Six months of Washburne, etc.

Green floor at the school
Originally uploaded by katherine of chicago

No, it's not six months since I first went to Washburne Trade School, my favorite exploration site in Chicago (one I've somewhat neglected recently while another huge trade-oriented school has been torn down), but six months since I first got photos there, including this, still one of my all-time-favorites. My first visit, with a group of Flickr people, was incredibly fun but my memory card quit about 2/3 of the way through the excursion, losing the 150 or so shots I've took. I definitely wasn't yet up to going in these places alone and had to wait for an online friend to offer to take me back to reshoot, and I first met him six months ago today.

Since then, I've spent a lot of time at WTS (I even managed to be there on Thanksgiving, New Year's, and Easter--the latter two were somewhat spontaneous trips with friends) and with that person. If you'll forgive the metaphor, I could say that both this place and that relationship have undergone changes and I've lost some of what I wished was still around, but what's still there is pretty cool, and important to me.

On a lighter note, this visit was also the first time I faced the dilemma of desperately needing a restroom in a place that didn't have functioning restrooms. My camera batteries were running out and that shortened the visit a bit, but still...There's still not an ideal solution to this problem, but I recommend visiting abandoned buildings with Burger King, McDonald's, or Starbucks nearby.

Anyway, for those of you who haven't seen it, here's my WTS set. I highly recommend photo sets by Noah and David; both have beautiful photos of parts of the building that were torn down before I first visited. We've all blogged about WTS more than once, too...

That pretty much does it for the quasi-anniversaries I've been celebrating (Flickr, UE, making friends)...until it's been a year. I think I passed the 3-year anniversary of this blog not long ago, but I didn't count it because I went two years without posting here.

This constant urge to commemorate could be related to another of my nerdy public radio obsessions--all the anniversary stories they run. In the past week, I heard stories about the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the subsequent city riots, the 100th anniversary of Bette Davis' birth, and the 75th anniversary of the end of Prohibition--or more specifically, Anheuser-Busch starting to produce beer again. So Monday I picked up some Schlitz and spent the evening having beer to commemorate that date, and eating ice cream to commemorate that I had ice cream around.

(Okay, I just checked my past "flickrphoto" tagged posts here to see if I'd used this photo before, and I realized that all the posts where I've since replaced photos on Flickr now come up without images, and I truly don't know how to redo these, unless it's to insert the actual photo in each post...)