After 
bunny_hugger and I became formally engaged, my parents started thinking of when they would be able to go out to Lansing, to see where I would soon live, to meet bunny_hugger's parents, to meet her rabbit, and such things. The early plans were for something around early spring, since back in early January it looked like we might get a winter in. And then my father had his heart problems and while we expected even back then that he'd be out of the hospital by late March, we didn't expect that he'd be up to spending a weekend wandering around an unfamiliar state. (He's getting there, though. He's even started some very light work again.)
So it was just me and my mother who flew into Detroit last Friday, to be picked up by bunny_hugger for a whirlwind visit. Our whirlest, the shortest on record and likely the shortest we'll ever have. My father did not drive us up, but he did take the car back and reported no new dents or smashes or accidents along that way, even though --- as he correctly pointed out --- I was the driver who parked the car where it got whacked in Manhattan. My mother's still telling jokes about it; my father's still grinning through clenched teeth at her jokes.
When my mother and I arrived at Detroit we landed tolerably near schedule but did need to walk through roughly fourteen miles of passages, always following paths marked ``Baggage Claim'', which never seemed to bring us anywhere nearer Baggage Claim. We also went through the light-and-sound tunnel underneath that presented an interesting play of light and shadow and sound and probably would have caused me to completely shut down if I were just arriving from a Singapore-to-the-United-States flight. (It doesn't take much to overload the brain after a long-haul flight.) After two hours, with no turbulence to speak of, this was easy. Just, long, to find our way to the outside. We also couldn't find the escalator to go down to the baggage claim level (thence to go outside; we didn't have any checked luggage), but that's because apparently they don't have one. I don't design airports, obviously.
bunny_hugger was very well-positioned to pick us up, except that there was a weird tangle of cars not letting others get up to the curb. So while she was frustrated at the other cars, we just got out to the one-lane-away-from-the-curb lane and piled things into the car. And so we began the nighttime drive back from Detroit to Lansing, with bunny_hugger and my mother chatting about the area, and getting caught up on things missed while my mother was in hospital, and getting my mother some familiarity with the drive back out west. Curiously (to me) my mother decided to ride in the back. She normally gets rather motion-sick and needs to sit up front, but this time she wasn't bothered. I wouldn't have guessed.
My mother went right to her hotel. She'd booked a room, figuring that would be easiest for everyone involved as well as give bunny_hugger and I some time to ourselves during this extremely compressed, extremely packed weekend.
Somehow despite our really just going to her home, and my unpacking just the little bits that I needed to have unpacked, and then going to check the comics and whatnot (time I had figured to use to do things like read the comics was spent guiding a student through some probability questions for homework instead), we ended up staying up to about 9:30 am, time to start getting up and meet my mother to get the day's action started.
Trivia: A quarter million people took self-driven automobile tours of the Kennedy Space Center in 1964. Source: A History Of The Kennedy Space Center, Kenneth Lipartito, Orville R Butler.
Currently Reading: Secret Wars And Secret Policies In The Americas, 1842 - 1929, Friedrich E Schuler. More fascinating than reading about attempts to stir up trouble between the United States and Britain/Canada? ``In January 1915, [ military attaché Fritz ] von Papen sent Hans Boehm from Maine to scout parts of the border and identify targets. But his sabotage attack failed because the weather was too cold.''
PS: How To Forget The Area Of A Trapezoid , because, in class, I did. Well, I didn't forget the formula, but I forgot how to prove the formula is right.