See you soon

Dear blog reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. As my dear father and his many hard living relatives used to lament, I am a bit stoved up. What does stoved up mean? In the Sharritt lexicon of common ailments, it means that you are feeling off of your game. You are a long way away from a debilitating injury but you are going to be limping for a while.  The stoved up markers inclued a face set in grim determination and a slight hunch to there shoulders.

You might ask how is that different from how Sharritts look in their natural happy state. You have seen the old black and white photo, standing out by the garden, the clothsline, the fence by the pasture field screened by a stand of pink and read hollyhocks. Yep, it is a collage of grim faced hunch shoulder folks.  You need one more ingredient for proper stovage. You have to get the Sharrit to concede that they aren't feeling up to snuff.

It appears that my hard riding across Iowa and through Brown County on a tandem with the lovely Miss Beverly has taken a toll on my sciatica nerve on my left leg. It has caused enough distress that I have taken a week off from riding. Yes it is that serious.  I am jonesing get to get on a bike for my daily 18 mile ride.  This too shall pass. I am on the mend.  The numbness in my leg has been chased down to the ball of my foot and on out to my middle three toes.  Any time that I have to give up biking for a week, it is a defacto admission that I am stoved up.

What does one do when they are too stoved up to ride a bike or hoe a garden? The lovely Miss Beverly and I fired up the Subaru and headed to East Lansing, Michigan to visit the lovely Miss Grace and handsome Chris Kozak. It had been too long for me. I had seen plenty of Chris on RAGBRAI. However, I had not seen Grace since May. She had been in Washington DC for an internship. School is almost back in session. She has returned.  The young couple has moved from Ann Arbor where Grace is enrolled in Social Work to East Lansing where Chris is learning to be a lawyer. She will get on a bus and commute daily to Ann Arbor for the fall semester in the opposite direction that Chris commuted daily his first year of law school. It is a complicated life. They seem to navigate it with aplomb.

I like East Lansing more than Ann Arbor. It probably has more do with the fact that the Kozaks will reside there for the next two years. Why spend time falling in love with a town when you are going to leaving soon. Ann Arbor was a very good town to satisfy your culinary desires.  All of that disposable income refreshed each fall by a new crop of freshmen and the restrantuers decended in droves with lots of variety and good food.

East Lansing is no slouch. We ate at a place called Meat. No further explanation is required.  In the evening, we went to the Michigan State ice cream store. Why doesn't Purdue have such an animal; Land Grant School, Dairy Farm, Food Science department, all of the ingredients. Another piece of low hanging fruit when I become a Purdue University Trustee.  I will propose a winning football team and an ice cream shop on campus. I may go down in Trustee history; noted for my foresight and bold plans of action.

I do have a bone to pick with the Michigan State ice cream shop.  They have Illini icing, Hoosier hash, Terrapin Toffee, etc.  I was ready to order the Boilermaker Tracks. I got to the counter and ordered the Boilermaker flavor.  The deer in the headlights behind the counter had no IDEA what I was talking about. What has happened to the quality of higher education when we don't expect underclassmen to know the names and mascots of all of the Big 10, no 11, oops 12, make that a baker's dozen, crap Big 14.  I take that back poor confused coed. It is hard to keep track without a program. However, don't think that I am letting you off of the hook Michigan State. Let's make things consistent; either all school names or all mascots. Don't leave Purdue out there like the answer to some arcane SAT test: Which of these do not belong; wildcats, Illini, Hoosiers, Buckeyes, Terrapins, Cornhuskers, Purdue? Answer: Purdue; it is the only one to offer a higher education.

We rounded out the weekend with a fantastic growers only farmers market and lunch at a fantastic, soon to fail restaurant in a small town up the road: pearls before swine. 

It was a weekend about other things besides seeing Grace and Chris. We were kicking the tires on a new chapter in their life, looking in the nooks and crannies, checking the foundation, letting go. Again.

You all know about that. You are taking kids to college, the marines. You are going to help out with the new baby, or help with the move to that new job across the country. We have had a lot of practice; preschool, 1^st day of kindergarten, camp. The list goes on and on. It gets easier but it still is not easy enough and some times it makes me feel a little crazy.

 Letting go is like peeling an onion; there are many layers and peeling them back can make your eyes water. It too can stove you up.

Take care.

Roger