even more photos

 

 
 
 

more pictures of the storm damage

I live in a disaster zone!!!

As always, the pictures end up in the opposite order that I intended. Oh well. We had a huge storm for about 30 minutes yesterday afternoon. My mom and dad and I werein the kitchen starting dinner (wewere going to grill pizzas) and there was this huge noise outside so we all run to the door and look out the window and there was sheets of rain and (small) tree branches blowing down the street. The house was literally shaking. So me and my mom go to the attic to check that our roof was still attached. Our roof was fine. Elsie's roof loses pieces every time it rains, but a lot came off. After the rain mostly stopped, (apparently there was a tornado warning for lakeview, which NEVER happens) we went outside and there were leaves everywhere. But then the people who live in the condo three doors east were saying that the cottonwood tree (its huge and my neighbor who is over 90 says it was big when she was little and lived in the same house) fell down. So we went out to the alley and oof. THe tree had indeed come down. It took three decks off the condo and got the top corner of the building too. But nobody got hurt. Their garage is kind of squished.

On Greenview (one street away) there were two trees blocking the street. One had somehow landed between two cars not hitting either of them, but the other tree landed directly on a car.

Lots of people were walking around ogling the storm damage. Then it started thundering and lightninging and blowing rain. After a while it stopped. Then I woke up at like 1am and it was starting up again. And today it's supposed to rain even more.

So that was exciting. Much more exciting than any of the typhoons in Japan.

me lazy

It is so humid here... as bad as Japan! Possibly worse, actually, since the air temperature is in the upper 80s every day. I got my UPass yesterday and it started working today, so I didn't have to pay to take the train off to the book mines (hah) too many times.

I have started working on this settlement house project website at work that is meant to be done by the 31st... so since I only started on it yesterday (working with templates that Aaron had made, but the project was completely restructured since he wrote those) it's not very good. If you want to look at it, here it is. Still a work in progress, though, so pay no heed to the goofy things I wrote on it.

Last week, we bought a giant box of peaches(25 pounds) at the farmers market and are still working on them. Yesterday I bought a smaller big box of tomatoes and a couple cucumbers... but then we got more cucumbers from James's friend's mom. So today for lunch I had a cucumber and two tomatoes. The ones I bought were normal american sized cucumbers, not skinny Japanese ones, but the ones we got given to us are "Polish pickles" so they are, well, pickle sized. But I doubt they will make it to picklehood. If that is even a word.

School starts next week!!! and I have jury duty (maybe, I'm only an alternate so I have to call the day before) on next Thursday... I know nothing about crimes! Luckily I have to go downtown, not to 26th and California(far away and in a disreputable area) or someplace in the suburbs(far away and, well, far away).

If anyone knows how to get forecastfox (the firefox weather plugin) to NOT switch to Chiba every time I restart the computer (and there is no default option) it would be much appreciated if you could reveal it.

Tonight for dinner: Italian-Japanese food - pasta with tomatoes, olive oil, garlic and crab bits, with a side of sunomono (pickled cucumbers), seaweed and sliced bell peppers.

swing dancing

Or not really so much. Mikhail and I went down to the summerdance lesson last night and it was swing dance. We actually did pretty good during the practice, but then there was a 30 minute interval between the lesson and the band so we went for a walk and ate ice cream in millenium park and walked back (during which we saw Arthur and Michael Marhoefer, who I thought we saw while we were dancing but Mikhail didn't know for sure and we did not want to be embarassed if I was wrong). The band was really good but they were playing a lot of semi-modern popular music, so the tempo was much faster than we were capable of swing dancing to. But we did regular dancing. Also, we saw Russ's little sister, bringing the northsider count to 3.

While we were on the el going there, between Armitage and Sedgewick, the train stopped and there was an annoucement and then the driver came and changed the sign to say kimball instead of loop and we went backward for about a block. Then he walked back through and changed the sign to loop and we went in the correct direction again, and got passed by a northbound train, so probably we were too close to the track switching thing since there was only one platform open at Sedgewick. This brown line construction is going to be a pain. I've got to go to UIC tomorrow for two meetings and I'm thinking I will ride my bike so that I dont have to face rush hour trains both ways. Although it is supposed to be in the low 90s (30s C) so I can't say that I'm exactly looking forward to a 45 minute ride in the sun.

Today James and I assembled a second compost bin, so now we have one for yard debris and one for kitchen debris. I was reading the instruction book and apparently you can put rice and bread that is stale in the compost bin besides the usual vegetable peelings, paper and leaves, just nothing with meat or fat or metal.

rain

So we had been planning to go to the renaissance fair today but then it was pouring rain this morning. It did stop pretty early but apparently it rained several inches closer to the Illinois-Wisconsin border (where the fair is) so we didn't go walk around in the mud all day. But I did finish my new shirt.

And we have two watermelons to eat!

Springpatch

So I went with Aaron and his mom to Springfield to get some furniture for his new apartment on Wednesday. It's really nice although I am ambivilent about all the beige carpet. I don't really like beige on anything, but I guess you don't really look at the floor very much. It might showthe gray cat fur a lot...The apartment is in this subdivision of apartment buildings that are all exactly identical, it seems like it would be very easy to forget where you live and be lost forever. But there is a swimming pool outside that we went in.

It's getting really hot out here, last night it did not cool off at all. And the next five days or so are all supposed to be above 90 degrees and the heat index is going to be over 100 at least a few of them.

I got new glasses. They're wire frames (I havent had glasses with nosepads since I was in grade school, I think) and the front part is black but the inside is bright pink. The nose pads might need to be adjusted or something, though, because I had dents on my nose from them last night.

Apparently landscape guy, instead of having class the last day, sent an email (which I didn't get) giving out the assignment (on the day he had said it was due). I had already emailed him my completed paper and he never wrote back that he got it, so I'm unsure what to do. Having not recieved the assignment from him, I'm somewhat inclined just to write to him and ask again if he got my paper rather than "State [my] view about the significance of green spaces in a large city from the experience of visits in parks and gardens in Tokyo."

I want to go to the beach today!