Hit and Run

Krystal called me last Thursday to casually inform me that I was her emergency contact person. Random, I know. It was finals week and she had just finished taking her exams. Now all she had to do was finish up her work week at the school cafeteria, and then pack her things and say goodbye to her beautiful Yakeley-Gilchrist dorm room located on MSU's beautiful old North Campus.

Talking to K this time of year always makes me nostalgic for MSU. Spring at MSU is one of my favorite memories. If you've never been to MSU's campus in the Spring, you're missing out. The campus is laden with trees in full bloom: cherry and apple blossoms, dogwood, magnolia. There are flowering bushes everywhere and more tulips than you could throw a stick at. Students are all out on the grass, studying or playing frisbee, and sharing the lawn with the squirrels and ducks.

Here are some shots from my days there. They don't look very nice because I scanned old photos with my flatbed scanner, instead of having the negatives professionally scanned (I totally missed these when I did a big negative scan a few years ago. Bummer!). But you get the point.

A few short hours after Krystal and I spoke, she calls me again, in tears. She had been riding her bike on MSU's campus when she was hit by a big old green van. A big old green van that KEPT ON GOING after it took my sister down. I was so pissed. She filed a police report but she didn't get the license plate because she was too busy getting whiplash and a concussion, so the police didn't hold out any hope for catching the a-hole.

Krystal said that three other people were around when this happened. Two didn't even stop (you're lucky I wasn't there, JERKS!). One girl asked Krystal if she was all right, and she was in so much shock that she said that she was, and the girl left. After sitting on the sidewalk for a few minutes she realized what had happened and called the police.


She felt pretty beat up but thought she was okay, so she went to work. A few hours later she had a massive headache and got worried. When she called me I suggested that she lay down for a few hours to see how she feels.

"What if I have a brain aneurism?!??" she cried. She was starting to get worked up.

"What?" I said.

"I don't want to end up like Natasha Richardson!!" Now she was really crying.

Who the heck is Natasha Richardson? I wondered. I know that K has a friend named Natasha, but I didn't think she had head problems...

Krystal explained that Natasha Richardson was Liam Neeson's wife who recently died from a brain aneurism after a skiing accident.

Oh, THAT lady. I'm sooo not a celebrity follower. I'm proud of that.


After talking her down, Krystal decided to go to the emergency room. She had been freaked out about making Mom and Dad angry by running up their medical bills, as K has had several trips to the doctor or ER this year. Mom reassured her that if she was hurt, she needed to get checked out. That's life.

So she did. And she is okay, despite the whiplash, concussion, and hurt knee and elbow.

Krystal and I found it ironic that just a few hours before her accident she had put me as her emergency contact, and then an emergency happened.

I am really steamed that the van driver didn't stop after he hit K. She is hurt, and her cool vintage bike is probably totalled (though she wants to see if Dad, the fix-it man, can resurrect it).

Sadly for K, Spring at MSU probably won't have the same whistful, bird-chirping, lovely garden, sunshiny feeling as it does for me. Poor girl...

Hilton house wrap-up

A few notable moments from our stay at the Hilton:

Photographing plants:

Marian asked me to photograph her peonies as they bloomed, and of course I couldn’t resist shooting her other flowers, too. I was greatly intrigued by what I called “space needle” flowers. They were flowers without petals. I
took many photos of them. When Marian returned this weekend I commented on them. “Oh, those are aliums that have already bloomed and lost their petals,” she said. Agh! I’m a lame brain! I thought she had some rare funky species of outer-space flower or something!

Killing plants:

One of my jobs was to keep her indoor plants, front porch plants, back porch plants, garden plants, and vegetable garden plants alive. Most things that were planted in the ground survived. The potted plants did not fare so well. See this beautiful one? Yeah, it shriveled up by the time I was done with it. Marian was good natured about my murders and was also very patient as she taught me (again! I’m a slow learner) about how to care for potted plants. I am determined to get it right! (Says the girl who killed almost all of her own houseplants this last winter when she was sick!) I also was so unobservant that I totally missed the chipmunk and groundhog infiltrations in her vegetable garden. I could blame it on pregnancy brain, but honestly, I think the problem is my general “blondness” that rears its ugly head once in a while.

Breaking Appliances:

The water heater broke with a week left to our stay. And they don’t make that kind of heater anymore, so the new one will take almost 2 weeks to come in. Of course, the water heater broke on the day that we had out-of-town friends stay the night. Bathers were subject to what my family calls “Lake Superior washes.” Eee! I was not one of those bathers. I am not brave. I went to my own house for showers when I could.

A few days later, after a really long day of hard work, I sat down to watch an hour of TV before bed. And the TV broke. Agh!

So there we were, out in the an old antique house, no hot water, a broken TV, no normal internet or normal working computer. We were roughing it! Haha.

After that I was afraid of some other catastrophe—you know, things come in threes. I kept a wary eye on the dogs, lest they befall doggie malaria or something. I certainly was not going to let a dog be the third blow!

Dog watch:

Marian said that I could cut Maggie’s hair. I was so excited! I love stuff l

ike that! And Maggie was a total peach about it. She LOVES people attention. Here is a shot I took of her before I trimmed her mane. Look, it’s Aslan!! J (Maggie is not a natural model like Lucy.)

Here are some shots of the dogs playing “Launch.” (For a gross story about a Launch game snafoo, read “Ruiner of Fun.”)

Birthday boy:

JB celebrated his 28^th birthday. Happy Birthday, Jeddie!

I tried to be a good wife by making him his favorite cake: spice cake with homemade pneuka frosting (a brown sugar frosting). Well, his birthday fell at the beginning of water heater drama and I was just crazy busy and ended up jacking up the frosting—I didn’t have enough to spread around and when I tried to spread it farther, I ended up pulling up part of the cake and it got smashed in the frostng. I told him that I had made him a Kindergarden Cake, because it looked like a Kindergardener made it. He said that we could just make more frosting and put that on. So we did. It still turned out looking like this: