Minnesota

Here we are! Where to begin...?

The picture above shows Will and I and the dads in our "Team Minnesota" matching t-shirts, for the drive. We made it as planned, the old Volvo more than pulling her weight (and heroically driven by dad and Bill). The first night, we stopped in Indiana and enjoyed the hospitality and company of Jerry's parents, Jerry and Claire. The second night, we arrived in our dumpy new Minnesota apartment, just ahead of a violent rain and hail storm.

It would be impossible to fill you in on all the details, but here are some, in no particular order:

--Maggie and I almost stepped on a snake early in our trip, while making a pit stop in western Maryland, on the West Virginia border.

--It has rained (significantly) almost every day since we arrived in Minnesota. People tell me that this is not typical.

--We joined the local healthfood co-op, modeling ourselves after our MN corgi/blog friends, Megan and Chris.

--Will and I passed the surprisingly challenging (er, confusing...) MN written driver's license exam, and we are awaiting our new licenses in the mail. Also, weirdly, when we got new license plates for the cars, the last 2 digits of Will's (for the Honda) were his birth year, and the last two digits of mine (for the Volvo) were my birth year. Otherwise the plates are the same.

--I found out that one of my MN vet classmates was murdered last weekend. (That is what Lauren's comment to the previous post addressed.) So sad... She had already moved to Minnesota and started working on campus, so I'm sure that this has hit some of my classmates quite hard. I'm very sorry that I never got to meet her. She was a fellow dog-person and by all accounts sounds like a lovely woman.

--Below is a photo of the tribute to the sea that I promised to build on the eastern wall of our apartment. When the candle is lit, flickering shadows of schools of fish project on the wall, but I wasn't able to capture that in a picture.



More to come shortly. In the meantime, much love from Minnesota...