Return to Michigan State

Before we started posting our travels, we had already done a couple of stints, one at Purdue U in late summer and one at Michigan State U just before Thanksgiving. We are now in the middle of a 2 week locum at Michigan State and will do another 2 weeks at Purdue in July. But for now, we are at the weekend between the 2 weeks at Michigan State. To make it more than a work trip, we decided to make the 2 hour trip to South Haven for the weekend. South Haven is on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, and a beautiful place to play. It is also just minutes from the Saugatuck/Douglas area which is Georgia's "Mendocino of the Midwest". We were there a couple of years ago. We got here in time to see the sunset. As best I can tell, these pictures are of Milwaukee at sunset.... from across the lake. We got here at the Yelton Manor http://www.yeltonmanor.com/ last evening in time to go see the sunset and walk around the corner to this little shop called Northside Memories http://www.findlocalcatering.com/Michigan/North-Side-Memories-36028.html that seems to have everything in the drink and snack realm you would ever want.

Came back to the room and settled in with "Charlie Wilson's War", but you know who drifted off to dreamland after about 7 minutes. I got up and showered to start my day. I walked out the front door to find this little guy feeding on Elaine's flowers. Since they were Elaine's flowers and not mine, I decided to leave him alone. I feel so satisfied that we were able to raise a beautiful crop of tulips this spring in the face of rabbits running all over the neighborhood. Among the myriad of flowers around these 2 houses is a little yellow flowering plant that seems to thrive most everywhere. I asked Elaine about it this morning to find that it is an indigenous midwestern primrose (Oenothera tetragona..sundrop)(that I don't think I have seen before). Elaine considers herself the "Johnny Appleseed" of this plant and promised us a start (if we remember to remind her). If we get it to take hold in Illinois like here, there will be starts for all who desire in a year or so. It's about time for a breakfast that smells delicious, then we'll saunter around to see what else we can discover.

Although I am enjoying my time at Michigan State, I stumbled on to a couple of interesting things. First, the odds of coming back to MSU for a locum seem to diminish when I found out that although they are losing one radiologist to Colorado State U, they have hired THREE.... yes three new ones. It seems that at this point, vet schools either have radiologists or they don't. So we will have to make the most of this trip. If you are a diligent reader of these posts, you should know of my disdain for inadequate street signs. Well, here there are enough signs, but being a bit of a "compass head" and map fiend, with logic being the basis, I am dealing with a problem in East Lansing. One of the streets we take from the Hampton to the vet school is Abbot(t). Now why did I write it like that??? I don't know how to spell it. All of the little green street signs I have seen spell it Abbot, yet all of the businesses along the road use "Abbott"... Abbott Law Offices, etc. And to take it further, there is road construction on the north end and all of the ORANGE road signs that tell you about the roadwork spell it Abbott... How can I sleep at night when I can't figure out how to spell a simple thing like a street sign. If you come to visit us, you will find that at one end of our street it is spelled "Jeffery" like we spell the name of our "baby boy". Yet at the other end, the street signs spell it "Jeffrey". Alas, there is no order in this world. To make matters worse, There was an English artist who was a contemporary of Sir Isaac Newton who spelled his name Geoffrey Kneller http://www.handelhouse.org/img_info/george.html