MSU Hallway

I am back in my other life, the one lived in Okemos. This is a shot at the end of a day at my workplace, the offices of University Development at Michigan State University. My building is part of Spartan Stadium, a new addition to the stadium's east side. The offices of U.D. are located on the second and third floors of this new building, the top four floors of which (floors 4-7) are various skyboxes riding high above the football field at the bottom of the Spartan Stadium bowl. It's a nice view all the way down this hallway, which runs some 150 yards from south to north. My cubicle is about 25 feet in back of me as I stand at the windows overlooking the MSU track and the I.M. fields near Munn Ice Arena and the Breslin Center, where MSU's basketball games are played. What was I thinking this day? Not much, really. It has become a routine, going back and forth between Okemos and Copper Harbor and my two jobs. It's just the life our family leads, and we don't tend to think much about it day to day. It just something that we keep doing, and it would only feel peculiar or even worthy of notice if we DIDN'T do what we have done for some 15 summers since I returned to the Kilpela family business in CH.

Pokemon Stickers

Before we get too far down the road of time, I want to go back to a shot I took in the late spring and neglected to post. It marks a transition that has been continuing through the year in the life of our family. Logan has gone into high school and Drew into middle school, and they are both off to fairly good starts in their new educational surroundings. This photo is of Logan in May, when I rented a construction dumpster to get rid of all the old windows and doors that I have been removing from the house as I finish replacing old fixtures with new. This window frame with the window pane still intact was from Logan's bedroom. It was just about to get toosed into the dumpster with all the rest when I realized that it was from his room. That wasn't hard to figure out, since the glass was covered with Pokemon stickers that he had pasted on when we was in second grade or so. Pokemon was the rage during Logan's elementary years, but the boys tell me it is making a bit of comeback nowadays, and all their Pokemon cards and trinkets might actually be worth a little bit, if they'd take care of them. But these faded stickers are now at the top of the Grand Ledge landfill, almost surely never to be seen again, just as Logan's childhood is becoming a rapidly more disatant memory.

Working on Miniature Sets

Logan was up to another creative project late in the summer, with Drew's assistance. Logan is a filmmaker, and he was working in August, just before Mom and boys headed home for the opening of school, on some movie whose story involved my canoe. They found a "rocky" hunk of stryofoam in our business's work room down on the Queen IV dock, and Log set to work spray painting it to give it just the right look as a miniature rock cliff for a scene in the movie he has planned and has been working on. Earlier, I found him painting a toy canoe red in order to match the look of my real canoe, with the intention of shooting a scene in which my red canoe burns. I'll be interested to see where all this is heading.

Gotta Love That Junker

My son-in-law Art Davis loves his heap, that old red Jeep that he bought a couple years back. He seemed, perhaps, more excited about buying it than getting married to my daughter, Miranda, last September -- though I must admit that Miranda seems to love that old heap with a special fondness as well. Here's a shot of Art and Miranda, my sons Logan and Drew in the narrow and rugged back seat, pulling out of the driveway at our Copper Harbor house one late evening in mid-August a good hour after sunset. They use this old clunky vehicle for getting around in the Keweenaw woods on their various berry-picking missions and for hauling their big dogs, pictured elsewhere several times on this blog, to the trailheads they hike out from. I guess it has served a couple of great purposes, that old Jeep. It's always a rural luxury of our unpretentious sort to have a car or truck that you can beat the hell out of. I offered my old green Caravan to Art and Mir this summer, but Art's still happy with this thing, and so I drove my old Caravan home to Okemos and finally sold it to a friend who needed transportation. I'll miss it just because I could beat the hell out of it.

Horseshoe Channel

The days of summer have ended, and I and the family have returned from Copper Harbor to our life in Okemos. The weather has changed considerably as well. It is cool down here in Okemos on this early September day, in the low 60s, and fall-like up in CH, with a temp in he 50s and a heavy gale brlowing over Lake Superior. But I have many photos of the summer in the queue still planned for this blog, so I will keep with summer for a while longer, if only to keep as much of it as I can in the memory for as long as possible. In mid-August I took my boys out to Horseshore Harbor, the 600-acre preserve of the Nature Conservancy, to enjoy a fine summer day on the Lake Superior shore. We all went swimming in the West Harbor, as I call it, out at the preserve. A west wind was really jumping that day, and there were some sizeable waves crashing in (though the Queen IV had a fairly placid crossing, I was to find out later when she returned from Isle Royale. Here's a shot of the boys, Logan and Drew, swimming up one of the rocky channels in the West Harbor area of Horseshoe. They were pretending something that I was not privy to and having a great time.