I took Alex back up to school at James Madison. He is in a new dorm right in the center of the campus. I think he will be better. He can more easily walk to the places he needs to go and will have more contact with other students. The room is smaller than the one he had before & has no air conditioning. This will be okay most of the school year, but it still can get hot in September. His room is part of a suite with six guys, who share a kind of living space in the middle. Above is his building and below is his room as it looked when he moved in. The tree is a river birch, the southern cousin in the birch family. In Wisconsin we can grow the paper birch or the white birch. They are pretties than this kind of brownish one, but you have to adapt to local conditions. I wanted to get a picture of Alex too, but he refused and kept on moving in and out of the shot.
The campus was full of new freshmen, you can see the gaggle of them below. They are much better groomed than back in the 1970s when I started, but otherwise look similar. Speaking of gaggles, the geese just stroll across the road and most cars stop. I didn’t. I went slow enough that they could move out of the way, but I am not going to yield to geese. They squawked a little but they cleared a path. Up at the farm, a turkey stood in front of my car and stared at me. I actually had to get out and shoo it away. Turkeys are dumb enough to be run over by a car going 3MPH; geese are not.
