Last night’s snow (or as I originally typo-ed, slow), dumped only about 4 inches on suburban streets in the area, but the traffic was horrendous and there were enough minor accidents to put corks in all the bottlenecks. And due to the way the east-west arterials around here are blocked by large tracts of parkland or shopping malls, there’s only a few ways to get between work and home. If there’s bad weather, or traffic, everything gets choked off at one of two places. I started out pissed, as I had a late “hit” call where someone needed an exchange…
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We went to the holiday party last night for David’s office. In recent years, it’s been an enjoyable enough affair, especially after they stopped booking the DJ nobody liked… but the experience we had was somewhat beyond our wildest expectations of a nice evening. Meson Sabika was the setting, a large mansion in Naperville, which is one of the few Chicago suburbs with a sense of its own history. First settled in 1811, it’s set in gently rolling country, with a vibrant and architecturally appealing downtown, with public space and art everywhere. We drove down after work, and I was…
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My life doesn’t really run to a narrative. There’s the basic “get up, go to work, come home, eat something, do something, go to bed” framework, but there’s no grand sweeping Story of my Life. It’s just a collection of random moments. That being said, some days are a little out of the ordinary in minor ways. Today started out normal, got different, then got normal. It was very slow at work – as in, frighteningly, “when are they going to start training us on other accounts” slow. Not terrifyingly “when are they going to start to pull in the…
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There’s been another upgrade to Second Life, and I haven’t been online consistently in a couple of months. So I went online today to check in, pay rent, sort inventory; boring stuff to some, but for some reason the purposelessness is relaxing to me. While doing this I like to hang out somewhere with a good music stream. I’m currently located at the Gardens of Apollo[SLUrl link], and found that the nicely detailed gardens are now a bit too detailed for my “big” computer if I set the graphics display to “high,” and woefully undetailed if I set it at…
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Today being the third Saturday of the month, I managed to make it to Asbury Court in Des Plaines for Holy Moly’s monthly ecumenical service. It was pretty lightly attended, probably because of a competing holiday craft fair event, but it was a nice time and those that were there were our “frequent flyers.” Father Paul and Mary did a reprise of their duet from last Sunday’s service of “Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream” with Paul on banjo, but as the words were printed, I joined in anyhow. Some of the other old folkies that were there today…
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Tonight we’re not heading to Grant Park with the throngs, we’re headed to Oak Park with thongs. Okay, it’s an unseasonably warm, clear day, and we’re taking O-themed, or Hawaiian themed, snacks to Jill’s house. She’ll have Jon Stewart on downstairs and the radio on upstairs and we’ll feast on pot roast and nail trimmings until the results are in. Dear God, I hope the results are in. I’m taking my laptop and may checkin with my Second Life chums (who’ve been neglected of late), but I’ll also be watching races at the election tracker CNN.com has. You can set…
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Here’s a quick update on the Floor Project From Hell: We’re almost done! Except we’ve had scope creep! We started laying out the floor after it acclimated on Friday. It’s now Monday; yes, we’re slow, but we hit a minor snag and we’re now setting up for a big finish. Which involves totally repainting the room in a slightly darker color. I’d gone through hell patching about a zillion screw-anchor holes in that room 5 years ago – but there were a couple of dings and places I hadn’t done a very good job. First of all, we knew we…
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Purrrrrrrrrr… UPDATE: GRRR! Uploading a photo direct from my iPhone via the WP plugin strips out some but not all angle brackets, breaking the img tags. Sending a photo to Flickr via email, which re-directs to the blog with pre-formatted div tags, also strips angle brackets. Thirdly, using a Firefox plugin called ScribeFire to blog from my desktop computer also strips angle brackets. Only posting from the HTML editor screen within the main WP installation results in SUCCEED. The other third-party applications for sending posts with photos results in various flavors of FAIL.
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Remembering ‘The Heart Of NPR,’ Gary Smith : NPR Longtime NPR Greeter and Client Services Coordinator Gary Smith passed away this week. For years, he sat at the reception desk at NPR’s Washington headquarters. Smith was a force field of good cheer; he was a big man who became the heart of NPR. As I drove home, listening to Michele Norris talk about Gary Smith, I was moved by her description of a man who made greeting the often jetlagged or on-deadline visitors to the NPR building his number-one job. It seems that every week, Mr Smith always began his…
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Chicago weather from the Chicago Tribune. Including Tom Skilling 7 day local weather forecast. WGN-TV and the Chicago Tribune — chicagotribune.com Weather Severe Thunderstorm Watch in IL: Cook , DeKalb , DuPage , Grundy , Kane , Kankakee , Kendall , Lee , Ogle , Will , Winnebago Severe Thunderstorm Warning in IL: Cook , DuPage , Will Flood Warning in IL: Henry , Jo Daviess , Kane , Lake , McHenry , Mercer , Ogle , Rock Island , Stephenson , Whiteside , Winnebago Flash Flood Watch in IL: Mercer , Rock Island A few moments ago lightning struck…