It's been some time and some struggle but my mathematics blog got back on track this past week. Here's the last couple weeks so you can see what that looked like: How January 2022 Treated My Mathematics Blog The Plan, and How It Will Go Wrong My Little 2021 Mathematics A-to-Z: Tangent Space With that trip to the State Tree done, we were drawing near the end of the Christmas season. So here's pictures from the end of our Christmas trees' time with us. Also some of bunny_hugger's recreational fun. So here's a Christmas stamp puzzle that bunny_hugger worked on over Christmas. It turned out to take her roughly 48 minutes, because it turns out all the stamp edges give you a lot of hints about where to set pieces, and the interiors reflecting so many different art styles give you even more. A last look at our upstairs tree, illuminating the ceiling. All the ornaments are off so this is just the lights left. Peering down the upstairs tree with the lights alone making some great color patterns against the walls and attic door. The downstairs tree, bare except for its lights and the carousel topper. It was a really good-looking one this year and the all-white lights turned out to fit it well. Nighttime photograph looking down from the bedroom window at the lights of our shrubs. You can really see the window screens that we'd replace with storm windows if we knew where these storm windows were. Alas, all glory: our trees set out for collection. The trees sitting out ready for collection as seen from our bedroom window, and also, me showing off what a good job I do shoveling the sidewalk. Although the guy who does sidewalks for the not-actually-legal AirBnB next door shovels a third to half the walk every snow anyway, we think as an attempt to make good with us or to give AirBnB patrons places to step when they get out of their car. And one more puzzle, a gift from my mother to bunny_hugger. It's women of art and science and engineering and architecture; the woman who designed the crashed-spaceship art museum in East Lansing is represented here. This puzzle took bunny_hugger about 12 minutes to do, with the varying color themes and all the text --- teaching her a good bit about unfamiliar names --- helping so much . Trivia: Cities bidding for the 2010 Winter Olympics had to put up a $100,000 entrance fee. Cities reaching the final round had to pay an additional $500,000. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle. And that's as far as this book gets, so, until 2024, everybody I can misplace this pleasant little book. Currently Reading: Sucker's Progress: An Informal History of Gambling in America , Herbert Asbury. So, I love Asbury's portentous tones in declaring things like ``the Lottery and its unholy offspring Policy [ the numbers racket ]''. But I'm fascinated to learn of things like Wolf-Traps, which seem like a horribly modern ``disruptor'' Uber/AirBnB/weWork-type idea: the Wolf-Trap house provided a place, and lookouts and equipment and all. But anyone who wanted could come in and, if there were an available table (and equipment), set up their own faro table or whatever other game of chance they wanted. The rent was customarily 10 percent of the bank, at the end of the day. Could set up a table with as little as a dollar or as much as a thousand, if you wanted. And apparently the games were reasonably honest, since, like, if you were any good at making money as a crooked faro dealer you didn't need to rent a table from a Wolf-Trap.