You Knew It Was Coming

I'm spending time with Crunch this week, and last night I got up around 3:30 to let him out and found this:



It was snowing very, very softly, tiny little flakes of snow.

Later in the morning, we got out for our walk when it was snowing more heavily:



He loves this stuff. Me? Not so much. I'm happier indoors, where I've been snuggled up in bed with a cup of decaf coffee and endless episodes of Downton Abbey (which turned last season into the most ludicrous, badly written soap opera. I spend about two-thirds of each episode cringing in embarrassment for the actors). Anyway, it's warm and cozy indoors.

It's snowing still, hours later. The roads still seem clear, which is good because I have to dash out in a couple of hours to run some errands here and there.

What else has been going on?

Well, Thanksgiving happened, as you know. Dave and I went to my brother's for TG, along with my mother. We didn't have turkey, but went all in on a feast that included rotisserie chicken, ham, macaroni and cheese, green beans, Brussels' sprouts, cornbread, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, and pumpkin and pecan pie. So it was a nice, filling Thanksgiving.

Seems like so long ago!

And what else? The doctors are still having a go at me. I'm on the third medication in an effort to bring my blood pressure down a bit. The first one made me so dizzy and sick to my stomach that I felt drunk all the time. The second brought about hours long bouts of peripheral neuropathy. The third (which I have yet to begin) is supposed to be a little better about these things, although the side effects include fatigue, which I wrestle with constantly anyway. So we'll see. I may just turn into a mud puddle in the end.

'Round the Corner

We've had some wind and snow and very, very cold weather 'round here lately. Dave and I have been holed up in the casita, watching Netflix, playing games, and sleeping sleeping sleeping. It's below freezing outside, but the storm has passed us by and so there won't be any more snow. It's supposed to climb back up into the 50s by the end of the week.

Health update:



Let's see. My recent visit to the doctor to check my blood pressure has me on a new medication. Then, lucky me, I had a Pap test and pelvic exam. Those are always fun. The doctor also had some test results for me: The sleep study came back with no signs of sleep apnea. My blood tests came back with no sign of diabetes. The worst of it was an extremely low vitamin D level. Low, like, one third of what they consider to be low. So I'm on a prescription mega-dose of vitamin D now. That's fun, too.

And there's the couch once a week:



That's where I sit for therapy. The therapist has been trying to talk me into EMDR for about three weeks now, but I'm not having it. So instead this past week she did one of those Meyers-Briggs type exams where you end up with a run of capital letters that supposedly explain your personality to you. I ended up being the rarest personality type (ha!), a type which my therapist said she so rarely as to be never sees in therapy. (Wonder what that means. Am I traitor to my personality type?)

And though we haven't been to the studio at all this weekend, I don't think I've posted any pictures of recent work, so here is a raku'd ocarina that Dave and I collaborated on:



She's cute, no?

Sleep? Study?

I can sleep or I can study, but turns out I can't do both at the same time.

This was me, Friday night, wired up for a sleep study. (I'm relatively pinkish in that picture because I was having a mild allergic reaction to something--the soap in the sleep study bedroom, I think--and I couldn't take an antihistamine or risk screwing up the study maybe.)

I have trouble sleeping under the best of circumstances (in my own bed, with my own blankie, able to read--sometimes for hours--until I drop off). This set up (covered in more than twenty electrodes and wires, in an unfamiliar bed, three cameras watching me, imposed darkness at an arbitrary bedtime). You can see one of the cameras in the upper left side of the photo. (There was another in on the opposite side of the room.)

That is not my futon. That is a very uncomfortable bed made up with sheets that felt kind of like parchment paper, only more stiff, and a blanket that was not unlike the ones that my middle school used to cover sick students in the nurses' office. (Yes, I went to public school when there were still such things as school nurses.) The patient in the next room coughed all night and buzzed for the technician several times to get up to go to the bathroom and I could hear it all; The rooms are not sound-proof by any means.

