Summer Adventures

Jake and I had a lot of adventures this summer that I haven't posted about. I don't really have time to write a lot, but I'll put up some pictures and a few blurbs.

Camaro Superfest 2012
There was a car show full of Camaros (what is the plural of Camaro?) right here in Ypsilanti. So I dragged Jake to it on one of the hottest days of the summer.

With my favorite classic car: '68 Camaro 

 Transformers

 For my dad: Godzilla eating a Ford sign

Again, for my dad: a yellow '69 

Pool cue as hood prop 

 Utah and Michigan State Trooper Camaros

Cool buildings by the park 

This boardwalk connects two parks across the river from each other.

Mussel Beach

At some point during the summer, we were really aching for a beach. So we decided to visit one of the great lakes. Mussel beach is on Lake Huron in a place called Bay City. If you think of Michigan as a mitten, Bay City is right at the bottom of where the lake extends between the "fingers" and the "thumb." We were thinking of swimming, but aside from the water being very cold, we were deterred by some funny signs about fecal beach muck. Gross. Another sign warned us about the mute swans that frequent the area to attack children and other innocent passersby. Luckily, we did not encounter any of those.

Farmer's Market

We frequented the heirloom tomato booth at the Ypsilanti Farmer's Market. We made delicious bruschetta, caprese salad, and tomato sandwiches. Yum.

The bowl contains green sausage tomatoes. I've never seen them before, but they were tasty. 

Science Experiments
Jake got really excited about children's science experiments over the summer. So we made gloop (pictured below) out of Elmer's glue and borax. We also made oobleck with cornstarch and water. I didn't take a picture, but it was really cool. It is a liquid, but it hardens instantly if you apply a quick force, such as a poking finger.

This video demonstrates the appeal of gloop. (In case you are at work, the appeal is fart sounds.)

Cooking

We made a couple of new recipes: molasses ice cream and root beer cake.

Light-up Houses

Jake won a contest online (because he has awesome, creative ideas!), and these light-up house kits were his reward. The lights turn off during the day and on during the night. You can see the light sensor on the roof. They use this cool conductive paint (you can see the shadows of it up the sides of the houses in these pictures) to create the circuit. I decorated the one on the left and Jake decorated the one on the right.

Good-bye, summer! Hello, fall!

WE'RE Going Back to School!

Jake is going back to school in a few weeks to start his Ph.D., and I'm going with him! I have been accepted to a master's program in Apparel, Textiles, and Merchandising at Eastern Michigan University. (Yes, they shorten that to EMU -- funny.) I just got the official word that I have been offered a Graduate Assistant (GA) position, which is basically just a campus job, but receiving one means that the school will cover my tuition and pay me a stipend each semester!

I was accepted a couple of months ago, but I didn't know if I would be going because the non-resident tuition is out of control. I missed the scholarship application deadlines back in February before I even knew EMU existed. So my only chance at a free degree was to get a GA position. Most of them are taken by now, so there was only one that I was qualified for, and I got it!

I will be assisting a professor in the School of Technology Studies. I don't know a ton about the responsibilities yet, but it will mostly be administrative. Oh, and they give me a free parking pass! Awesome!

EMU was founded as Michigan State Normal School. What a funny name! It makes you wonder why it needed that qualifier - normal. Anyway, I haven't explored much on campus, but the buildings I've been to are pretty. I did get a tour of my program's facilities, and they have a lot of cool equipment for studying textiles. Here are some pictures from Wikipedia.

Roosevelt Hall: My advisors office and most of my classes are here.

Starkweather Hall: The oldest building on campus.

Boone Hall: An administrative building.

Pierce Hall: This administrative building has an elevator with windows (the three big ones on the left). It's fun, but the window is always covered in hand and face prints that are taller than you might guess.

I took some of my own photos of the UofM campus when Jake's parents were helping us move. Jake showed us around the north sector of campus where his classes and work will be. Then we went to the central campus where many of the other departments are housed. Jake hates waiting for me to take pictures, but I really like some of the ones that I was able to take below.

This is the Wave Field. It was designed by Maya Lin, the artist who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC.

