Florence, Creation, Hoosiers

On our way to another locum, a few things are stringing together in my "stream of consciousness" thinking. We decided that on our way to Knoxville to work at the uTk vet school, we would swing by the Creation Museum south of Cincinnati. http://www.creationmuseum.org/ Although there is a west coast version of this facility, Rod, Blaine and Jack Kneller volunteered their labor to help build this one. Here is a picture of them with the worker group a couple of years ago. Perhaps, I will share more about this after we've visited the place courtesy of Rod's guest passes. While we are here we are missing the annual woodcutting on Stephenson Lane in Springfield with the Hogan Clan. That's a bummer, but with my nearly healed intercostal muscle and both hands not quite recovered from carpal tunnel release surgery, I would have probably embarassed myself trying to keep up with 80+ "uncle Bob".

On the way here, coming down I-74, we passed Batesville and Sunman where my vet school lab partner, Lloyd Koester grew up and practices veterinary medicine. Then out of the nite came a green and white sign that said "Milan"... Whoa! Milan, Indiana is the little town whose basketball team won the IHSAA basketball tournement in 1954. http://www.sportshollywood.com/hoosiers.html This is the team that the movie "Hoosiers" was based on. You'll never know how from 1954 to 1960, how many times my imaginary team mates and I (from little Silver Lake, Indiana) played as the Milan Indians against the larger powers of Indiana high school basketball out in our toolshed on rainy days. I shot jump shots over the likes of Jimmy Rayl from the Kokomo Kats and 6'4" Pat Porter from Noblesville, and completed reverse lay-ups around that brute Larry Heistler from Etna Green (Not such a large school, but a Kosciusko County power during the time.) Of course, there was no one to see all that except at times my cousin Monica who still claims that she spent her youth rebounding the ball and throwing it back to me so I could practice... Surely it wasn't that bad.... was it???

So what about Florence??? Several years ago, Georgia had the opportunity to travel to Europe. One of her favorite cities was Florence, Italy. You may remember the dairy commercial that featured Florence, the Holstein cow by that name also. Then while in Oregon, (Check blogs from last March.) One of Georgia's favorite places to shop was "Bon Jour" in Florence, Oregon. So here I sit in a really modern place (Hyatt Place) in, you guessed it... Florence, Kentucky. Oh, and there was Florence Williams, my beloved first grade teacher at Silver Lake School, where I grew up a Hoosier during a time when Creation was allowed in grade school curricula.