With the help of a pre-approved dose of melatonin, I managed to sleep for just over two hours, from one a.m. until just after three a.m., when I woke up thinking about plant genetics and then tried to get back to sleep by downing another dose of melatonin and playing a boring game on my phone. After two hours of that, the technician came in and asked if I just wanted to get up, so I did.

I'm supposed to get my results week after next or perhaps the week after that, maybe from the sleep doctor or maybe from my own doctor, maybe via a phone call or maybe through a follow-up appointment. (The tech was very unclear about how results were to be delivered.)

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday, Mom!



(That was Easter, I believe, sometime in the early '70s.)

November So Far

Here's my version of a raku pin-up girl, ca. 30,000 B.C.



No real reason for putting her up here, just that I never did before. (At least I don't think I did.) She's an ocarina, by the way, with a very sweet tone.

And what's going on this week you ask?

Well, the bills for the last month's medical garbage are rolling in. I'm not sure why we have insurance when I look at what we have to pay. I mean, yeah, we're on the hook for only 10% of the hospital visit (which, apparently itemized bills are a thing of the past; you just have to trust that the hospital is all above board when it comes to billing), but when it comes to the in-office doctor's visits? I am apparently paying $200 to $350 for roughly 15 minutes of time with an NP, PA, or doctor--and that's after the insurance sends their pennies in. Seriously. That means that care from an NP and PA is about $600 per hour and my doctor tops out at $1,050 per hour. So I guess it's a good thing that I only needed 15 minutes of their time.

First world problems--or almost first world problems, considering that in Japan, in the UK, in Canada, and so on and so on, those bills would probably be considerably--considerably--less. But that's fine.  So long as my money gets channeled into some poor CEO's pocket, I'm happy to still call myself an American.

So that's the main thing this week.

The other main thing is that we bought and are now using a folding "semi-recumbent" exercise bike. I'm starting slowly with 20 minutes a day (which is more exercise than I've gotten in years). But it's fine. (I'll start increasing it by 5-10 minutes a week as I get stronger.) So every afternoon I just put something on Netflix or an Amazon prime video and go. So far, I've been stuck on these 45-minute shows about various mafia types and on cooking shows with Jacques Pepin.

We've been in acquisition mode around here, somewhat. In addition to the exercise bike, we've also got a (drumroll please!) new toaster oven. There wasn't anything wrong with the old toaster oven, really, but every time we went to Costco recently, Dave would wander over to the toaster oven section and look sort of longingly at them while caressing the programmable convection Cuisinart one. So after a couple of visits, it accompanied us home. 

And let's see:

Dave is doing Movember this month. I'm trying to convince him to go with a John Waters-style 'stache when he does finally shave it (I even promised him an matching eyeliner pencil like the one John Waters uses), but I don't know that he's got whatever that takes. We'll see.

And that's really it, actually.

Happy Halloween!

We--Kelly, Kevin, David and myself--put together a Halloween/harvest/Day of the Dead diorama to welcome our (non-existent) trick-or-treaters. (Do children not trick-or-treat anymore? Or is that just in our neighborhood?)

This happy little fellow is carved from a radish (!) that we grew in our garden:

It's about the size of a large grapefruit. He's cute, no?

We also made little figures out of more radishes and beets (and lots of toothpicks) and carved a big pumpkin to round out the lot. A few candles and an advantageous spot on Kelly and Kevin's porch and we had a little altar all readied.

(You can't really see much detail with my cell phone pic, but you get the general idea.)

After the Fall II

Part of the danger of ceramics and a deep ceramic sink, demonstrated here:

One handmade soda-fired mug less (fewer?) in this world.

So back to the doctor yesterday. Back on the blood pressure medication, day two, which is already causing me problems. (Dizziness, light-headedness, nausea about three hours after taking it. I couldn't take a blood pressure reading for a few hours after I started feeling this way--was away from home--but by the time I was feeling "normal" again, my blood pressure was still a little on the low side. I'm assuming the meds are working too well.) Fuck. Why can't anything be just super duper simple? Without any side effects, I mean.