The pictures below are of the law school. It is a very cool building, like something out of Harry Potter. This atrium area lets light into some study areas of the law library.

These are the law school residence halls. Awesome! We're jealous. 

Hope you enjoyed this little campus tour! School starts in a few short weeks, and we are trying to enjoy the freedom we have left!

Rain Clouds, Googagers, and a Sprinkler Gauntlet

The clouds in Michigan make me feel very small. They tower over me. I think the best word to describe them is grand. The first time I saw them roll in, I had to snap a few pictures.

I'm not sure these pictures capture how grand they really are. They are so huge and low to the ground. It almost always rains soon after these clouds roll in, which is surprising seeing as the distant ones look so pretty and sweet. But as you can see in the second picture, their undersides look much more gloomy than you would expect.

Another surprise we had when we moved to Michigan: the goose population. Shortly after we moved in, the goslings started transforming into adults. They reached a really funny, awkward stage in between, so I said they were goose teenagers. In an attempt to create a more succinct term for them, I called them googagers. Jake was always making fun of me for combining the words incorrectly: it would actually be goonagers. So the term stuck and now refers to all geese.

Googagers: they are everywhere, and worse - their poop is everywhere. We noticed one or two little presents when Jake's parents were helping us to unload the moving truck. They put some cardboard down on the lawn so we wouldn't step in it. What we didn't know then is that the lawn is merely an illusion. The lawn is really a few blades of grass growing through a hearty blanket of green goose poop. I refuse to cut across our grass for any reason. There are some uneven places in the parking lot where rain and sprinkler water pool, and that water is literally green with poo particles washed down from the lawn and sidewalks. Gross. It is good that they run the sprinklers so often in our complex because it clears the poop off of our sidewalk. They are like landmines.

We are glad they water the lawn in our complex because we have lost count of the number of people who have told us that you don't have to water your lawn here. This is funny because Jake and I have seen countless brown lawns. We saw one lawn that was brown with green polka-dots each in a circumference around a sprinkler head. To their defense, we have also been hearing that this is a particularly hot summer for the area. But still, it's pretty funny.

The lawn at our complex seems to be doing okay, but they run the sprinklers at the worst possible time. They are always going in the late afternoon during the hottest part of the day. Not only is this inefficient, but that is a high traffic time for coming and going around here. So the other day, Jake and I came home in the afternoon to find the sprinklers running in front of our apartment. We carefully tracked the three that appeared to be threats and planned our strategy for getting to the door. I made a break for it with Jake close behind, and just as I leapt for the landing step, we were broadsided by a fourth culprit that had evaded our detection. We were both soaking wet, defeated by the sprinkler gauntlet.

Anyway, back to the clouds and the geese. The rainstorms we have seen out here are much more intense than the ones we remember in Utah and Idaho. They are sudden downpours often accompanied by strong wind. We went to lunch the other day and contemplated sitting outside because the weather was so nice. We decided to sit inside and halfway through our sandwiches, we looked out the window to see the table umbrellas blowing inside out, giant raindrops pelting the ground, and a substantial stream rushing toward the storm drains (aptly named - who knew?).

So the first time we had one of these storms, I was home alone while Jake was at school. I ran to the window only to peer outside and see this.

Whenever we have a rainstorm, the geese congregate like this. The all face the same direction and tip their heads back a little as though they are searching the skies for their mothership. Then the hordes parade across the lawn, pecking their beaks in the grass looking for worms. Those crazy geese. In the second picture, you can see the amount of water that shoots out of our rain gutter during these storms. It creates a nice little recreation area for the geese.

Box Fort, Time Machine

It felt so good when we had finally unpacked all of our things in our new apartment. But what were we to do with all of those empty boxes? The kids in us thought a box fort was the logical answer.

We had such a good time planning it and building it, discussing its structural integrity, playing card games inside under the colored light that shined through the blankets. By morning it had lost its charm as the only way to the kitchen was to crawl through the fort. Every vacation must come to an end.

Journey Through the Center of the States

Most of you already know this, but we made it to Michigan. It's been over a month now that we have been living here. The drive out was very long. We drove something like 2,000 miles over the course of five days.

