(Weather) Odds and (Chicago Card) Ends

The weather has been really weird this summer. Aside from a stretch of about one week, it's been cold - it got disgustingly hot for a few days, at which point I finally got around to putting my air conditioning unit in, and then it immediately cooled off and has barely cracked 80 at any point since. Mother Nature, you're hilarious. Seriously, I know it's night, but it's barely above 60 right now. I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, I guess - not having to run A/C means I don't have to pay any additional utilities, and having it be 75 and mild every day is pretty enjoyable. But it's just weird. I mean, it's mid-July! 75 isn't summer in Chicago, it's summer in London.

In more annoying news, the CTA sent me a note a few weeks ago saying my Chicago Card would soon expire. I went online to renew it and did what they told me to do, but a much later expiration date was listed, and sure enough, the next day I got an e-mail saying I had been erroneously mailed the letter saying my card would expire. I went on about my business until today, when I was unable to get into the el in the morning because... my card was listed as expired.

I called the CTA and they weren't terribly helpful, saying that a number of people were having the issue and that the powers-that-be weren't sure which course of action to take. Their only solution for now is explaining the situation to the workers at every single station (and/or bus drivers) and hoping they buy it and let me in for free. 1-for-1 so far (since I wasn't sure what was going on, I paid the cash fare this morning), but that's really not much of a solution, right? What if I'm in a hurry because the train is arriving? Trying to explain the situation to someone who may or may not have been briefed on it and may or may not believe me if they weren't is probably not something that can happen in ten seconds. And of course I take the Purple Line, which only runs once every 15 minutes at most times. They'd better resolve this problem soon.

Apocalypse now

We had a pretty ridiculous storm here on Monday night. It had rained in the morning, so I took my umbrella into work (fortunately). When I left the office around 7, it wasn't raining, though things seemed a little ominous. By the time I got off the train, around 8, it had started to pour. I got into the car and started to drive towards Alma's house, thinking she was home, but I called her from the car and left a message saying that it was raining, but wasn't too bad at the moment, if she still needed to drive back down from school (which turned out to be the case).

Then I got about a mile from her house and things went crazy. The rain started coming down so heavily that I couldn't see ten feet in front of the car except for other car and building lights. I managed to get to Alma's driveway, where I called her apartment and told her not to drive back down if she hadn't left. It turns out that up at the school, it was barely doing anything! Meanwhile, lightning was striking within blocks of me; the sky was flashing constantly. I've never seen anything like it. It's what I imagine being in the middle of a military battle would look like. I turned on WGN to see what was happening with the Cubs game and there were tornado sirens going off at Wrigley. I'm not sure I can recall ever seeing a storm of comparable intensity.

Within an hour things had tapered off, but at around 11, it started up again, though by this time I was home in bed, trying to rest up for a doctor's appointment the next morning. Of course it turned out that the office lost power due to the storm, which I didn't find out until I got there at 8:30 am.

Probably not a very exciting post, in retrospect. So here's interesting news: there's a good chance I will be going to the Philippines with Alma and her family in late December/early January. It's not a cheap flight, but (even with a girlfriend of Filipino descent) how often do you get a chance to take a trip like that, especially when you wouldn't have to pay for hotels? Plus Asia is the last continent I've never been to, and with stopovers this would be a chance to add several countries to my list, aside from the fact that two weeks in the Philippines, especially in the middle of winter, would probably be crazy awesome.

Back in town

I'm back from San Diego. A deeper discussion of this with pictures will be up within a few days once Alma can get all her photos into the computer, but it was pretty nice, even if I only managed to see one of the two Cubs wins and had to sit through their loss. By far the worst part of the trip was the flight back in - in particular, the end of it, which was at best the second-worst turbulence I can recall having to deal with thanks to 35 mph winds at O'Hare - and while the weather wasn't quite as warm as maybe I would have liked, it's not bad when the weather is in the mid-60s with some sun and no humidity. It certainly isn't worse than the steamy 85 degrees I came back to.

All in all, it was a pretty fun time, and a good choice for my first true vacation since 1994. I don't know if I'll be able to take a vacation like that every year, but I'd like to. I think it's been good for me to just have some time away, not having to worry about anything. (Kudos to work for not calling me in a panic at any point.)

I'm not the first Sparkle

The yo-yo weather continues. We get a great weekend - two straight days (Sunday and Monday) that ranged from mid-70s to low-80s, and the scheduled storms managed only to come overnight, leaving enough time for things to dry out by the time I'd be awake enough to go outside, thus enabling Alma and me to squeeze in another round of mini golf on Monday afternoon - and then I wake up today and it's 43 degrees with a wind chill dropping it to nearly freezing. This delightful meteorological anomaly is known as a "pneumonia front," and apparently this was only the seventh time it's happened in recorded weather history. It's supposed to warm back up by the end of the week, and then rain for much of next week while maintaining high temperatures on the warm side - but then I won't be here next week, and hopefully the weather in San Diego will be what the weather in San Diego is known for being. Of course the ten-day for San Diego lists temperatures for next week like "high 67, low 61" and "high 65, low 61," which isn't bad, but probably could have been a little warmer. I suppose this is what I get for scheduling a vacation during the June Gloom.

