmas I wore it downstairs for everyone to see. The most notable reaction here is that her parents' dogs, a pretty nervous pair of animals, watched me cautiously and backed off. They were good about not barking themselves crazy at me this visit; maybe I shouldn't press for more. (bunny_hugger's mother was speaking again of how the dogs are more rickety than ever and not long for this world, though she's been saying that for a terribly long time. They were having much more trouble getting up onto and down from the sofa this time, though.)

We didn't have near enough time to play Betrayal at the House On the Hill again, though I think we did take out the Pinball Hall of Fame at least. Mostly the morning was spent watching her brother get ready for his flight back home, and his ultimately deciding he didn't have time to return the Wii U controller to GameStop, just as bunny_hugger had predicted. We did offer to drive him to the airport, but her father insisted we'd done enough by picking him up and taking him to the free-play day at the Arcade already.

So we gathered up everything, rabbit included, divided up the leftovers from dinners, packed it up in the car and drove back home where we found the fish in the basement were in good order, and started working out what we needed to do ahead of New Year's and, for that matter, flying out to see my parents, which we wouldn't do until after the new year. Later we learned one of the dog had accidentally been locked in the basement and had devoured the stuffing which had been left in the cold there, at considerable risk to her blood-sugar level and wrecking planned leftover dinners her parents had wanted to have. But the dogs survived fine.

Trivia: American divisions in 1942 required 144,000 tons of shipping space to move one infantry division to Britain. An armored infantry required a quarter of a million tons. Source: Why The Allies Won, Richard Overy.

Currently Reading: The Lives Of A Cell, Lewis Thomas.

PS: WordPress's 2014 in review, Mathematics Blog Edition, just sharing WordPress's little semi-animated review of 2014 in that blog's existence.