Eminem and Me....curious?

Finally getting a chance to post a picture of my office. I don't know if you can really see it from this shot, but I'm the first black window on the left, second floor. Ho-hum.

Okay...not really. I'm in a much newer building, consequence of working at a university that's only 50 years old, but my office does have two giant floor to high ceiling windows, which are quite nice.

Had a loverly lunch today with the college dean, associate deans, and four other new faculty (there are 25 of us in the college this year & they're hoping to hire 40 for next fall). The Eminem connection? We had it at Meadow Brook Hall, where Eminem and Kim re-married in January.

The hall is, obviously, above. Here's the entrance...





And part of the gardens...
The hall was the home of our benefactress, Matilda Dodge Wilson, who endowed the university (she had these huge...tracks of land), and the Dodge of her middle name is..."The" Dodge family. I didn't get a shot of the garages and chauffeur quarters, but they're pretty impressive.

The lunch was fabulous...really great food, so it turned out to be a good thing that I took a walk around the grounds before we ate...took longer to circle the building than I'd expected, but it was volunteer day, so the place was crawling with people taking care of the gardens...most were still in bloom. The volunteers were ripping up most of the beds.

They actually stood there waiting for me to take this photo so they could tear up all the lovely flowers...

The smell of earth had me missing my garden something fierce, so I asked about volunteering. I may also be coming back to Normal in a couple of weeks to close up the house and clean the place up. But I'll keep the Normalites posted.