Another dreary day in Ann Arbor; I'm ready for winter. Jenelle and I traveled from Ross to State & Liberty on foot last night in a spring-like drizzle and sat in Noodles as the drips turned to drops that fogged the windows. Thunder in the night is way off for mid-January...hopefully it is cold and snowy 350 miles to the north!

Escanaba is back at it with their "pre-feasibility" study for the proposed deepwater port. (This index links to all files.) Among the questionable conclusions reached was the projection of 30,000 containers traveling through Escanaba in 2008. This number is crazy, but gets even crazier when there is no reference of what size 'container' Astra Designs International had in mind; TEUs (20-ft equivalent units) would be a lot of cargo but 30,000 forty-footers is too astounding to even comprehend. That's roughly 575 containers arriving on a ship once a week - a devastating load on UP infrastructure. The whole thing is embarrassing.

The biggest news in my lexicon this week, though, is Bernard Charles visit to UHS. Mssr. Charles is the CEO of Dassault Systemes, the company behind CATIA and thus nearly every major industrial and manufacturing project since the launch of such software on the design of the Boeing 777. He was in town for the auto show and spent the morning at University High with press in tow...great news for the upstart school.