chatter

It is already the dreaded 3:15 on a Saturday and I feel time is slipping away. Why is 3:15 dreaded? I don’t know I guess it is the point where I feel that if I am going to accomplish something I should of done it by now. The real time I dread is 4:00 because on a normal work day I am officially done and the day is now like any other, weekend or not.

I did do something today actually, I made brownies. Yep, still in self destroy mode. I suppose I should stop writing here now and go meditate on why I do this to myself. If it is any consultation, they were too gooey for my liking. That all said, I am sure I will have more.

Let see, what is on the agenda for this weekend? Nothing much really. The kid wants to go out and buy dry erase markers and an inflatable globe. She even has lofty goals on this Saturday 😉

As I walking out to get the mail today I came up with the idea to sit with a calendar and plot out useful things to do for the foreseeable future. I need to get to Chicago to see the Vivian Mayer photo show before April. We really need to go through the painful process of putting in new floor in the zen den and Hollace’s room and paint the bathroom. I guess they will never get done unless I schedule them.

Going In To Work, originally uploaded by swardraws.

I had to stop on what was my brisk walk into work on Friday to pull out the iPod and Hipstamatic this.

I am testing out the “blog this” feature on Flickr to see how it looks on the ole Chatter blog. I hope to use that blog more but right now adding photos from Flickr are a bit a pain in the ass unless I blog it this way which isn’t ideal in most cases.

Last week the weather forecasters got the forecast completely right. They were forecasting a big time blizzard starting at 3:00 on Tuesday Feb. 1 and right on the nose it started. I of course took the train that day. Since everyone knew the really big snow was going to fall over night, 2 feet of it, most everyone brought work home for Wednesday. The train like expected left 30 minutes early which is 3:50. The roads weren’t too bad yet so we got to the train station on time or early since we left early but the train was delayed for 60 minutes. I had my mifi with me so I surfed the web and caught up on my Words With Friends. It was funny actually, any other 30 minute early shuttle day usually had an earlier shuttle added for those who wanted to get home early. This time they didn’t do it but should of.

When it was all said and done, it took me nearly 2.5 hours to get home that night. RAW was waiting with my car when I finally got off the train, it wouldn’t of been a nice walk home.

All that night, the winds were a howling and got some thunder snow. It was very noisy out there. Two doors down at Andy’s was an ambulance. I felt for anyone like ambulance drivers who had to be out in the weather. RAW found out the next day that Andy was flat on his back on the floor, his back going out while he had his kids there. There were 100s of car stuck on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago for 12 hours and I heard a couple stories like that around here in Antioch and Grayslake. I would of freaked if I was stuck like that.

The next day was a winter wonderland to say the least. Their was a drift that engulfed the front end of my car, with a tidal wave drift in front. The backyard was like a bowl filled with an amazing amount of snow. There was no going anywhere even if you wanted to. They closed all the roads in Lake County and at 8:00 an email from work declaring a snow day! That was unheard of, Abbott never closes for snow. I didn’t know what that really meant. Do I still work or was I given the day off? I was having a light work week and I knew I would have the next day to do the work I brought home. I spent all day wondering but not really working anyway. It was a snow day goll darn it.

RAW walked up to the bar with Andy while waiting to use his snow blower after another neighbor was using it. Hollace and I went out to play in the snow. She kept saying she normally doesn’t like snow but this stuff was cool. I took lots of pictures.

Thursday it was back to work but I took the train. I debated on whether that was a good idea or not. I found a traffic website that had live cameras on all the roads I take and they didn’t look too bad but things were still blowing around. It would of been a no brainer to take the train only now the bitter cold was coming and that usually means long delays for the trains. We don’t have an enclosed shelter at our stop and I didn’t want to have to stand in that sub zero wind chill any longer then I have to. I finally got the bright idea to enlist in RAW’s help. He can get up and drive me to the train station and I can wait in the car until the train came. It was only 5 minutes late, not too bad. Of course coming home it was more like 30 minutes late. RAW picked me up.

This blizzard ranked up to number 3 in biggest snow in Chicago’s history. Number 1 is 1967. Number 2 is 1999 which I can’t remember for some reason. It happened a month before Hollace was born. Why can’t I remember that? One of the reasons I am writing this right now is how I ended up remembering that snow evidential. I found my old journal and read all up about that storm. It happened as we were coming out of the holidays on Jan. 2 so it didn’t impact work so much. I apparently worked at home 2 days though. I still don’t remember much about it. I do remember a couple days later while RAW was using starter fluid to try and start my car that he nearly set it on fire. According to the journal he did but when we took it to the repair guy there was no damage, nothing to fix.

It has been over a week since the blizzard and all that snow is still out there. It is suppose to get above freezing this weekend through most of next week so maybe we will get rid of some.

actually I have been writing and all only it is on paper. Every morning for the first 15 minutes of my day I write 4 pages of whatever. It is kind of like the morning pages of one of those how to be artistic books only my pages are kind of small. The book was suppose to be my eating journal but it is also my state of mind book. I think it is helping me work out whatever and to focus.

Last night after Hollace told me she has a boring life, I helped her with a timeline of her life for a class assignment. While I was trying to remember what she could put on it, I ran across my old blog and was reading up on 2005. I noticed I had the same work anxieties as I do. I think mine right now are under control probably only because the jobs I am working on don’t involve a creative director.

Anyway, I thought I would write here so in 5 years I had something to read about October 1st.

Tonight was the College of Lake County Recent Works art show. I not only had one photo accepted in the show, I got an
Honorable Mention award of $25. Hey, what the heck, I’ll take it.

Besides having a boring life, Hollace is been into anime, watching too much of it on the internet. It isn’t just the imagery that inspires her but the music. She now has me looking for violin lessons for her.

On the home front, we just made a decision on who is going to do our roof. Hopefully that can get started soon though I am not in a hurry to shell out $6,000.

Last weekend we went to RAW’s mom. I volunteered Hollace to work a shift with the donkeys at the Farm Fall Fest (where she goes to Farm Camp). She did ok. I purchased a Virgin Mobile Mifi so now I can get online anywhere so while we were waiting for Hollace’s shift to be done, I watched an episode of Dick Van Dyke on Netflix. With the Mifi, I purchased a month of unlimited bandwidth (as opposed to 10 days of 100 Mbs) so I wanted to see how much we would use in an extreme case. The conclusion, in 3 days we used 1.2 Gig. All in all, a successful test.

We then stopped over mom and dad’s and said hi to Paula who was visiting.

I am getting old (no duh) and can’t stay up too late anymore. I was ready to go to bed at 11 p.m., on a Friday no less. My normal without fail bed time on a work night is 11:30.  I use to stay up until 2:00 a.m. in the old days.

I guess that is all I have to report today. I will try and get back here soon to compliment my daily paper blog