Tuesday I had my annual physical checkup. Last year I'd made an appointment as we were afraid bunny_hugger was losing her job and I should get some kind of medical history, and between making that appointment and going I was put on the new health care plan of Multinational That Took Over Old Company. And then this year I was back on bunny_hugger's health insurance. This wasn't hard for them to sort out, though, at least so far as they told me. So the state of things. For the first time I had to admit that I was depressed, but, I pointed out, it was situational. The doctor agreed, being unemployed since September is really hard. I guess I should feel glad to have independent confirmation that this sucks, but, you know. My weight is up a bit from last year. That's probably related to my emotional misery. Also physical misery. I had to cut back --- almost cut out --- my long walks around the neighborhood because my foot started to bother me. Planar fasciitis was the obvious self-diagnosis, and putting some better padding on my poor old sneakers helped a good bit. But then my ankle and hamstrings in one foot started getting persistently sore. I still do some exercising, walking inside the house, but for shorter times and not as many days of the week. The doctor agreed this was the wiser thing to do, and ordered an X-ray to see what might be physically wrong since this has been going on a couple months now. With the added information that this is worse when I haven't been moving --- which, ironically, suggests what I should be doing is taking hourlong walks around the neighborhood --- and the X-ray confirming nothing's obviously broken or anything, the best guess is: arthritis. She showed a couple stretching exercises that looked quite familiar from yoga class and I wonder how much of this would not be a problem if I were still going to yoga classes. I went back on Friday for my blood draw, getting my general health checked. Obviously don't have the results from that, but I'm curious to know whether we've overcome the Vitamin D deficiency that I picked up to make me an official Michigander. Let's enjoy some backglass and playfield action from Pinball At The Zoo. Silverball Mania is a pretty fun early-solid-state game and it sets some kind of record for most muscular liquid-metal characters in one game. Chicago Coin's Astronaut, from 1969; you can see fantastic concepts for long-distance lunar rovers in the background there. The Astronaut playfield, which is nicely near-symmetric but also really dynamic-looking. Trivia: The Forever Yours bar, a dark-chocolate version of the Milky Way, was introduced in 1939. Source: The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars, Joël Glenn Brenner. Currently Reading: The Final Mission: Preserving NASA's Apollo Sites , Lisa Westwood, Beth Laura O'Leary, Milford Wayne Donaldson. Surprised by how easy a read this was given that it's an archaeology book rather than a space history one. (Granting the fields have some commonality and, as the authors keep pointing out, it's kinda weird to consider such recent projects as fit for archaeology.)