MICHIGAN PERILS (2nd publication)

May 18 I left Urbana to drive up to East Lansing, Michigan, for a conference at Michigan State U. Every year there's a CALICO conference (Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium) somewhere in the US. This time it was in Michigan, where a lot of relatives have ended up.

Friday, May 20 was my paper - basically a mini version of my dissertation experiment. It was sparsely attended (maybe 20 people), but real research presentations usually are. (Attendees seem to prefer bells and whistle presentations that are more demos of computer techniques, programs, etc.) Real research with real results tends to be more boring at computer conferences. In any case, it gave me a fresh entry for my CV in time for job hunt season. My last presentation was June 2001. (Both parents' illnesses and the final dissertation crunch kind of ate up the years in between.)

It was nice to be back at CALICO. I had attended faithfully every year since 1994, but had missed the last two conferences. A lot of the same people tend to show up year after year, so it's kind of a home-coming in my discipline.

After the conference, I began my Michigan travels, first visiting cousin Julie and daughter Beth in the Detroit suburbs (Northville), then Dad's cousin Alice Buhse and her husband in Trenton (a southern suburb), where I managed to scan a bunch of Alice's old family photos from the 30s and 40s, including some rare ones of a visit by Alice's father (the brother my grandmother came over to Ellis Island with in 1907) to relatives in southern Sweden just before WWII started (summer 1939). A quiet idyll before all hell broke loose.

In between I visited Ann Arbor, where the U. of Michigan is located to check out the Arabic textbooks in their bookstore (UM is famous for its Arabic dept.), and checked out the Henry Ford Musuem in Dearborn, a western part of greater Detroit and Ford headquarters. My favorite exhibit was an original fan letter by Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie and Clyde fame) to Henry Ford praising the "dandy" Ford he had stolen. Dearborn is also home to the largest Arab-American community in the US, so I had to check out the restaurants for lunch! As usual, the portions were enough for a small family.

Yesterday, May 19, I drove west to the Kalamazoo area, where cousin Alison and her husband Mike live. They have two small kids Ashley and Dustin. I met the three (minus Mike) again this morning at the Paw-Paw library, where we browsed the kids section of the library before a gourmet lunch at Burger King. (The Star Wars action figure of the day was Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, not one of my favorites. Oh, by the way, I had taken the opportunity one evening earlier in the week to see the new Star Wars film, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.)

Today, I successfully arrived in Western Michigan. Holland is where my uncle Mark and Aunt Chris moved less than a year ago from Kalamazoo (Alison's parents). My mother's uncle Dick and Aunt Jean have lived here for years, too. And their kids and grandkids are still mainly in the area, too. Jean has held court every Saturday afternoon at her house for any family member to come for coffee, so tomorrow will be an unsually well-attended one. Chris has invited everyone back to their condo (a few houses away in the same development) afterwards for dinner.

After 11 years being bound to my graduate program and the University of Illinois, this is the free-est I've felt in a long time. No schedule. No deadlines. No incomplete requirements. I'm even planning to drive up north to the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan afterwards before heading south into Wisconsin again. I've never crossed the Strait of Macinac before, and since I'm that far, I might as well head a bit farther north to Sault St. Marie, Canada just to say I've done it. But this is just speculation still, not real events to be described, so stay tuned ...