I'm alive!

Gosh, it's been a while, hasn't it? Something like four weeks, in fact, which I think is the longest posting break in BigFlax.com history. But I have my reasons. #1, of course, is that between working full-time and going to school two nights a week, there's not much time to blog. And then #2 is that between working full-time and going to school two nights a week, there's not much worth blogging about, either.

To answer the obvious question first: school is going fine so far. The first exam in Intro to Psych is next week; I'm really looking to maintain as high a GPA as I possibly can, so I'm definitely shooting for As in these first two classes, which ought to be doable. Anyway, it's a start.

I've also been sick recently, so I spared you a week of "ohhh, this suuuucks" updates. I'm still shaking off something which first showed up on Friday the 15th, knocked me out over the next few days (to the point that I missed Monday and Tuesday of work that week, and only through sheer force of will dragged myself to class on Tuesday night), and has pretty much been lingering in sporadic cough and intermittently stuffy/runny nose form ever since. At this point I'm probably at 90-95% health, or at least 90-95% of my usual, which may or may not actually be "100% healthy," but the last 5% of illness has proven tough to shake. I could probably stand to sleep a little more, which would probably help, but it's hard. To get as much sleep as I'm "supposed to," I would need to go to bed around 11pm every night, which just. Isn't. Happening. I could barely get to bed by 11 during the period when I was getting up at 5:30 for work.

What else? Well, due to my combination of work and school commitments, and the fact that (also due in large part to same) I have watched pretty much no college basketball this year, I'm actually not going to run the Tournament Challenge, for the first time since 2000. Maybe if people want to get an ESPN group together or something just for bragging rights, that'd be cool, but I'm not feeling collecting money, organizing and updating brackets, etc. Just too much work, this year, with everything else going on. This news will undoubtedly please Alma and any other readers who give zero shits about college basketball, although it means I'm going to have to find something else to post daily about if I want to keep up my usual March volume. In 2006 I made 28 posts in March. 28! Please note that it is highly unlikely you will ever see me make 28 posts in one month ever again, for any reason.

This winter has been kind of soul-sucking, which may also have contributed to my lack of posting. Alma's car got stuck on a patch of ice a week ago Tuesday; I went up on Wednesday night and attempted to use some traction-creating plastic things I found at Target, but they didn't work. We ended up going to Ace on Saturday afternoon and getting an ice chopper, and Alma sat in the car while I chopped at the ice around the right front tire so that once I got part of it stripped away, she could try to back out of the space. It still took several attempts and I eventually realized that the problem was not just the ice behind the tire but in front of the tire as well, oddly enough. Alma took some pictures which maybe she'll post on her blog at some point. At any rate, that whole struggle was emblematic of the winter as a whole. It's just snowed a ton, and when it hasn't been snowing it's been really cold, except for like the one weird day when it wasn't. I couldn't be more ready for spring to get here, although I suspect we're not going to hit 60 degrees until about May 20th.

So that's what's been going on. Slogging through a shitty winter, working, and getting used to going to school again. Not much more to say than that, I suppose, but hopefully I can get back to posting a bit more often than once a month, lest you think I've gone all Matt Pearl on you.

Things they do look awful c-c-cold

So remember when it was 65 degrees in January? That was 12 days ago. Right now it's -2 with a wind chill approaching -20. Weather.com says -7 with a -23 wind chill before sunrise tomorrow. I know it's Chicago and I shouldn't be surprised, but this is even colder than it was supposed to be and even for Chicago it's uncommonly cold. It's supposed to stay below 20 - which I usually consider to be the point where "cold" transforms into "bitter cold" - for at least several more days, with nighttime lows in the single digits (factor in wind and we could easily be looking at more below-zero effects). There's also a decent chance of snow for six of the next ten days. Always fun. So in less than two weeks the temperature will have dropped more than seventy degrees. That's horrifying. I can deal with the cold (although it sucks), but to have that 65-degree teaser as a prelude to weeks of bitter cold is just such a kick in the pants.

I never talked about my Christmas presents. Not a whole lot to say, I guess; my parents got me a new flat-screen monitor, which is pretty sweet. Still, I think the best present for sheer thoughtfulness and ingenuity came from Marian, who was up in New Jersey the morning of our "Christmas" (which was really December 29) and brought me back a turkey sandwich from the Millburn Deli, my second favorite food in history. It was delicious in spite of the four-hour car ride it had just taken.

Lord almighty, I feel my temperature rising

Just a few days ago, the overnight low was in the single digits and it snowed like crazy. Today it is in the mid-50s and the high tomorrow is slated for - according to the Weather Channel forecast I'm looking at - 59, with a low of 51. Unfortunately there are also supposed to be thunderstorms, which will likely preclude me from enjoying this weather in any way. But a 50-degree temperature increase in less than a week is insane, even for Chicago. I remember junior year when we had a prolonged super-cold snap and then suddenly it leapt to 32 and it felt balmy... but today it actually is balmy. Quite strongly so. Fun while it lasts, I guess. The upcoming week is actually supposed to be decent, although there's a big difference between 58 decent and 38 decent.

