And it's just what I like

Happy doctorversary, my love.

---

So, getting home from Dallas. We turned in our room keys and tried to make sure the hotel knew that, while we were checking out, ADM who had made the reservation for both our rooms, was not yet. As far as we know he didn't get locked out of his hotel room while he slept off his seventh-place finish in the PinMasters finals. Ten strokes below par, in all that. He is crazy good.

Also the big electronic billboard, which had been flashing Six Flags ads as part of its rotation all the time we were there, had moved over to something else. The park's Spring Break event was over and probably the park would have been a lot less jammed, if it was open. I'm not sure it would be for a Monday that early in the season.

Before returning our rental car we had to fill up the gas, the first time we'd had to consider the problem all weekend. Whatever slickness points I gained from knowing how to read the dashboard indicator of what side the gas cap was on were lost when I couldn't find the way to pop the door for the gas cap. It turned out it had nothing to pop; you just press the door in a little and it opens wide again. The next problem: the gas tank warned it took E85 gas. I had never considered this before. The station we'd stopped at didn't have E85 blends, and they didn't have the owner's manual in the car to reassure me whether putting regular gas in might destroy the car engine somehow. I filled it with regular and planned, if challenged, to say if they wanted E85 then they should have given any indication anywhere on the car that this was important. Later research indicates it doesn't really matter and an E85-fuel car will take regular fuel just fine. OK, but we couldn't be perfectly sure of that in the circumstance.

Love Field has, we discovered, this map of the world that dates to the modern terminal's early-60s construction, so it had the whole continent of Africa depicted in late colonialism. I tried to point this out to bunny_hugger but she was focused enough on getting through security without their faulting her choice to wear clothes to know what I was talking about.

In the airport was our last chance for souvenirs; bunny_hugger found some Christmas ornaments. I looked at the well-thumbed display copy of a novelty book with a name something like The Real Texan's Guide To Everything You Need To Know About The Other 49 States. Well, I'm always up for a snarky geography. The pages were all blank, of course. I don't know who'd buy such a thing. This was also our last chance to see if Wattaburger or some other local fast food places had anything at all vegetarians could eat. No luck, so we settled for a Manchu Wok meal that was pretty satisfying.

Home --- well, Detroit, anyway --- was a cold shock after four days spent in the 70s and 80s. Also I managed to mislead us on the path to finding my car, particularly, getting onto the wrong half of the parking garage. We had to either go well out of the way in the cold, light drizzle that felt more icy than it was, or else leap over the gap between the ascending and the descending paths in the garage. We took the walking out of the way option instead, which was the sane thing to do.

We went back to bunny_hugger's parents house, collecting our pet rabbit. He'd been mopey and depressed the first couple days he was left, and then got more engaged and interested as bunny_hugger's mother paid attention to him. This felt uncannily like how our lost rabbit behaved, up to his last year. It was a curious little normal moment at the end of a strange and impulsive long weekend.

Trivia: Some art historians believe that Jan Vermeer's Astronomer and Geographer depict microscope-inventor Antoine van Leeuwenhoek. There is not proof that the two had met, though they lived in Delft at the same time and shared interests in light and lenses, and Leeuwenhoek served as Vermeer's executor. Source: The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, The Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World, Edward Dolnick.

Currently Reading: The Boulanger Affair Reconsidered: Royalism, Boulangism, and the Origins of the Radial Right in France, William D Irvine.

PS: Reading the Comics, April 29, 2017: The Other Half Of The Week Edition, closing out last week relatively early.