I just want to celebrate another day of living

Not much happening today so let's take in pictures from the Michigan State Women's Pinball Championship:

Practice hours! The venue was open for three hours before the tournament began and while we were there soon after the place opened other people got there even sooner-er.

People doing their warmup games on tables that won't behave nearly so well when the tournament starts.

The Clubhouse has a couple nice pieces of old arcade hardware including this vintage Game Room sign. The PAPA 2017-2018 Circuit sign lists various events including the Pinburgh where bunny_hugger and I had perfect rounds and played D Division finals.

It's totally not creepy of me to take a picture from above the top of a pinball cabinet, right?

Hope not, because here's another, catching the tables on which the open final the night before finished.

RLM had left the rig for streaming set up on Mustang and bunny_hugger played a game to see how distracting it was having the stuff in the way. Of course not all the stuff was there --- the laptop's absent, for example --- but the real goal was seeing just how much attention it pulls when you stand at the thing. She bumped her hand on the rig at one point and RLM said oh, well, in actual play the rig would be a bit farther back so she couldn't; that was just parked there to not be in the way. Still, when the time came, indeed nobody hit their hands on the rig.

Trivia: The 'panhandle' at the southwest end of Connecticut was created as the result of a 1683 boundary survey it and New York commissioned, to find a way to give New York a twenty-mile buffer east of the Hudson River while still keeping Greenwich and Stamford in Connecticut. A small narrow wedge, ``The Oblong'', diverting the main body Connecticut's western border from following a line of longitude, was given to New York in compensation for the surplus land given to the Greenwich-Stamford panhandle. Source: How The States Got Their Shapes, Mark Stein.

Currently Reading: Suddenly, Tomorrow Came: A History of the Johnson Space Center, Henry C Dethloff. NASA SP-4307.