Jury don'ty

I had jury duty today. I'm pretty sure it's safe to tell you that, given what transpired.

6:30 am: Get up.

7:30 am: Start driving out to Rolling Meadows. Why the hell did I have to drive all the way to Rolling Meadows? Because apparently Cook County has some dividing line in the middle of the city (I've heard it's Roosevelt Road) and if you live anywhere in the county north of that, you can be assigned to any of the "northern" courts, which include the Daley Center, Skokie, and yes, Rolling Meadows. I wasn't the only person there from Chicago, either.

8:30 am: I-90 traffic cleared up after O'Hare and I ended up making reasonable time, so I was one of the first people there; in fact, the room wasn't even unlocked yet when I arrived. I went in, got my number, and sat down with "The Illustrated Pepys" (a book I must have gotten for some class in college that I ended up dropping, which I dug out of my room this morning while searching for something to take with me). By the way, Samuel Pepys? Kind of an asshole.

9:00 am: We watch a video clearly produced in the late 1980s (oh, the hair on those women) and starring Lester Holt (then an anchor for the local CBS News) as the token "local broadcast guy we hired to have someone who'd been in front of a camera before." Meanwhile, the first court call comes and goes with no court requesting jurors.

10:30 am: Second court call. No court requests jurors. There must have been a lot of guilty pleas going down today.

11:30 am: With an hour having passed since the second call and no juror requests, we are dismissed for lunch with instructions to be back by 1:30 for the third call. Yeah - after just three hours of sitting (less for those who didn't arrive early), it's a two-hour lunch break! I drive over to Randhurst and hit the food court; the mall was looking pretty dead (though of course it was noon on a Tuesday) and the food court was actually kind of crappy. I had lunch at an off-brand express Chinese place which made me understand why Panda Express is so popular. Also, I'm guessing that food court doesn't see a lot of action in more ways than one - there was still a large mall-stand poster up for In the Mix, the movie starring Usher which came out November 23. 2005. To complete the lunch break, I drove past the former spot of Twin Links, the preferred mini golf spot for Drew and me before it closed last August. It's now a spanking-new and as-yet-uninhabited medical office building. Sad.

12:30 pm: With nothing else to do, I cut the lunch break in half and go back to the jury room.

1:30 pm: Third and final court call. No courts request jurors.

2:30 pm: An hour having passed since the final call, it is assumed that no courts need jurors. We're given our $17.20 checks and released. Oddly, it ends up taking me longer to get home than it did to get in, due to traffic. Tired, I forego trying to make it in for a couple hours of work (I got paid not to go anyway).

And that's it! On the plus side, I got money (albeit a very tiny amount and it basically just covers transportation and lunch expenses when you get down to it) for doing nothing but reading and I got a random day off work, which honestly I kind of needed mentally right now. And I also won't have to get called again for at least a year, and usually it's more like every three years unless you're spectacularly unlucky.

In other news, Mother Nature apparently decided summer was over. We're into the "high 70, low 50" part of the year where it gets obnoxiously cold at night and never really warms up either. On the one hand, the apartment is finally cooling off; on the other hand, my room still turns into a furnace as soon as I close the door. Always a fun time.

We're in for nasty weather

The weather in the Chicago area the last couple days has been nothing short of abominable. Here's the approximate pattern, as seen through my eyes:

9 am: Clear, blue sky; temperature in the high 70s/low 80s. Looks like a gorgeous day.

1 pm: Similar to before, but ten degrees hotter and twice as humid. No longer a terribly pleasant day, but at least a tolerable one.

3 pm: Out the office window, the sky goes totally dark. Rain pours so heavily that nearby buildings cannot even be seen.

7 pm: Rain continues with minimal periods of abatement. Near-constant lightning. Rain runs the gamut between total deluge and normal heavy shower.

10 pm: Rain stops; skies clear in preparation for next morning's bullshit niceness.

I've missed a lot of the absolute worst; Leah describes a pretty crazy situation from this afternoon. I can confirm that it certainly looked as bad as it was; as noted above, the rain was so heavy at times that I couldn't see farther than the next building over, which is completely fucking insane. But I've managed to take lunch early enough to avoid the punctual mid-afternoon storms, and by the time I've left at least the worst of the wind has already died down. I saw a lot of after-effect today, though.




Click on the thumbnail for a larger view. No, that's not my car, thank God, but it is the car that was/is parked on the street pretty much directly in front of my apartment. And when I came home today, at about 8:00, it was pretty well covered by this tree which had been uprooted. Fortunately for the car and its owner, most of what was really on the car was a large branch, and even then some wires had stopped the branch from hitting the car too hard, although frankly I'd be even more worried by the wires at this point.

Still: damn. I know I've only been here seven years and only four summers, but this has to be the worst spell of weather I've seen yet. Usually this sort of stuff happens once a year; this was twice in two days, and according to the forecast we may have more on the way. Maybe tomorrow I'll at least think to take an umbrella rather than letting blue sky in the morning fool me. (Blue sky at morning, sailors take warning, right?)