Just to reassure folks who heard about the shooter at Michigan State University tonight: ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger and I are fine, as of this writing (just before midnight the 13th), and while campus has rarely felt so close, we don't have any reason to expect we're in any plausible danger. Thank you.
This weekend we visited bunnyhugger's parents, celebrating their birthdays, which are one day apart. It was with some trepidation; we were watching Sunshine and figuring to make the decision just before leaving whether it was safe to leave her alone. Which means, paradoxically, we decided to skip one of her remaining good days.
We went there to celebrate them, of course. They had gifts for us. The bigger by volume was a dresser, an antique that a friend of theirs had no use for. We figured it could go nicely in the guest bedroom where it could serve to hold my clothes, what with how it's a big pile of horizontal surfaces. It needs some minor repairs, which is fine, because the guest bedroom needs a lot of cleaning out because my clothes are all over every horizontal surface.
The bigger by emotional content is a poster photo. The city, and its sister cities, finally took down the photos they'd put around towns in commemoration of the sister-cities anniversary. bunnyhugger you'll remember had three photographs selected, and they had ... one ... to return. Nobody seems to know where the other two are. Since bunnyhugger's parents are in town --- it turns out just one block over from the organizer of the photo project --- they could pick it up and hold it easily.
Here's where it got not-easy. When bunnyhugger's real name was given to the people in France, they mis-spelled it. Her name doesn't exist in French and it uses a sound that French doesn't use. And this poster was, apparently, printed and hung in France, based on the languages of the sign. The thing is when bunnyhugger's father saw his daughter's name spelled wrong he acted on the urge to correct it. So he whited out the error and tried to pen in the right spelling and he admitted it didn't look great. Everyone has asked what he was thinking, doing that without asking, and he ... didn't quite come out and admit to why he did that without asking. But it has damaged a thing that could otherwise have been a great, simple story to tell people who asked about it. And it's sent me looking for how to get white-out off of ... photo-poster cardboard, whatever that is. I'm not sure it's possible.
That as a flash point for arguing aside it was a happy, pretty smooth day. bunnyhugger's father had several gifts for his wife, all pleasant-looking jade-and-gold jewelry. And they'd gotten our cards, including --- on my cards --- bites from Sunshine. bunnyhugger had the same idea, independently, but not until after she'd sealed envelopes. Her father claimed he wasn't sure that the torn corners of the cards were Sunshine's bites rather than just that I'd bought damaged cards. From another father I'd think he was being facetious but here ... I mean, he opened the cards from bunnyhugger without noticing that she had put big, iridescent stickers on the back flap. (He opened his wife's cards, too, something he could only explain as doing so she wouldn't have to. He has behaviors we can't understand except as a compulsion to do certain tasks.)
Dinner was fondue, making good on the meal we missed when Christmas Eve was too snowy to travel. And a German chocolate cake that was just enormous, along with scoops of vanilla ice cream. We have never once succeeded in not overeating when we visit there.
We did have time to play a little Mice and Mystics, one of the bonus adventures that brings the series to an end. Unfortunately only a little bit, and that was confused too. When I recorded the game state at our last playing, in October, I failed to record which room we were in. bunnyhugger was confident we had completed this one room; I was as sure we had not started. She remembered reading specific bits of the story text, but the room had us doing a novel unique-to-this-adventure task that I did not remember us doing or even hearing about. We ultimately decided to play the room she thought we had finished and I thought we hadn't started, and we got through pretty successfully, considering we hit a point where we just weren't sure how we were supposed to do the thing we had described.
Unfortunately, we only had the time for the one room, meaning we spent more time in setup and packing-away than we did actually playing. Part of this is that setup was slow, not least because of the argument about where we were setting up to. But part was that we had to get home, to make sure Sunshine got her medicines on time. We did, and she did, and she seemed none the worse for a day by herself.
Here's some more pictures from the (Open) State Pinball Championship.
Only one of these two will stay alive in the tournament. Baywatch is, it turns out, a surprisingly good game considering it's a theme everyone would sneer at and that the Sega pinball games were mostly ... not that good.
ACE and CST getting ready to face off on Getaway, a game absolutely unforgiving of poor shots. They're both very strong, well-controlled shooters. And yet, ball three, they're both under twenty million, which is a score you could get by a lucky mystery award.
Jungle Queen is, of course, the game I lost two hundred bucks on at Pinburgh. (It was the tiebreaker game for first-or-second place in that D Division finals I played and while I had my best Jungle Queen game ever, the other guy had a much better one, so he took first and the greater cash prize.)
The playoffs! Oddly, the only photograph I took of the whole tournament state, which only covers the lower half of finishers after all.
The championship plaque which this year replaced trophies. It's nice and all but, you know, trophies, right?
On my own I played this very neat game of Boomerang. It's not a great score except for how tidy it is.
Trivia: Two IBM 1401 computers delivered to The New York Times to help gather and project election outcomes were declared up and running by noon on Monday, the 29th of October, 1962. By the 31st, after two dry runs of the process, the Times asked IBM to remove the rented computers. Source: If/Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, Jill Lepore. (IBM persuaded the Times to let the machines stay, on the grounds that whatever did happen would be valuable experience.)
Currently Reading: Suddenly, Tomorrow Came: A History of the Johnson Space Center, Henry C Dethloff. NASA SP-4307.
