The picture tour

I thought I'd include a few pictures showing some of the upsides of where I'm living.

Here's my backyard; i.e., the view from one of my back windows. All things considered, it could have been worse:

I still occasionally see cows out in one of the fields across the stream. This is cool. (Smelling the cows because the windows are open remains less cool.) I was going to take a shot outside of the front window to show how close the campus was, but there are too many trees in the way to be able to see it. No interior shots until I get some furniture, which may be a while.

Here's downtown, which is probably a five minute walk from my apartment:


I find this a relatively cool area. There is a heavily recommended pizza place (which has yet to impress me, unfortunately) and a Chinese-restaurant-in-a-box.^*


There is also the fountain seen at right, which includes a plaque explaining how it had places for men, horses, and dogs to drink, and a description of all the places it got moved around over the years before it was re-installed here. I find this interesting, because I swear I've seen the same basic description on a fountain somewhere else (including that it was moved around a lot before being re-installed at some point.) I wonder if every town had a fountain someone made to include places for men, horses, and dogs to drink, or if there was one relatively wealthy dude with a horse, a dog, and a serious thirst traveling the country.



Here's a shot from Presque Isle, looking towards Erie:

Presque Isle is actually a peninsula, not an island, although apparently it was once an island, but sand buildup eventually connected it to Erie. You can now drive onto the "island" over what I guess is a sandbar underneath. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether this is a good idea or not, but it's a pretty area, and there are beaches.


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^* I'm positive there is a kit you can buy to make a Chinese-restaurant-in-a-box. When you open the box, you find: a pack of paper numbered menus (two sided) including "combination dinners" with an eggroll, a bunch of golf pencils to stick into a bowl of rice so that people can circle which order they want, a lightboard with bunch of faded pictures of menu items for sale to put up on it, a set of rectangular aluminum take-out boxes with clear plastic lids, fortune cookies, a refrigerator case full of soft drinks, and possibly a family to run your restaurant for you. (I'm not sure about the last one, but I think it's a good guess.) I think these appear using different names in just about every city in the United States, as far as I can tell. That they come as a kit seems the only likely explanation to me.