Day 1: Draper, Utah through Wyoming to Sidney, Nebraska. 
This pretty much sums up our view through the wind shield for most of the trip:

You can see the Corolla that Steve and Allie were driving, the Penske truck that Steve and Michele were driving, a long stretch of road, and a big blue sky. The scenery did change from time to time, but those factors remained the same. Here is a little taste of Wyoming:

 Windmills

 Tunnel

Rock Formations

The most popular Hampton Inn destination on the planet.

Sidney, Nebraska is home to Cabela's headquarters. We visited the store there, but it was smaller than the one in Draper. I took a picture, but it was pretty dark.

By the way, what is up with these oddly shaped water towers? Maybe I'm the only one who thinks they are odd because it seems to be commonplace across the Midwest. Where I'm from, water towers look like this:

Source

Or they look something like this:

Source

They do not look like this one we saw in Nauvoo (and many other cities):

Nor do they look like this one, which is located in Ypsilanti where we now live:

Source

(In case you were wondering, this building was named the world's most phallic building in a contest held by Cabinet magazine. If you weren't wondering, I apologize for telling you anyway.)

That concludes today's study of water towers. We'll get back to the trip.

Day 2: Sidney, NE to Council Bluffs, Iowa
Council Bluffs seems like it is basically one city with Omaha, NE. They are on either sides the border between the two states. At this stop, we were able to visit Winter Quarters, the church history site. It was beautiful, but I didn't realize how hot and humid it would be along the Missouri River.

LDS Temple at Winter Quarters

Excuse the poor quality of these pictures of the Missouri River as they were taken through windows. What can you do?

 From the car

From our hotel window

Day 3: Council Bluffs, IA to Keokuk, IA
I didn't take many pictures on this drive, but after we arrived in Keokuk to drop off the truck, we drove to Nauvoo and Carthage in Illinois. Again, I didn't realize how hot and humid it would be, but we were right on the Mississippi River this time, so it was.

Nauvoo was really pretty. We visited the Scoville Bakery, the Webb Blacksmith shop, the Jonathon Browning home and gun shop, and the Land and Records office. I think the blacksmith shop is where they told us about making the Nauvoo bricks, which was interesting, and they give you a brick at the end. At the Browning home, they told us about Jonathon Browning's company, and they showed us the tools he used to make his guns. We went to the Land and Records office to look up one of Michele's ancestors who had lived in Nauvoo. It was really cool - they were able to tell her which plot of land her ancestor had lived on so we could go look at it.

Nauvoo Temple

Behind the bakery

View from Browning's back porch

 There were so many butterflies on these flowers at the temple grounds. I just thought they were pretty.

This is a view of the Mississippi River from the cemetery at Nauvoo.

We were too late for a tour at Carthage Jail, but we're pretty sure that the window at the top left of the picture below is the one that Joseph fell from.

Day 4: Keokuk, IA to Cincinnati, Ohio

This was a long day. We drove all the way across two states: Illinois and Indiana. There were a lot more corn fields than I was expecting in Illinois. It helped me to understand Children of the Corn and other rural horror movies. There is just an eerie feeling to driving through miles and miles of corn. I can't explain it. This picture pretty much sums up what we saw for most of that day.

We ended up in Cincinnati, where we dropped off Steve and Allie at his parent's house. Day 4 was my birthday, so Steve and Allie had raced ahead of the caravan to buy a birthday cake. It was really nice of them, and the cake was delicious! Steve's family invited us for dinner and ate birthday cake with us. It felt nice to be in a home again, even if it wasn't ours.

Day 5: Cincinnati, OH to Ypsilanti, Michigan

Our new apartment was a short four hours from Cincinnati. I never thought I would say a four hour drive was short, and maybe I never will again. But that day, it felt short. Ypsilanti (pronounced IP-sil-ant-ee) is like Ann Arbor's Orem. The locals shorten it to Ypsi (ip-see). What should be their claim to fame, although I had to read about it on Wikipedia, is that Ypsilanti is where Domino's Pizza was founded. Seriously, Ypsi? This is big stuff - figure it out. 

Anyway, we're here, and we're trying to get to know the place better so that when all of you come to visit us, we'll have cool places to take you!