Welcome, Spring!

Look what greeted us here in Chi-town on the very first day of spring!

I tell you what--I like a nice dusting of snow now and again in its proper season, but I'm sick and tired of this stuff by now. It's almost April, and I have not seen one crocus yet!

They say April is the cruelest month (well, T.S. Eliot did, anyway), but this March is giving April a run for its money. Tomorrow they say it will be close to 60. Then it will dip back into the 30s and... you guessed it! Snow. Feh.

If April is crueler than this, then can we just skip it and get on with May?

Uh Oh. More Snow.

Oh, it's coming down, all right, although this picture is from Sunday night, when we got a quick layer of fluffy wet stuff that was pretty much gone by morning, but--as you can see--it piled up nicely on the wires outside our back windows. This round of snow was supposed to start overnight, with several inches on the ground by morning, but it was just starting to sleet as we headed out the door. We figured if it got too awful, they would close the building and send everyone home, but at least we would have put in an appearance. We got about halfway to work, though, and it had become so sloppy and slippery that we just turned around and headed home. And actually, they DID close the building at 1:00 this afternoon. I had plenty to work on, so I didn't have to stop to make a scary and no doubt lengthy drive home.

So far (fingers crossed) we haven't gotten anywhere near the foot of snow predicted. I just hope that holds.

Okay, here's an odd slice o' life that happened yesterday--it made me wonder if I had been transported from the cash register at Costco in Glenview to Torquay and the reception desk at Fawlty Towers. I dropped in to Costco to pick up some Rainbath, pine nuts, dried cherries, etc., and, as always, the checkout lines were long. I wheeled my cart to a spot behind a lady who looked to be in her 60s, but who knows these days? She had a package of blueberries in her hand and a case of bottled water in her cart.

I always leave a respectable amount of room between the end of my cart and the keister of the person in front of me... I don't like it when people bump me from behind, so I try not to do it to others. However, this dame just backed right up into my cart before I had a chance to move it. She whipped around and gave me the nastiest look, and I apologized, but she just kept glaring. Finally, she turned her attention forward again. Whew.

She put her blueberries on the conveyor belt and left her bottled water in her cart. As the berries moved toward the checker, I placed one of those separator bars on the belt and unloaded the few things from my cart.

Then the fun began.

The checker asked the lady if she only had the two things--the berries and the water.

"WHAT?" shouted the lady, in frustration and disgust.

The checker repeated her question.

"I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!" the lady shouted. "I'M DEAF!!!"

The checker pointed to the berries, and then to my items. "Only these? Or these too?"

"NO!! NO!!! THOSE AREN'T MINE!!"

The checker nodded, handed her the change from her order, and then started to ring up my purchase.

"NO!! THOSE ARE NOT MINE!! I'M NOT PAYING FOR HERS!"

At this point, the person helping the checker wrangle the carts and purchases brought the cart with the water around, placed the blueberries in it, and guided the irate deaf lady toward the door. We could hear her voice ringing through the store as she headed for the exit, yelling about how she was deaf, not stupid.

Um... I dunno. I kind of beg to differ.

Takes all kinds, huh?

At least the checker took it all in stride and good humor. I'm afraid I would have gone all Basil Fawlty on her ass.

P.S.: By the way, I started this yesterday, but I couldn't get the picture to upload, so I wrote the bulk of it on 2/6, not 2/5. Just so the chronology makes sense...

A Winter Walk and Other Random Thoughts

This afternoon the temperatures climbed into the thirties (heat wave!), so Jeff and I decided to take a long walk up into Evanston to visit the comic book store (where I discovered in a book about the worst places to live in America that I had actually lived in TWO of them--Allston, MA, and Syracuse, NY) and to take in the Irish session at Nevin's Pub.

The lake was just beautiful. As you can see, it's been a cold winter so far. The shore has really iced up. The photo above is of our little neighborhood beach--the northernmost beach in Chicago.

Here's a view of the lake just about at the Evanston border:



Check out the "icebergs"!

One of the most interesting parts of the walk around the lakefront curve was realizing just how shallow the water has become. When we first moved to Rogers Park eight and a half years ago, the tops of the tallest of these pilings were mostly underwater.



The walk was invigorating, the temperature above freezing, and the sidewalks had been cleared (well, most of them), so we made pretty good time. Once we got to Nevin's though, we had worked up big appetites. Usually, we only opt for a couple of beers and maybe an order of chips and gravy or "harp strings" (fried onion tendrils) to split. Today, though, it was fish and chips for Jeff and bangers and mash for me. Except for the order included EIGHT bangers! Yikes! But you know, I was hungry. Weight Watchers be damned, I ate them all. I'll go back to counting points in the morning.

Alas, when we left Nevin's, the temperature had dropped considerably. At least, it felt like it had. We hoofed it home, though, making better time than we did on the way up to Evanston because we were just so daggone cold!