The doctor also suggested, based on some test results, that I start on a dairy-free and very low-fat diet. No dietician available to give a hand with that, of course, which stresses me out. But I've decided to try anyway.

And then there was therapy today. I'm glad to be in therapy. It was kind of the highlight of my day, believe it or not. I want to have three hour therapy sessions every day, minimum. I want to spend all day in therapy actually. I want to just move into one of the empty offices in the building and wake up in the morning, fix a cup of coffee and some toast, and start therapy. Have lunch, more therapy. Dinner, a little therapy. Brush my teeth, therapy, then bed. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I want to have the option of therapy. Then I want to get up in the morning and do it all over again. I want to start talking and not stop talking until everything is fixed.  Finally fixed.

That's a reasonable goal, isn't it? Perfection?

for use BEFORE your exam

Here is a clue as to how my day started out:

No, I didn't use those. I just swiped them from the changing room after the mammogram was complete. Oh and, yes, if you are relatively large breasted, the usual two x-rays per breast is just the beginning of the process. It was maximally uncomfortable and minimally painful and I had a really competent tech doing all the work. So there was that. That was done by 8 a.m.

I met Lu Doob for lunch after, at Flying Star. We had relatively healthy lunches (salad, rice and veggie bowl) followed by relatively unhealthy desserts (pie and ice cream, chocolate eclair). In the course of conversing, we decided to go for NaNoWriMo, so we're going to meet on Mondays each week to write together. So there's that. We'll see how it goes.

After lunch: Nap.

And after the nap, there was therapy. Yay, therapy. I haven't been to see a therapist in a couple of years, but with all the medical garbage I've been going through recently, my anxiety is through the roof and I'm afraid it will push me into a depression. The new therapist seems very awesome and I feel hopeful about therapy for the first time in a long time. So there's that.

After the Fall

Take a gander at the sum total of our corn crop this year:

I clearly did not get out with the paintbrush to do any pollination this year. That is some janky corn. Of course with the crap garden we had this year, that is a bumper crop. Still, beautiful fall colors, no?

Here's another partially painted olla. I don't know why I'm on such a kick with these things. I have far more than we'll need for the garden in the spring.

 It is an easy way to use up the commercially prepped paperclay that I bought fifty pounds of before I realized that the ridiculous amount of bactericide in it was trashing my hands. I don't like wearing gloves while I work, but with this stuff I have to.

And we did some more raku weekend before last. Here is one of the four ollas  I raku'd. 

 

She's got such a happy little grin, no?

Hearty

Last night around this time, I was headed home from the hospital after 24-hours "observation." After having chest pain that lasted 14 hours and got worse around bedtime, I went to the emergency room. When nitroglycerine made it feel better, I was transferred from the ER to the hospital proper to have tests done. I look like a start-up heroin junkie now, blown-out veins run amok, after having my blood drawn seven times by techs of varying ability. I did a stress-echo test which was fun with a nitro-induced headache and nothing per os but a few cups of ice-chips to suck on for the 18-hour stretch between the time I was admitted and the time they did the test. 

After two doses of nitroglycerine, a few aspirin, an IV drip, and a couple of shots blood thinner later, the hospitalist decided that it was probably heartburn, a diagnosis that made Dave apoplectic since he doesn't understand the differences between how fat brown women and middle-aged white men are treated (not just in medical situations, but in many situations).

But I'm home now, thankfully.  I am assuming that there isn't anything wrong with my heart.

Ha. Ha. Ha. 

The Week in Review

This past week was a doozy. Dave was out of town on business and I felt like crap all week (more about that later). I went to the studio once midweek and finished an olla, this olla, that I painted today:

I started this olla midweek and finished it today; started to paint it, but it was too wet and the underglaze wasn't sticking very well, so I put away my brushes and went with Dave to have a slice of pizza instead.

