Oh, where is the song that goes like this?

[austin_dern]

Monday began with packing, making sure we hadn't overlooked anything, and making sure we'd be able to carry it all on the El and on the train back to Lansing. Also I completed my swiping the bottles of skin lotion provided daily; I'd been using them to soften my poor chapped hands. I reassured bunny_hugger, I had gloves now. My hands are in improving shape.

To eat we returned to the sushi restaurant we'd eaten at Monday a year before, with skylerbunny. It's, as the con restaurant guide described, strip-mall fast-food sushi, but that's still reasonably tasty and available and none too far from the hotel, and based on the airport flight paths there'd be only a small chance of a plane crashing into it after a failed takeoff. We tried not to worry about that. (We also wandered around the adjacent Office Depot as we waited for a cab to arrive; that mostly turned up that we could find calendars and $5 DVDs interesting as long as we're with one another.)

After another round walking around the hotel and catching who we might, we accepted that it was time to go, to leave the wondrous and strange time of a convention and go to the simple, blissful wonder of time at home together.

So, we walked to the nearby subway station and rode the blue line the hour or so it takes to get near Union Station. For reasons that surely make sense you can't get directly to Union Station from the subway, although this time we didn't have to walk up nearly as many flights of stairs to reach the street level. We have no explanation for this; they can't have renovated the whole station since last year, but, we can't possibly have missed the stairs we used this time.

We picked up some snacks for the train, since we were none too confident in the food options, although that actually came to some chocolates and some salty snacks, plus soda. The shop where we got them also had an estimated kajillion copies of the Steve Jobs biography. bunny_hugger observed that the biography quite thoughtfully put a big picture of Jobs's face on the cover, ``so when you reach a portion where you want to punch him in the face, you can''. She can have a vicious, yet accurate, sense of humor.

This year we were faster to reach the train's departure gate, since we didn't want to get stuck in the distant nether-reaches of the line, and especially didn't want to get stuck separated on the train car. Here our plans worked; we got a pair of seats together, and even a pair of seats with a nice prominent electrical plug which was even working. So bunny_hugger was able to, besides ride in reasonable comfort, use her Mifi device almost the whole ride to catch up on what Internet stuff could use catching-up-on, just the way I could with my iPad.

We got to East Lansing on time, and without any noteworthy pauses in the train's progress. We did have the problem of finding a taxi, though; there weren't any cabs cruising the area as best as we could tell. She phoned one, and they promised arrival in about fifteen minutes, which turned out to be about twelve minutes longer than they actually needed to get someone to us.

So in what is for us the early evening we got to her home, and settled in.

Trivia: Ted Judah, early lobbyist and engineer for the transcontinental railroad, was allowed in early 1860 to open a ``Pacific Railroad Museum'', advocating the project, in the Old Vice President's Room within the United States Capitol, on the same floor as the House and Senate halls and across the hall from the Supreme Court. Source: Empire Express: Building The First Transcontinental Railroad, David Haward Bain. (And yet nobody ever tells the story of the second.)

Currently Reading: Triumph: The Untold Story Of Jesse Owens And Hitler's Olympics, Jeremy Schaap.