Sometimes this old farm feels like a long-lost friend

bunnyhugger got home the following Wednesday, not quite a week after she'd left. I didn't drive to Toledo to pick her up; among other things, I was back in the office finally, telling people how she'd done in the pinball tournament that they conflated as the purpose for my week off. She took the bus from the Toledo train station up to East Lansing's multi-modal facility, a new building since the last time we took the train into town. While the train got into Toledo late, the bus made up time in part by skipping the scheduled stop in Dearborn (nobody was getting off there), so she arrived mid-morning and I had permission to leave the office for an hour or so and pick her up. It ended up being a little longer than that, but nobody was worried, showing how much looser my new supervisor is from the old.

After that you'd think she would want to sleep, and she did, and did. Not as long and indefinitely as she'd want, though; we had pinball league that evening. The start of a new season, the first one since the pandemic began where we'd gotten back to one season starting in August and the other starting in the new year. It would be a displaced one, though. The hipster bar where we play has been closed Mondays and Tuesdays for reasons we're not precisely sure about. You see the trouble this represents for a Tuesday league, though. We were able to slip to Wednesday without any great chaos, though, and we're pretty sure we didn't misplace any players because of it.

The Saturday after that, as she'd barely got her sleep caught up, was a Lightning Flippers women's pinball tournament, held in the early afternoon. This was another small gathering, but an amiable one. It'd be nice if there were another five or so women coming to these tournaments but they're pleasant and low-key and a good excuse to come out and play pinball on games that bunnyhugger might not think to pick herself, so that's all positive stuff.

The drawback is that this --- even though it took only a few hours --- threatened our ability to do something else, something important ...

---

But before we reveal that, let's have a couple more pictures from my old office and then we get into something special and pre-Christmas. You ready?

My old office was downtown, near the state capitol and here's one winter morning where I thought the light was particularly nice. So you get to see it at last, here.

---

Close-up on the dome and where you can see the very rickety ladders to move between different levels of the roof.

---

Back home! The upstairs tree here, obscured by Wintergreen, who'd been placed upstairs so we had room for the tree downstairs.

---

Reverse angle, the carousel rabbit illuminated by the tree with a dark, unknowable void behind it.

---

And here's the lights. bunnyhugger loved having the chance to decorate the carousel rabbit for the holiday.

---

And here's how it looked by day, with all the lights on and the rabbit's eye wide open.

---

Trivia: The Baha'i calendar gives names to each of the 19 months of the year, and the same names to the nineteen days of each month. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: His Majesty's Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine, S C Gwynne.