On Friday morning I woke up feeling worse than I had all week so I went to the urgent care center to get checked out. Here's a pic of the boring exam room:

I had a just-in-case EKG and came home with a sheaf of prescriptions, mainly to cure a sinus infection. We'll see. I'm not sure how much I trust the NP who gave me the prescriptions; his advice about the antibiotics was, "I'm giving you enough for ten days, but if you feel better after seven days, go ahead and stop taking them."

So there was that.

And on a lighter note, I took a picture of these candles (?) at the local hippy-dippy co-op where we do our grocery shopping:

Remind me to tell you sometime about the woman at the studio who was obviously, obviously making ceramic butt plugs (?!) and when asked what they were, she said, "Oh, those are chess pieces!"

Riiight.

Raku U.

For once I'm not going to lead off with the calavera. Instead, here is a trio of little (as in three to four inches tall) paper clay masks that we raku'd yesterday.



I went a little mask crazy, partly to finish off a bag of paper clay that had been moldering in my cubicle for awhile and partly because it has been awhile since I tried to make masks.

I'm not sure yet how to feel about them. I mean, these are fresh fresh fresh out of the kiln; when I took these pics, I was still blowing the ashes off them and scrubbing off the reduction-based gunk.

This guy I kinda like--but I like primitive looking things.

Look at that crazy glaze.


And of course, the calavera.

She is much better looking in person.

(Aren't we all?)

Ch-ch-ch-chia Chocolate Pudding and Some Other Stuff, Too

This week:

Well, not this week, but a couple of weeks ago (did I already tell you this story?) I woke myself up in the middle of the night laughing. I asked The Brain why we were awake and why we were laughing, and The Brain said, "We should start a Sigur Rós cover band." Which I know, hilarious, right? But I need my sleep. That stuff can wait til morning, The Brain.

But this week:

I went to the dentist to have my night guard adjusted. Damn, I hate that thing. It was pressing on one of my front teeth and causing it to ache, so the dentist had to drill out that part. After that was done, the dentist put the guard back into the water and mouthwash in a ziplock bag contraption that she had me bring it to the office in, and I, thinking that the bag was sealed, put it in my purse. I ran some errands, picked up Dave, and we went to (try to) pick up his glasses. While I was waiting with him in the optometrist's office, I kept my purse on my lap and, yes, I came home with a wet, minty-fresh crotch from the leaking ziplock.

So that was fun.

Let's see what other fun things happened this week.

We've been trying to cook more at home and eat out less, so I cooked some new things, including a fast, cheater-y version of pasta e fagioli ("pasta fazool"). On another night we had a burrata and tomato salad--trying desperately to partake of the last of the summer tomatoes. Another night we had huge breakfast burritos with hash browns and egg and some leftover green chile-cheese sauce from a green chile macaroni and cheese we made a few days before.

Mostly though, I've been craving sweets terribly. Last night I ate a small bag of chocolate covered pretzels before dinner (mozzacado sandwiches, which sound weird but are really only fresh mozzarella and avocado with tomato, red onion, basil, olive oil and balsamic vinegar on sourdough bread) and a chocolate eclair for dessert. Dave and I also threw together a ch-ch-ch-chia chocolate pudding (chia seeds, milk, sugar, cocoa, instant coffee, salt) that needs to sit overnight. We'll see how that goes; I'm very sceptical about chia seeds in general and chia seed pudding more specifically.

This recent spate of cooking has been inspired by a totally random youtube find called foodwishes. The guy who runs the channel (and the accompanying website) is hilarious and I find his videos inspiring enough that I've already tried a couple of his dishes.

And aside from food, I have to say, I haven't been doing much. I did read Susannah Cahalan's book Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, reviewed meh-ishly (accurately) in The New York Times.

