We began the day meeting at Teusink’s Pony Farm in Holland, on a perfectly fall-feeling day, with a temperature in the forties, a strong breeze, and a mix of sun and clouds. Several confirmed attendees stayed home because it was raining where they lived, but it did not rain in Holland until late in the evening. Take that Jenison!
With the intent of shooting more pictures, I sold our normal seats on StubHub and bought some Row 1 tickets on eBay for the Michigan-Indiana game, completely forgetting the fact that Rows A & B are ahead of Row 1. Thanks to the hail and chilling rain, that didn’t turn out to be a huge problem, as there was nobody in the 8 Row A seats in front of us the entire game, and the Row B seats in front of us were empty most of the second half as well. I picked corner of the south end zone to make sure we wouldn’t be behind the uprights or the field goal nets, and the location turned out to be great, except for the cold rain blowing in our faces during the first quarter.
Since Aly started her Tae Kwon Do adventures this summer, Leah’s been rather entertained by the whole thing and has taken to several of the ‘Master’ instructors. We arrived a bit early for Aly’s belt promotion ceremony (her first) and took seats along the side of the gym. Leah quickly spotted the instructor she likes to talk to the most (‘Master Sidney’) at the front of the room with the other instructors and started hollering at him: “Sidney Mickey! Aly needs a new belt!” over and over. We were absolutely dying, and had no idea why she was calling him ‘Sidney Mickey’ instead of ‘Master Sidney’, but after a couple minutes, we told Aly to take her up front so that Leah could take Master Sidney directly instead of shouting across the room.
One night in July, Aly and I had a daddy-daughter date out at Saugatuck State Park. We hiked a trail I’d never taken out to the lake, and passed nearly a full outfit of clothing over the last half-mile or so before reaching the beach, so we were expecting to find naked people (or at least naked person) but were thankfully disappointed to find nonesuch. We swam under the setting sun in the chilling water for about an hour before I decided to kick Aly out because she had progressed from shivering to something more like quaking. We dried off and made our way down to Beach Trail and watched the sun finish setting before making our way back to the car under flashlight guidance and a protective bubble of bug spray.
We had a nice day for football, and I was joined by lead guitarist and strategist Andrew. For the first time in my 30+ years attending Michigan games, I brought a camera. It will not be the last. I brought just one lens, my Canon 70-300m F4-5.6L, which worked out quite well for shooting from the ninth row. I had a friendly drunken girl falling onto me much of the first half, but it was nothing like the obnoxious drunk guy who was falling on us the entire Notre Dame game a few weeks back.
