Catching up

When I left you last fall, I was working at Purdue and we were helping care for Georgia's mom in Gas City, IN. In late October, we said goodbye to her and celebrated her life here on earth with family and friends.

We have since returned to our home, had a wonderful Christmas celebration with our sons and families and started working on reacclimating.  Although I took most of December off to make room for the Christmas celebration, I have continued to work at Purdue now and then. In the meantime, during January, I had bilateral cataract surgery and welcomed a brighter world. I learned that I should never have argued with Georgia over color because I wasn't seeing what she was seeing.. (I'll resist launching into a life lesson here... I think you can figure it out for yourself.)  At this point, I only need glasses for close up reading. Seems my astigmatism prevented me from being able to get the multifocal lenses which would have eliminated glasses. Problem is that now I have glasses on when I don't need them and don't have them when I do. Surely I'll get this figured out. I do however need sunglasses a lot in this bright world.
Because my driving route changed from Gas City to home, I am now driving from the central time zone to eastern which makes an early rising time, but gets me home much earlier. This also changed my route. So again, I get to acquaint you with another small Indiana town; Wingate, Indiana. Wingate site     Their major claim to fame is their 1913-1914 Indiana State High School Basketball Championship. Sort of a Milan story, I think. Milan was the small town that the movie "Hoosiers" was based on. It appears to be a nice little farming community. At 7:30 am (eastern), the only places open in town are a filling station and the Spartan Inn. A family run restaurant, the decor is pictures of the famous basketball team along with other local images. Spartan Inn site   You probably guessed that yes, I had to figure out a way to check it out. Life is too short to just drive by, right???? One morning, I worked it out so I would have time to stop for breakfast. I walked in and the 4 guys at a table glanced at me and after the waitress got them settled, she came to see what I needed. Very nice lady who was ready to work on my breakfast. It was pretty good, but their potatoes were "cottage fries" which were the deep fried version.. Nothing like the home fries at the B&B in Gas City or Sammy's in Champaign or Urbana Garden in Urbana. Good breakfast, but not worth the extra effort for me. Neat thing is that a few days later, I was filling up with gas at the station down the road and the guy across the pump from me was one of the guys at the Spartan Inn. I explained that I remembered him as the guy who gave another guy a ride after breakfast a few days earlier.. He recalled seeing me and asked what I was doing. He was very friendly. Well , he is an insurance salesman.... what do you expect?  Found out that his son was going to go to Purdue, but ended up in Texas and was a ranch manager there. I'll not bore you with more details, but found that he knew the folks at Shadeland farm where Georgia, I and our 2 dogs (Bootsie Donovan, the beagle and King the German Shepherd Dog) and 2 cats (Missie Midge and Mister Mingo) lived during 2 years of vet school at Purdue. Got the rundown on the family and found one of the grandsons was running it. They apparently bought the farm from the New York guy who owned it in the 60's. (Oh, they changed from Hereford cattle to red and black Angus.) I may never know if they have forgiven me for butchering a pig in the kitchen the weekend that we were moving out. That weekend, Georgia was in the hospital with our new baby Rodney Blaine Kneller. I moved us out and had no place to keep the pig I had been raising, so had to butcher it.. I thought I had cleaned up pretty well, but apparently not as well as I thought. I'm not sure Georgia has forgiven me for sullying her reputation for keeping a clean house.
I've become quite a fixture at Purdue. One nice thing is that I have gotten to work with some other old friends. Dr. Bill Blevins, a Purdue 68 classmate has retired from the diagnostic imaging service at Purdue and is now filling in teaching some lectures and like myself doing a few locums. Nice to catch up with him a bit. This week however, I got to work with Dr. Chess Adams who retired from the University of Wisconsin a few years ago. Chess came to work with us at Illinois back in the late 70's and left us to become the first radiologist at the new vet school at the University of Wisconsin. That of course called for some "way back" reminiscence, reminding each other of many people and incidents. We were however able to keep up with the workload between recalling people and happenings of our youth. Here's Chess hard at work at Purdue.

OK, for those who don't know him... William McChesney Adams. Now you know where the Chess comes from.
Because Valentine's day is this coming week, here's a valentine from our front door. Later, skk