Awfully Big Adventures (part 1)

I disappeared again.  But for a good reason!  Adventures have been had.  Not huge adventures, but enjoyable nonetheless.  What adventures, you ask?  Well, I'll tell you.  I have finally taken advantage of my sister's living in Illinois and went out to visit her in mid March.  We met in Chicago for the first four days of the trip and then headed down to Carbondale for the remainder.  Let me just get a couple things out of the way before I begin.  Yes, we went to Chicago in the wintertime.  Technically.  Even though there was snow on the ground, it was in the 40's while we were there.  Quite bearable, especially considering that there weren't too many tourists yet.  And no, we had no idea what we were going to do there.  Frankly, I didn't really know what there was to do in Chicago.  Maybe I don't know enough people who have been there, but I've never heard the Chicago equivalent of "Oh are you going to the Golden Gate Bridge/Alcatraz/Pier 39, etc. when you visit San Francisco?".  Except for deep dish pizza, no one really knew what I should experience in Chicago.  Thankfully, I've recently gotten to know a couple gentlemen who lived in Chicago for some time.  So armed with very little knowledge and too many recommendations, I headed out to the Second City.

Looks just like a large, snowy quilt.

A view of Chicago from Millennium Park, near the Pavilion 

 The first day I arrived in the late afternoon and met my sister at our hotel.  The cab ride in showed me the largest McDonald's I have ever seen!  I initially took the two giant, golden arches to be some sort of public art exhibit.  That's how big this McD's is.  Our hotel was on the Loop and thus, perfectly placed for metro travel.  We donned our winter coats and scarves and set out to check out the hood, namely Millennium Park.  I'm sure the park is much more stunning in the springtime, but it was good enough to get to see Frank Gehry's Jay Pritzker Pavilion and the Cloud Gate, aka the Bean.  We ogled architecture, oohed at the lake in the distance, awed at the massive, non-working fountain that we had to cross a plain of snow to get to, and stumbled upon the Art Institute, where we made the misguided decision to visit it on our last day in Chicago.  We finished up our evening eating at the Good Stuff Eatery, where I had a Sunnyside Up burger and Seanse had an Obama burger.

Worth it crossing the snow to get to

This is the city for art nouveau!

Andersonville 

The next day, we took the L out to Andersonville, the Swedish neighborhood in Chicago.  Or it used to be.  Much like Ballard here in Seattle, very little of the Swedish roots remain.  Antique stores apparently took the place over.  But what antiques!  Pictures of gorgeous mid-century furniture probably took up more space on my phone than pictures of Andersonville itself.  We were visiting on a Sunday and sadly were too late to the one Swedish restaurant, so we opted for an Irish pub.  If you can't get Grandma's food, might as well get Grandpa's.

Just one of the many awesome antique stores in Andersonville.  This one clearly wanted to be Canadian

A little home in Chicago!

The L making its rounds, behind it the gleaming Trump tower

Monday we took some of the recommendations of my native Chicagoan and went out to Wicker Park to visit a couple of bookstores.  This was probably a bad decision on my part.  One, because the last thing I need is to buy more books, and two, when you live a mere 3 hours away from Powell's City of Books, all other bookstores just pale in comparison.  Bookstores are, of course, always magical, but as I now know, not necessary on short trips.  We headed back to the Loop to take a better peek at the amazing buildings, the Trump Tower, the Chicago Tribune, and the Corn Cobs.  We tried to follow the river down to the lake, but that would just be too easy, now wouldn't it?  That evening we went out to Lincoln Park to get the best deep dish pizza in Chicago at Pequod's.  Miguel, my Chicagoan in Seattle, tried to relate what this experience would be like for me.  I didn't fully understand until I tried it myself.  The "caramelized" crust is what made it.  I could try and explain it here, but I know words would fail.

More amazing architecture, again, looming Trump tower

The Corn Cobs!

The Bean!  Or Cloud Gate.  Whatever.  

This is a city Target.  Yes, this is a Target.

A monkey and a puppy in Seurat's Sunday in the Park 

Our final day in Chicago we went to the Art Institute as planned, thinking a mere 3 hours would be enough time to see it all.  Fools!  After exploring the miniatures in the basements and the world art on the first floor, we felt like we were making good time.  The second floor however, is home to the largest collection of Impressionist paintings outside of France.  Needless to say, we didn't make it to the third floor.  Opting not to rush, we enjoyed looking through all the pre-Modern art and decided we would make another trip, starting next time from the top.  Picasso was just put on hold for a bit.

With our Chicago adventures at an end, Seanse and I headed to the train that would take us south, where more adventures awaited!  Stay tuned...

The Saga of a Sedentary Life

I know, I know.  I've been remiss in my blogging duties of late.  I blame...well, I was going to blame the holidays, but it's a little late for that.   I blame my general need to sleep so much.  I think it must be unnatural.  I think I also need to blame this bloody golden age of television.  When did shows just get so damn good?  Even the bad ones.  And with the beginning of a new year, new seasons dawn.  I'm in the midst of the new Downton Abbey season, Game of Thrones approaches in April, the second season of Broadchurch should be available soon, and sometime in the next year or five, the new Sherlock.  I'm in the midst of watching the second season of Peaky Blinders, and the second season of the Fall.  Then my brother decided I should start watching the Blacklist, one of those it's-not-that-good-but-it's-so-great kind of shows.