Fall is pretty much on its way now, and it's almost time to rip out the mostly failure of a garden and maybe plant some fall/winter stuff. Our fat little orb weaver has disappeared (hopefully off to lay an egg sac and not because she became a bird's mid-morning snack) and I can now pick the eggplants from under her dilapidated web.

It's been awhile since we had a good studio day, but we're going tomorrow to raku some stuff. We'll see how that goes. If I get my shit together, I'll take some photos.

This Day, Tuesday (II)

That photo has nothing to do with anything, except that we (Dave and I) had eye exams a month ago. (And still haven't received the glasses (Dave) or contacts (me) that we ordered that day because the place where (the insurance dictates that) we go sucks.)

And speaking of sucks: It was a sucky past week, weather-wise. Lots of rain (which is good, yes) and wind and thunder and lightning. And it was cold enough that I actually wore my new jean jacket when we went out for dinner one evening and I once or twice entertained the idea of going without the air conditioner. So the rain is good, yes, but, man, I do not own an umbrella or waterproof shoes and I walked Crunch all weekend. Soggy times, man.

I finished up Jeanette Winterson's memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and a quick sociological study called Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by Kate Fox. I blazed my way through all of my beloved Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, which I try to do every year or two. What next? I'm wading into Healing Trauma by Peter A. Levine--it's been on my shelf for about a year--but that's more of a long-term project. I need a new novel or something more distracting. I put Hanna Craft's The Bondwoman's Narrative in my Amazon basket, but that hardly seems light reading.

What else is going on?

Well, boring stuff, like getting new tires put on the car and grocery shopping and toilet scrubbing. That kind of thing. I'd like to give the casita a fall scrub down, but I can't seem to muster the motivation to get into that. I mean, I just barely unpacked from our trip to Chicago last month. (And our suitcases are still sitting out!) 

Yawn!
 

This Day, Tuesday

Wild, Wild Life

It has been gray all day long and raining on and off all day long.

The hummingbirds came dutifully to the feeder every so often, but they weren't their usual exuberant selves. I imagine that they, much like I did, stayed in their nests and only ventured out to top off with sugar water.

A family of four finches came in the rain to eat the aphids off the cottonwood trees on the patio. They hop around in the tree and nibble at the clusters of aphids that form at the ends of the branches.Yesterday and the day before I noticed that the ladybugs that inhabit those same trees are growing fat from feasting on those same aphids. Fat ladybugs get very wide, cartoonishly wide, but their spots stay the same size.

Last night I let Saba out onto the patio and as soon as I closed the door, she began crying, almost wailing, to come back inside. I opened the door and she ran in and a huge grasshopper, like four inches long, jumped off her back and onto the pillow on the bed. I had to take the pillow out and scrape the grasshopper off it.

On Sunday one of the women at the studio told us about living on the Navaho reservation in the '70s. One year the grasshoppers were so bad that they ate everything in her yard, every bit of greenery including the pampas grass. She was so frustrated with them that when they climbed the outside walls of the house at night, she would go out with scissors and cut their heads off. "They drove me crazy," she said. And they lived for days after, headless little grasshoppers crawling around in the yard.

There is a fat little black-and-gold orb weaver in the garden. Her web spans all four of the overgrown eggplant plants. (The bees know to avoid her web as they collect pollen from the flowers of the surrounding bolted arugula. The bees are also quite happy with the blooming basil plants and the New Mexico sunflowers.) I hope our little orb weaver avoids the birds and finds a mate and leaves an egg sac for next year. I love spiders.

Oh! And I forgot to say about the tiny jumping spider that I saw on the cottonwood tree yesterday. Tiny thing, jumping from leaf to leaf, my favorite kind of spider.

A week or more ago, very early in the morning, pre-dawn, a skunk visited the patio. I didn't see it, but Dave did. They peered at each other through the kitchen window. I like the way skunks waddle about, but I don't want to have one on the patio. Nor do I want the cats to encounter one on the patio.

