We Got Visitors!!!!!

What a treat it was to have David and Grace visit us for a few days. David has just finished his third year of medical school and Grace has just finished up her classes at the Fashion Institute of New York. It felt like we were having Christmas early as it was so wonderful to spend time with family.
We had our first Senior Missionary Outing when they were here to the GM Assembly Plant in Lansing. The plant is highly automated with some excellent robotics and is supposed to be the most high tech automobile plant around. It is not open to the general public so it was a real treat to tour it. David and Grace loved hanging out with all of us and we all had a great lunch at the home of President and Sister Jones.

In between teaching our classes and the really terrible weather, we still were able to show David and Grace some fun places in Michigan.
The tulips in Holland were basically gone, but we were able to show them the massiveness of Lake Michigan, the beautiful beaches there, and the bright red Holland South Pier Lighthouse. I’ll admit it, that we did a little shopping in downtown Holland too. It is a beautiful little Michigan town with a serious Dutch heritage




We had short visit to an artsy tourist town on Lake Michigan, called Saugatuck—lots of Native American names around here

Today is Memorial Day and we are so grateful for all those who serve now, have served, and especially those who have given their lives for this great nation. Most of the students and young people here have all headed for the beaches or lakes. For those that are still around, we have invited to a BBQ here at the institute. It is supposed to be 90 degrees today with humidity.
Spring, I think, is here or has come and gone. I am never quite sure as this past week, it has been very rainy and cold and yesterday, we even had a tornado warning and went to a safe area to wait out the storm.
The campus here, however is beyond gorgeous and we are told that it has been declared a National Arboretum. Craig and I try to walk everyday and we have really enjoyed seeing all the ducklings and goslings along the river as well as the beautiful gardens. One of our favorites is behind the Radiology Building.

I love looking at the contrast between the tree outside our apartment window a couple of weeks ago and what it looks like now. I found out it is a dogwood tree and it so reminds me of the tree in our yard in Seattle when I was very young.

We works hard and we plays hard....

Well, we work hard and we play hard! Having had a very busy Spring semester with classes and activities, we had a little break before Summer semester begins at the institute…no classes to teach, most of the students away for the break, and no missionary district meeting.

SO…you KNOW that we are very experienced at packing a lot of tourism into a short period of time…

Actually, we spent a Saturday in Holland MI for the annual Tulip Festival. The following Monday we had to go to Ohio for a routine Kaiser visit (there is no Kaiser Permanente in Michigan and every visit is a 460 mile round trip!) SO we added a couple days to visit Kirtland, Ohio, which is just another 40 miles beyond where we had to go anyway.

Kirtland is the site of an extraordinary and formative time in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and we’ve long looked forward to being able to spend a little time there learning more and absorbing the wonderful knowledge that some incredibly important events occurred there.

So with that introduction, here’s the update…

Today (5/22) it’s a humid 88 degrees! Seems like we had a few spotty days of spring and launched right in to summer. Everything is green, flowering, and beautiful.

Our feathered and furry friends are busy behind our apartment…

Mr. Squirrel says “Am I feeling lucky today?”





Whoops…maybe not so much….








The fields are being prepared for planting…




On the MSU Campus, love is blossoming….




As are the flowers and trees….






And the Red Cedar River has finally stopped rising and is becoming peaceful, although still overflowing its banks….




In Kirtland, Ohio, we visited with our Half Moon Bay friends Dean and Marjorie Cook. Elder and Sister Cook are spending their summer as service missionaries helping to maintain the church historic sites in the Kirtland area. It was great to spend time with them as we visited the sites.

In front of the main visitor’s center…yep, it’s us!






And here with the Cooks at the John Johnson Farm, where the Prophet Joseph Smith and his wife Emma stayed for a time…




The Kirtland Temple....




School of the Prophets in the Newell K. Whitney store….




And a bonus lighthouse on our way home. This is the Marblehead Light on the southwestern shore of Lake Erie….



The Holland Tulip Festival. They plant 120,000 new tulip bulbs each year for this. It is fantastic! Holland is a very nice town on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan that was founded by Dutch settlers…as you can see, their legacy has become a very big annual festival!

It's May!!!

I’ve never seen such green, green grass before. It is everywhere and it appeared almost overnight. The daffodil’s are in full bloom and even some of the bushes and trees have blossoms. We’ve heard that spring in Michigan is spectacular and I think it is finally on its way. What a wonderful, but busy, week we have had. Along with finishing our classes for the semester at the institute, we had some very special visitors from home. Marjorie and Dean Cook stopped by on Tuesday on their way to serve their mission in Kirkland, Ohio. They were able to stay for the night; and after dinner out, lots of chatting and laughing, a very WET rainy walk on MSU campus, breakfast here, and they hooked up their rig and were off. We are enjoying our mission, but we definitely are homesick for our family and friends so it was so wonderful to visit with them. We welcome all family and friends!!! Eric called last night to let us know that he had his plane tickets to come visit us over Labor Day. Yea!

The University Ward keeps us super busy along with our institute classes. Monday night for family night, we went on a picture taking scavenger hunt for two hours on MSU campus. The kids helped us see things we had never seen before and it was a bit crazy, but fun. (It didn’t hurt that our team won.) The ward also had an “end of the year” BBQ and then Friday night was institute graduation which was wonderful.

We always try to make the most of our Saturdays. I am fascinated by the whole making of maple syrup so we went to the Vermontville Maple Syrup Festival and it didn’t disappoint. We had a yummy pancake breakfast with real maple syrup. They had maple everything for sale—maple ice cream, maple cotton candy (had to try it), maple candy, maple soda, maple cream, and on and on. Just driving to Vermontville was a treat as the grass and fields are so green and beautiful surrounding quaint farm houses and classic red barns.

Love abounds in the University Ward and there are lots of marriages planned for this summer. I even had the opportunity to go to one of the wedding showers yesterday. Then to complete our Saturday, we attended a musical concert at the Wharton Center at MSU as Peter and Terri Bates had given us their tickets for the concert. The chorus and symphony performed Verdi’s Requiem and the music was beyond amazing. Craig and I really got our classical music fix for awhile.

We came here to Michigan to serve and teach the young people in this area, but they have taught us so much. We have witnessed so much kindness as we watch how they treat one another—the young lady who walked back several rows to retrieve another young lady who is sitting alone, the young man who walks with the blind deacon as he passes the Sacrament, the many meals they fix for the elders who serve in this ward, the lovely flowers and thoughtful card we were given last week, and I honestly could go on and on. On Easter Sunday, I complimented Jo who is blind on how pretty she looked. She told me that Brittany had taken her shopping the day before. These kids just keep teaching us every day.