In the midst of all this, I've started renting movies again, from the oh so awesome Scarecrow Video.  If you are unfamiliar with this magical place, it's a film addict's dream with roughly 110,000 titles.  If it exists on any format, they most likely have it.  Last Monday, I went in for my weekly hour-long perusal of the shelves and decided to rent an anime I've been curious about, Naoki Urasawa's Monster.  Thinking it was only 15 episodes long, I figured I could knock it out in a week and have another series under my belt.  I started it and all other viewing ceased.  I would actually anxiously look forward to getting home from work, so I could watch a couple more episodes.  Imagine my delight when I found out that this show isn't merely 15 episodes, but 74!  What joy!  In true serial fashion, episode 15 left me with a cliffhanger.  I trekked happily back to Scarecrow today to check out the next set, but it wasn't there.  Surely someone checked it out.  I look at the database, nothing.  I recalled reading that it was streaming somewhere.  I check my roku at home.  I'll explain this if you don't have a roku.  It houses all the available streaming channels so you can watch them on your TV.  It has almost everything, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, PBS, Funimation, etc.  You can search on your main roku page, and it will look for the movie or show on all the channels and give you a list of options to watch it on.  So I searched.  None of the channels had it.  After some interweb digging, I find out that the company that released it, only released those first 15.  *imagine me, on my knees, screaming to the heavens "WHY?!"*

I have no legal means of watching the rest of this show.  And I felt the need to share my despair with the empty void of the internet-verse.  Now I will scour the globe for the rest of it, or resort to reading the books.  Only time and my patience will reveal which path I take.

Rant: over!  

Going Downton

Ah, another season of Downton Abbey!

Another season of Mary being a royal bitch to Edith.
Another season of Lord G being vaguely insufferable.
Another season of Thomas trying to be evil sans O'Brien.  
The drama, the looks, the quips from Dame Maggie.

I really don't know how I've lasted so long with this show.

Oh.  Right.

Page One

And with very little effort, the new year begins.

I saw a post on Instagram that said, "Page 1 of 365."  It's not a new concept, having chapters in your book of life, but for some reason the thought of each day being a page made me think.  I mean, 365 pages isn't just a chapter, that's an entire book.  Maybe not a massive, in depth book, but an Agatha Christie at least.  Maybe even a Jane Austen!  Each year of your life is a book.  That's a concept I can get behind.  It makes a year feel more important to the overall tome of your life.

So my hopes for the new book.  Last year's book was not the happiest, so let's make this book a bit happier.  Let's draw more, and read more, and internet less, and appreciate the fact that I have a job I don't hate.  Let's try to maintain the healthier weight a certain parasite helped us get to.  Let's go to Chicago.  Let's find affordable housing.  Let's pay off debts.  And let's not be too hard on ourselves when we fail at everything we hoped we'd do in 2015.

Happy New Book!

For auld lang syne! 

Come Together

Wow.  It's been a month since my last post.  Sorry!  I know I said I'd be better.  And I've been so very good lately.  But the holidays, you know.  I just wanted to make a quick post.  A small reflection on a death.  It's almost timely, it comes around the holiday season when families are coming together.  During a time of racial unrest when humans need to come together.  And here comes yet another death.  Maybe a fairly insignificant one, but one close to a few people's hearts out there.  Sadly, there's one less gravelly voice in the world.  I know that perhaps Joe Cocker isn't considered a great artist, but he did a couple Beatles songs better than the Beatles in my opinion.  And one of those songs seems perfect right about now.   I think you know which one.  In case you don't:

So here's to Joe Cocker.  May we find the time to come together this season, and for all the seasons to come.   Happy holidays!  

Words, Words, Words

I took a "what's your reading personality" quiz the other day.  I've always considered myself a bit of a book fiend, but seem to have trouble actually sitting down and reading lately.  Maybe I'm reading the wrong books.  Anyway, being somewhat addicted to these ridiculous quizzes, I just had to find out what my personality was.  In spite of the rather limited options for answers, my result was fairly accurate.  I got the book "aesthete".  Basically, it doesn't matter what I read, all I care about is how it was written.  It could be a poem or a play, a three volume tome or a short story, a romance or a tragedy, comedy or reality, if it is written well, I will read it.  I love the idea of that.  I've always loved words.  When I was in school, I would cover my notebooks with favorite stanzas from poems, quotes from plays, and paragraphs from books.  I have memorized "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" so T.S. Eliot's words are never far from my heart when I need them.  I want to cover my body with tattoos of words, to become the notebooks I tattooed as a student.

I wanted to set this up because I'm planning on doing a series of posts about book related things.  The posts will be about writing (of course), character development, and the art of fandom on different levels.  But I thought it would be good to let you know where I'm coming from as a reader first, not a writer, I want to be clear about that.  For some reason, I give off this writer vibe.  But I'm not, that's my sister (see the post about shameless sister promotion).

If you'd like to take the quiz yourself, here's the link.  Beware of ads, why Oprah needs ads on her site, I'll never know.  Also, there's an option at the end to click through each personality to see how you ranked.  I enjoyed that.

My Result

A Purist View

After watching Death Comes to Pemberley, I've come to the conclusion that I am a Jane Austen purist, not a Jane Austen enthusiast.  I wanted to throttle the powers that be for what they did to Col. Fitzwilliam's character.  I discussed it with a friend of mine, who did enjoy the show, and then I recalled that she also enjoyed the atrocity known as Lost in Austen.   Hence, my conclusion that I must be a purist.  And she clearly will take any form of Austen, no matter how outlandish, therefore, an enthusiast.

So this is a rant post.  Just a small one though.

The incredible injustice they do to the character of Colonel Fitzwilliam is inexcusable.  When he was the only member of that family to treat Lizzy with the respect she deserved from the first!  The treatment he gets from her in Death Comes to Pemberley makes no sense in comparison to Pride and Prejudice.   And then to see him transformed into an arrogant asshole, it's really beyond the pale.

This is my Colonel!  Don't you even mess with him.