A nice way to spend a not-all-that-cold Sunday afternoon. Well, not all that cold for a while, at least.

Other random thoughts:

Last night we finished watching The Cranes Are Flying, the fifties Soviet classic about love torn asunder by World War II. I first saw this movie YEARS ago, when I was a college freshman studying Russian. The professor brought this film and several others (Ivan the Terrible, anyone?) to class for us to watch. I remember loving the movie and crying my eyes out. It was a ten-tissue tearjerker, and no mistake. I have owned the Criterion Collection DVD for a couple of years now, but we just never got around to watching it until this weekend. What a wonderful film. It still holds up, after all these years. I cried my eyes out. But the most fascinating thing about the film is the glimpse it gives into Soviet life during the war--the terrible sacrifices, the horrific losses. We pride ourselves on having won that war, but without the involvement of the Soviet Union, Allied victory would have been impossible. Anyway... check it out if you get the chance.

I have a new printer!! My old one died a couple of weeks ago, so I purchased a new one that scans and copies as well. The first thing I printed? The first 100 pages of the novel so that Jeff could start reading and commenting. He gets first dibs! Scary, though.

It's snowing again, although "they" claim it will turn to rain by morning. I am tired of snow. But the idea of rain ON snow. Ugh.

Snow Day!

We've been pretty lucky in Chicagoland this winter--true, we've had some brutally cold temperatures and quite a few light snowstorms, but in general we have been spared a big dumping-on of the white stuff. Well, until yesterday.

We knew that the storm was coming. Anyone who was paying attention could see the heavy white band on the Doppler radar--shown on every local news program Thursday morning--marching north across the plains from Oklahoma. A whopper. They said it would start snowing about three or so and really kick in for the rush hour. Har! It started at about ten a.m., and by three the storm was well underway. We managed to get on the road by four, and it took us about an hour and a half to travel the eleven miles from work to home.

This morning, we woke up to this:



No way are they going to open the office, we thought to ourselves, and we waited for the call from the department phone tree. But no--the company NEVER closes. The building could be buried in snow and they would still be open for business. Still, the radio newsfolk were warning of dire consequences for anyone who tried to drive in the storm, which was still blowing lots of white stuff up the street. Given drive times, we would just about have to turn around and go home by the time we made it into the office.

So calls were made.

We were given dispensation to work from home. And we, in turn, gave our reports dispensation to work from home. So, it was a snow day, but a working one.

I'm not sure how much snow we actually got--the prediction was for 6 to 12 inches, and some locales had 9 inches at about seven this morning, but this is what had accumulated on the balustrade outside our sunroom windows as of late this afternoon:



Well, it wasn't like the snow days of old, when we would bundle up and grab a sled or a saucer and head for the hills, but it was a nice day to stay inside, avoid the slick roads and the cold, and catch up on work without the constant interruptions of meetings and ubiquitous crises.

What would have made it perfect?

Sidewalks that shoveled themselves.

Twelfth Night...

And Christmas is officially over. Time to take down the tree and the other decorations. Time to return the sunroom to its usual state as a place to sit and relax. And to work out on the Nordic Track. Sigh... it always makes me a bit blue, taking down the tree. It's so pretty. But it's also really depressing to keep the tree up too long after Christmas is over, so take it down we must and turn our attention to the new year.

So, Happy New Year!



This is what greeted us on New Year's morning, so my first official act of 2008 was shoveling snow. It wasn't all THAT deep or heavy, though, so I can't complain too much. It sure was pretty!

So, what has been occupying me this first week of the year? Writing, some. I have (as far as I can tell) four chapters left to write on the novel. I'm going to try to finish it in a week/week and a half. Then I'm going to read back through it and tweak. I'm reasonably sure I can get it to Jeff for his feedback as promised.

I've also been busy repopulating my iTunes library and iPod playlist (one only--so I can shuffle it to work out to). I finally figured out (with Jeff's help) why my iPod was full to the brim with less than 200 songs, when it is supposed to be able to hold at least three times that number. I had been uploading songs as huge files! Duh! So I got rid of those huge files, and I'm now uploading what I had again and more. It's exciting to know I'll have so many songs to work out to, but it's taking a while to replace and add.

I also bought us our own copy of Veganomicon. I bought Rachel a copy for Christmas and before I sent it to her, I browsed through it a bit. The recipes look fairly easy and they seem as if they would be tasty, but it was the breezy, engaging writing that made me want a copy for myself. We're going to try to make one of the recipes each week. Neither one of us can commit to veganism, or even to a constant vegetarian diet (go without bacon? I do not THINK so!), but we both think we could do with healthier dietary options.

So... that's about it for now. Although I have to recommend that if you have NOT seen Ratatouille yet, do yourself a favor and do. It is one of the best films I've seen in a long, long time.