I had a dream a few nights ago. A small, golden snake was loose in the casita. It slithered under the bed. Good omen, that.

Food

Breakfast was Quorn nuggets with a mixture of BBQ sauce and ketchup. Lunch was a toasted cheese sandwich with tomato and plain Greek yogurt with a sliced up banana mixed in. My afternoon snack was more Quorn and ketchup.

For dinner I had a hotdog (mustard, ketchup, relish, onions) and a diet Pepsi. Dessert was two slices of cheesecake (one plain, one with strawberries, blueberries, and kiwi fruit) and a large bottle of San Pellegrino.

After dinner, I made ratatouille from the eggplants in the garden. We grew two varieties, the long, intensely purple Japanese type, and an Italian type called Rosa Bianca that looks like the typical white eggplant streaked with soft purple. Both went into the ratatouille, along with onions, garlic, carrots, red and orange peppers, zucchini, yellow squash, mushrooms, canned tomatoes, tomato paste, and two hunks of Parmesan cheese rind. It came out really well. We'll have it for dinner tomorrow over cous-cous or pasta.

Books

I'm in the middle of Jeanette Winterson's memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? It's kicking my ass, it's so intense.

Prior to starting that, I finished William McInnes's memoir, A Man's Got to Have A Hobby: Long Summers with My Dad.

I might be memoir-ed out after this.

People

Tonight we cruised the aisles of Costco with my older brother. I haven't seen him for a few weeks. We had planned a Costco trip before I hurt my back. He's been working a lot of hours recently, but we planned to go to dinner at a new pizza place on his next day off.

I went to the studio with Judi yesterday. We didn't stay long. Later, I looked up some information on the Mayo Clinic website and sent her the links.

On the weekend Dave and I went to the studio. Blake was there, and Lara, Anna, Lynn, and Mike. We made plans to have dinner with Lynn on Friday evening.

Work
Masks and ollas mainly.

Ugh y Inspiration

Dave and I came back from Chicago the walking wounded, practically.

Dave came back with a pinched nerve in his neck that sent him to the urgent care center for x-rays and steroids and muscle relaxants. And just as he was starting to get better, I threw my back out.

Yes, it pretty much had to happen.

Yesterday I just rolled out of bed in the morning like always and found myself with so much pain emanating from my lower back that I could barely make it to the bathroom and back to bed. That's never really happened to me before. (Yay for first-time experiences.)

I try to never, ever take even otc drugs, but after suffering for several hours I finally decided that I had to have some ibuprofen. It took the edge off enough that I could get in the shower and let hot water run over my back for a while which also made it feel a little better.  As soon as the ibuprofen wore off though, I was right back to hobbling about in pain. So I'm keeping up on the ibuprofen and on bed rest.

Fun.

Meanwhile, here's the last of the Chicago trip:

Chicago had a few things to offer, inspiration-wise, mostly at the Field Museum and the Chicago Art Institute:


 

 
 


But the best thing I saw in any museum (or anywhere) in Chicago was this:



Charles Ray's Hinoki at the Chicago Art Institute.
 
What is this thing and why did it delight me?

Here's part of the description written by Ray:

"Ten years ago, while driving up the central coast of California, I spotted a fallen tree in a meadow just off the highway. I was instantly drawn to it. It was not only a beautiful log, but to my eyes, it was perfectly embedded in the meadow where it had fallen decades earlier.[. . .]With several friends, I transported the tree, cut apart by a chainsaw, back to my Los Angeles studio. Silicone molds were taken and a fiberglass version of the log was reconstructed. This was sent to Osaka, Japan, where master woodworker Yuboku Mukoyoshi and his apprentices carved my vision into reality using Japanese cypress (hinoki)."

Yes, that's right, it's a fallen tree faithfully reproduced by carving it out of another kind of tree altogether. The carving apparently took several people carving for several years to complete and it is expected (by Mukoyoshi) to last 1,000 years.

