sweet sixteen!!

Although I am a big fan of Southern California in general and USC, I've gotta say that I'm excited Michigan State is the team that made it to the sweet sixteen this year!
It should be pretty fun around here if MSU does well... or if they don't. Apparently the students here are known to riot when the team gets knocked out of the tournament! We may not be able to get close enough to take pictures but I'm sure there will be stories!

Munn Ice Arena

As we were giving Josh a tour of campus, we were able to get inside of Munn Ice Arena where the hockey team plays. Other TAs also teach ice hockey and figure skating classes in here (although, lucky for everyone, I don't have to teach those classes).
We haven't been to a hockey game yet and their season is over this year but hopefully we can go next year. Looks like it would be a pretty cool place to watch a game! MSU actually won the national championship in hockey in 2007 so they must be pretty good!


Other than that it's been pretty fun to have Josh here and show him around campus and East Lansing!

wish me luck!!

Josh is coming!!

He gets here tonight really late and will be here until the end of next week for ISU's spring break. We're excited to have a visitor to stay with us and someone we can show around East Lansing!

Other than that, nothing much new is going on here. I am working on a grant writing project that will hopefully set up some great research experience for me in the future and finishing up the semester. After this week, there's only 6 more weeks in the semester plus finals week! Hopefully I will be teaching and taking classes for one session of summer school and the coaching volleyball camps for the rest of the semester. Mikel's still working about every day and we can't wait for it to warm up around here and for summer to start!

happy St. Patrick's day!!

So today we learned that St Patrick's day is a big deal here in East Lansing! The bars opened at 7am and both Mikel and I were missing a lot of students from class today. There seemed to be quite a few people stumbling a little bit around campus and downtown as everyone celebrated St Patrick's day. According to my lifeguard, it's a big deal here because of the green for the holiday and Spartan green but I think it might have a lot to do with the alcohol consumption as well!

It probably helped that it was nearly 70 degrees outside for the first time in a long time. After Mikel and I finished teaching out afternoon classes, we decided to drive around and look at all the people partying in their front yards and at restaurants and bars. Here are some of the pictures we took...

This picture below is the Dublin Square bar.... there was already a line outside of people waiting to get in at 4 in the afternoon!


I wonder how many people are going to be on their "A" game at their 8am classes tomorrow...

College Football Hall of Fame

Our last big stop on the trip was at the College Football Hall of Fame. We actually didn't know it was even in South Bend but, once we heard, we figured we might as well check it out while we were there.

This field was outside the building and it was really nice turf where you could have your own little game. There was actually audio recordings playing outside of old football games too to make it a pretty neat atmosphere! Right inside the window, there was 25 school pennants hanging up in the order that national championship voting finished for the 2008 season; they update it each year with the most recent finishes.
We weren't sure what to expect because on the ground level, all there is a information desk, gift shop, and little sandwich restaurant. You couldn't tell how big it was or anything but it turned out the entire museum was in the basement level....

These people were inside a mini stadium they had where they had a short video of football history highlights...
Of course I had to take a picture of the training and sports medicine because that's where I spent a great deal of my college career...

The museum was very very cool. We could have spent a couple days in there with all there is to read but we spent 2 or 3 hours checking everything out. It would be definitely fun to go again and read even more! It was filled with so much history!

There was also a little training center where you could do a bunch of different skills and then, depending on your score, could determine whether you were "All-American" status all the way down to "water boy"....


This display had the most recent bowl game results...

This is just a small view of the inside of the museum. It twists and turns through different time periods and all of the gold colored plaques are All-American award winner.
We were lucky that we went on a Sunday morning when there wasn't a football game or anything much going on in town because we were the only two people in the museum for about 95% of the time we were there! That way, when I got loud or Mikel yelled for me to come look at something we weren't disturbing anyone!

As we were driving home we decided to take another scenic route and we were driving through a little town and all the sudden there was a college! It was really small and so we pulled over and drove around the tiny campus (in about 5 minutes) where there seemed to be as many dorm buildings as classrooms. We looked it up when we got home and it is a small Methodist school that competes in NAIA athletics.

Spring break has been great and I'm just trying to get myself a little ahead before school starts again on Monday. I've done lots of grading, worked on research projects, and started thinking about some papers that are due later in the semester. We've also had time to relax a lot and explore a little more! Mikel is still enjoying work and making some friends there. He's starting to get a few more hours too which is nice. (Who wouldn't want him working for them??)