Monthly Archives: June 2008

Another storm come and gone

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Last night a huge, tornadic thunderstorm (three of them, actually) ripped through Saline County and the rest of the area. We were out of power from 10 PM (local time) last night until exactly as I walked in the door at about 6:45 PM today. (Not sure how that happened.)

We, luckily, had very little damage — a tree snapped and some shingles got torn off the roof. Driving just a quarter of a mile east, though, it was obvious that a tornado went through.

In front of Access TV today was an uprooted tree, a lamp post that was twisted and fell over, and chunks of the satellite used for downlinking certain programs. It was a fun day there.

The Smoky Hill River Festival is still going on with a fervor though, so I’ll be there tomorrow looking at art and hanging out with friends :)

Of notebooks and cucumbers

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This is something weird that I realized: for as long as I can remember, my chemistry laboratory notebook has always smelled like cucumbers.

I’m not sure why, but a Google search for “chemicals that smell like cucumbers kinda maybe told me why:

Morrison describes the smell of 2-nonenal as “pungent cucumbers.”

Apparently my chemistry lab notebook has old lady smell.

I'm home

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After an unexpected decision that we would be deciding to just go home, all in one day, from Chicago, I was quite alarmed. We’ve never driven for 11.5 hours before.

Then again, quite a bit of that was stopping, and some was eating lunch. So maybe it was only 10.5 hours. Still, a lot of driving, and a lot of money spent on gasoline. The highest we spent on gasoline was at the Shell station in Naperville, or one of the really nearby subsuburbs, at $4.129.

Yesterday we went up to Navy Pier. We walked all the way up, because we were quite impatient for the next trolley (the first trolley) to come to the stop where we walked to and were standing for quite some time. Probably took us a couple of miles to make it there from Union Station… and then we decided to walk the Magnificent Mile after getting off another trolley later in the day.

We passed by an Apple Store with a MacBook Air on display between two pieces of fiberglass; the one in back had clouds, while the one in front had a nice pinkish color at the top and bottom, fading to a point of transparency where the MacBook rotated for what seemed like a long, long time. And there were people, too.

In addition, I thought I saw the most Helvetica in my life at the Sears Tower Skydeck, but I was proven wrong yesterday simply by walking into Crate and Barrel, where every sign was Helvetica. Every single last one of them, except for the ones by the elevator and escalator that said what was on what floor. I’ll tell you one thing: it slightly bothered me. Maybe it was the small amount of spacing they had between words.

Either way, I’m home, and I’ve decided on a few things:

  1. I really need to work on getting a website template done out of my current one, also for Movable Type and WordPress and all the rest
  2. I really need to work on fuse-mediawiki
  3. I really need to sleep

If you see me mucking about in IRC, or in real life (heaven forbid), let me know I should be doing these things.

Chicago, day 3

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A drive to the Metra station and a half hour ride to Chicago started the day once more. We then decided to walk around for no particular reason for about an hour, then wait for the free trolley system to start up at ten o’clock.

First stop was the Adler Planetarium, where we saw a whole bunch of things that I pretty much already knew, as I was also trying to be able to deal with large groups of children from the second grade. I probably exploded a few times internally. We watched an interesting movie on black holes.

Next was the Shedd Aquarium, which I quite enjoyed.

Chicago, day 2

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Arrived at the Metra station well on time and got on an express route from our location to Chicago Union Station. After that, it was a quick half an hour standing around, most likely looking like idiot tourists, wondering when the free trolleys were to start (which happened to be 10 AM; it was 9:00). Needing to kill some time, we went to the Skydeck of Sears Tower.

My ears popped about four times on the way up, which took about sixty seconds. It was a cloudy/smoggy day, so we didn’t get as good of a view as we were hoping for, but it worked :)

After that, a trolley ride to the Field Museum. We spent… five and a half hours there, and still didn’t get to everything. I have photos; they’ll go on Flickr when I get back home.

The trolley driver we had (both ways) claimed to be “the joker of the trolley company”. With one hand on the wheel, one hand holding the microphone, and his eyes on the road about half the time, we got to our destinations humorously. He was quite talkative.

We spent probably a total of three minutes in Union Station to get back, as I walked through the place quite fast, after I claimed I knew exactly where we were going. Turned out that I did… those screens that tell you which routes are going in which directions are quite helpful. Mum was quite impressed and decided that I could handle myself in two different international airports on my own. FUDCon, here I come! :D

Tomorrow, I think we’re going to the planetarium and the aquarium, unless our plans change at the last minute.

Chicago, day 1

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Short post tonight because I’m tired.

Went to the Lincoln museum, as stated in the last post, and it was *amazing*. Go there sometime in your life (soon) when you get a chance. All sorts of technology that I actually approve of. (That doesn’t often happen with museums… especially when most of them use Windows for displaying movies and they often crash… I didn’t see a single dead machine today. Nothing wasn’t working.) The whole history of Lincoln’s life was the neat part, though.

Made it to Chicago. Tomorrow we’ll be taking a train from the suburb we’re at to Union Station. I won’t be bringing my laptop (unless for some reason we have a backpack which I didn’t know of), so it’ll be blogging when I get back to my current residence again.

It would be nice to have texting so I could use Twitter more often.