Winters on Hunters Point

The snow has been heavy from time to times this December up in Copper Harbor, according to Internet reports and reports home from my daughter Miranda Davis, who lives up there year round. But the forecast is calling for some drizzle or even light rain over the next day or two. I haven't been up there since the early fall, but I do have a shot of the Hunters Point Preserve from a couple years ago, taken on a day of fairly wet snow, when the temps were in the high 20s. If the pictures from the coast I've been seeing lately are close to a true indication of conditions right now, this photo is probably fairly close to what things look like up on the Superior coast outside Copper harbor as of now. This is one my favorite pictures of the coast in winter time. It was taken on my old Olympus digital on one of those brooding days, when the skies were dark and the wet snow was spitting and the waves were coming in with only moderate force, the wind having eased up for a day. The days are short, too. If I recall rightly, this was taken about 4:00 in the afternoon, and it was already getting close to sunset and darkness.

Holiday Table Tennis

The Holidays and ping-pong, a tradition that goes far back for many American families, and the Kilpelas are one family that is trying to keep this tradition alive. Pictured are my nephew Tom Baumgart (in his late 20s) and my son Drew, 12. I've been laid up with a removable cast, the dreaded boot, for four weeks now (stress fracture from too much tennis), but I still had enough mobility and savvy to hand young Tom a quartet of losses on Thanksgiving Day at our house in Okemos. Drew then took on Tom, but I failed to find out the final results. Drew is just learning, but he is a natural athlete and should turn out to be good enough to challenge the Ol' Man some day. I must admit, though, that I am really the only person striving to keep the tradition alive. I'll keep doing my best. My brother Don and I used to embark on some epic table tennis struggles back in our college days, such as when we decided one Christmas season to have a tournament of the best-of-seven matches, each match being contested by the best-of-seven 21-point games. We got close to getting sick of ping pong by the end, but I don't remember us slowing down even after that epic war was over. If I recall, I won it in the 7th game of the 7th match, many days after Christmas. Don probably recalls it differently, and since we fought about ping pong incessantly back in those days so often, it's only fitting that we woiuld continue to dispute every nuance now.

The MSU Campus

Cousin Kev Koski, from South America, asked for some photos of the beautiful MSU campus. Kev grew up nearby, but has moved on to Miami and points even farther south. He's currently biking around the world. His blog on that can be found by searching at google. I'll try to remember to put up the address some time soon on this blog. So for Kev here is one shot, of the family, minus Miranda, who is really in a new family of her own now. That's Marsha on the left, Drew (12), Logan (15), and me on campus. We are standing beneath Miranda's first dorm room, in East Holmes Hall on the far east side of the MSU campus. The photo was taken in late October. The vapor lights were already on when we were finishing a fall walk through the gorgeous woods of Sanford Natural Area, which is a place I regularly visit on campus and of which I have thousands of photos. I'll try to post some more campus shots. I sell my work concerning MSU for publications and as notecards in a series I call "Natural MSU."