But that's just the amazing surface detail of the experience of seeing this thing. The other parts of the experience were no less thrilling. First, you can smell this thing long before you come to the gallery where it resides. It's got living smell to it somehow, unfamiliar in an art gallery. And you can feel the changes that it makes to the quality of the air around it. It increases the humidity.  It apparently affects lots of things around it, including the floor it rests on, which had to be reinforced when it started to buckle as a result of the weight and moisture.

I know that little floor factoid from talking to one of the security guards who watches over this piece, keeping people from touching it all day long. The poor man's gone a little...off...in part from being in contact with this thing all day, I think. I won't go too much into it, as he was the least interesting part of the experience to me, but he was full of little tidbits that aren't part of the formal description of the piece. For example, he told us about talking to one of the members of the artist's family who revealed that the artist had kept back for himself several sections of the carving. And he also said something that I wanted to pass on, as it is something that too often we forget about when we're looking at art.

He said, "As much I look at it, it looks at me, too."

There is no way around that knowledge except forgetting, is there?

(If I had the kind of personality that led me to do such things, I'd already be plotting about how to steal that tree and move it into our little casita so that I could wake up next to it every day.)

Day Five: The Shedd Aquarium, Pot Belly, Union Station

Ah, the last day in Chicago!

We began with breakfast in the room (cheese, bread, fruit, and coffee). Then we checked out of the hotel and stashed our luggage and hopped on the bus to go to the Shedd Aquarium. Our CityPASS ticket allowed us to skip the general admission line (as it had at all the museums we visited with the exception of the Museum of Contemporary Art, which was not associated with CityPASS). This was a good thing as the line to get in via general admission was daunting.

The Shedd was one of the places recommended by nearly everyone I talked to about our trip. I can see it. I mean, yes, the place is really beautiful and houses an amazing array of animals. But at the end of the day,  I feel generally about aquariums as I do about zoos. I know that the chance to see these animals in the wild would ordinarily be few and far between (well, with some exceptions, as I have been whale watching on two continents and have gone diving with reef sharks and sea turtles and jellyfish and octopuses and and and...), but I can't help feeling that putting animals in tanks and cages for the purpose of entertainment (or even education) is nearly impossible to justify.

I mean, I love whales, like this cutie Beluga whale.

But please let's agree not to do this to whales anymore.

Let's just all calm down, have a caffeine break and then look at some coral, okay?

So pretty.

Look at those colors!

This curious little pufferfish held still while I took half a dozen photos. I love pufferfish. (Do you know that the Shedd Aquarium employes a dentist to help care for the pufferfish's teeth? They do!) Pufferfish have such engaging personalities. (Anthropomorphize much? Yes. Yes, I do.)

Although fish are very curious creatures in general. They do like to see what's going on in their environments, just like you and I do.

For example, let's say that after you leave the aquarium, you go for a couple of quick sandwiches before hopping on the train. While are eating your sandwiches in the Pot Belly sandwich shop across from the hotel, this comes down the street.  Wouldn't you be curious about what was going on?

Fish are the same way! (This guy, by the way, was advertising some football thing for the nearby television station.)

Anyway, after lunch, we picked up our luggage and taxied over to Union Station, found our gate, and waited for our train with a lot of different kinds of folks waiting for their trains, too.

A lot of Amish people were boarding in Chicago. David overheard a conversation in which one of them said they were heading to Stockton, CA. Why though? No clue. I kept wanting to be seated with some Amish in the dining car, but instead, on the way home, we were seated with some painfully nice people from Wisconsin and some blandly racist woman from Las Vegas.

And then there was nothing but 26 hours on the train until we hit home. (Well, 28 1/2 hours actually, as we were stopped outside Dodge City for an hour and a half or more waiting for our engineers to meet the train. It's a convoluted story, but the essence is that the day before we left Chicago, the east-bound train on the same line struck a semi-truck outside of Albuquerque. The engineers involved in the accident were sent to the hospital and then had an imposed period of rest before they could resume their duties. We were waiting for them to meet up with our train and bring us back to Albuquerque.)

