Can You Write My Segues for Me? Please?

My brain is very very tired today, thanks to the shenanigans of Daughter, who choose midnight to 3am as optimal play time / throwing a fit time / snuggle with mama in the bed time / sit in the middle of the floor and whine time. So here's what passing for interesting in my current frame of mind.

Michigan State is in the NCAA basketball finals tonight, which are being held in downtown Detroit. And I am pretty sure that whether during the regular season you are a Michigan or Michigan State fan around here, right now you're rooting for the underdogs in green-and-white to win. Detroit needs this. Michigan needs this. It would be a much-needed bright spot at the end of what has been an incredibly bleak winter.

Just in time to remind us of that fact, we're having a snow squall today. Depending on where you look, predictions range all the way up to 8" of the white stuff. It's kind of funny, in that perverse midwestern weather sort of way. It's also a little tiresome. We've had enough of winter this year. Bring on the spring.

In other, unrelated news, our bank has changed its ATM to something that looks like the command console of a space ship. It's so incredibly high tech that it's disconcerting. If you want to make a deposit, it tells you to insert the checks without an envelope. It took me a few minutes to work up the guts for that. When I finally tried it, the machine spit them all back at me -- and only then did I realize that I was supposed to insert them one at a time. So I inserted the first one. Jiminy Crickets! It scanned the thing, told me what it thought the deposit amount was based on that scan (it was right), and then before I hit the button to "approve" that deposit amount, it actually showed me a copy of the check on the screen, so that it could ensure that I and the machine were on the same page about this deposit. If I'd been the type to issue forth with low whistles of admiration, that would have been the moment to do so.

Of course, such gagetry comes with a price. And the price in this case is that you have to insert the checks one at a time and go through the painfully slow process of seeing and approving each one individually, and then going through about four more clicks just to get back to the screen where you can deposit the next check. So the whole thing takes about five times longer than making a deposit used to. But then you can get a space-age deposit receipt that actually includes check images, which is pretty cool.

And, when you withdraw money, it makes you take your card back BEFORE dispensing the cash, so that the next yoyo who comes along can't snag the card that you absent-mindedly left hanging in the breeze, half in and half out of the card slot. Now that is an innovation I can support. Not that I've ever left my card behind because once I got my cash, I was done with the bank machine, you understand. But I'm pretty tired these days. And it's not helped by hearing 275 rounds of "You are My Sunshine" coming from my daughter's musical rabbit at 2am.

I'm sure there's some kind of clever conclusion I should be able to make here -- drawing together sleeplessness, the swirling snowstorm, the irony of songs about sunshine, and the value of prescient bank machines, but my brain seems incapable of writing those clever sentences. So if you wouldn't mind, please just assume there is a connection. Then chuckle at the irony or humor or whatever it is. And root for State tonight.

Oh, and please send coffee.