Day Four: Museum of Contemporary Art, Portillo's, Old Town (Ristorante Dinotto), Second City

On our fourth day in Chicago, we decided to go the Museum of Contemporary Art to see their new exhibit featuring the work of graphic novelist and cartoonist Daniel Clowes (of Ghost World fame).

We got a relatively early start to the day as breakfast was leftover bread and cheese and coffee in the room.

When we got to the museum (about fifteen minutes before the doors opened), I almost wished that we hadn't already had breakfast, as there was a farmers' market going on and among the fruits and vegetable vendors were people selling crepes and tamales and such.



This was the outermost edge of the market. The giant head (part of an installation by Amanda Ross-Ho called THE CHARACTER AND SHAPE OF ILLUMINATED THINGS) sits just in front of the steps leading up to the museum's main entrance.

However, by idly walking through the market (because I didn't want to stand in line at the doors until the museum opened), we unexpectedly ended up at the sneaky-sneaky entrance around the corner. We were the only people to use that entrance and as a result we didn't have to wait a single minute in line.

I didn't take many photos inside the museum, but I did stop to take this photo of children participating in one of the exhibits (perhaps the "Homebodies" exhibit?). I didn't see an explanation or directions for what was going on, but they all seemed to know that they were supposed to take a balloon and a bell. While they batted the balloons around, they would also (somewhat inadvertently) ring the bells For the duration of our visit, the museum was filled with the sound of ringing bells.

This was the only photo I got of the Clowes exhibit, an inked-in page from Ghost World. It was an interesting exhibit, although a bit reading intensive, which meant long periods of standing in front of pages hung just slightly too low for me. (That didn't make The Back happy.) But there were also lots of places to sit and peruse Clowes's graphic novels, a number of which had been left lying about.

This balloon head under a mattress was also from the Homebodies exhibit.

Intriguing.

We wandered the museum and saw the Clowes, the Homebodies exhibit, a three-room installation by Chicago artist Gaylen Gerber, and a photography exhibit called Think First, Shoot Later.

We had a caffeine break in the small cafe (Puck's Cafe--yes, a Wolfgang Puck joint) and then checked out the two-story gift shop.

By then we were ready for lunch.

Lunch was Chicago-style hot dogs, onion rings, and french fries at the relatively decent tourist trap, Portillo's.  It was loud and busy and the hot dogs were pretty good.

From there we headed back to the hotel to rest awhile before heading out the door again. We had tickets to The Second City mainstage show "Let Them Eat Chaos" and we wanted to have dinner beforehand in the Old Town neighborhood near the theater.

We took the El to Old Town and picked a place called Ristorante Dinotto. We arrived early enough to get around not having made a reservation and snagged a tiny two-top near the door. Dinner was a quick couple glasses of wine, a caprese salad, fritto misto, penne porcini, and a chicken dish from the daily specials. For dessert Dave had a cannoli. How was it? Well, our waiter--what was his name? Dimitrio?--was good.

We arrived at the theater just before the doors opened and, since seating is on a first-come-first-served basis, our seats were close to the stage.

How close?

Thisclose. (Those are Dave's knees pushed up against the stage.)

From my seat I could reach out and touch the edge of the stage. Yup. Close.

What can I say about the show? It was funny and we enjoyed it. The performance was a mix of pre-written sketches and audience-led improv. There were six performers total and although all were good, two of them were very, very good--good enough that I wouldn't be surprised to see them go on to bigger and better things in the way that other Second City performers like Tina Fey or John Belushi did.

Second City was definitely worth the money (about $60 for two tickets, purchased online) and something I'd do again--if I ever make it back to Chicago.

And this was my Chicago souvenir (unintended, the result of ordering a large diet Pepsi instead of a small).