Today at the Archicenter

(I've been volunteering at the Chicago Architecture Foundation as a Visitor Services Volunteer since March 2006, usually every other Monday morning.) I got to my 9:30am-1:00 shift just 5 minutes late. (I'm improving.) I'd had coffee but no breakfast at home and I really regretted the latter when it seemed too busy to even run a few yards across the building to grab something at Corner Bakery. A pretty big group (16) for the 10am Historic Skyscrapers walking tour. I was sure the 11am Chicago Old & New tour had been using "the devices" (these things that amplify the docent's voice; you hook a rubber earpiece over one ear. And you have to leave an ID/credit card at the store as a deposit and get it back at the end) for the last month or so. (Historic uses them, so you've got to give them out before 10 and gather them back at noon.) The employee at the ticket counter then wasn't aware this tour used them, so I had to scramble to hand out 24 devices at 11 when the tour should have been leaving. (I should add that about 20 of the people taking the tour didn't buy their tickets until about 10:55.) Then both docents' devices didn't work and I had to replace them. Still, the tour only left 8 minutes late, so no problem, and my 1:00 replacement showed up early so I didn't even have to gather them back in.

New experiences today: a woman couldn't take a device because she's allergic to rubber. And, I broke an earpiece.
Not new: I directed a lot of people to Frank Lloyd Wright stuff in Hyde Park and Oak Park. I stole glances at cute guys buying tickets until their (of course) girlfriends showed up. I practiced my slow, purposeful pacing. I only got through a few pages of my book.

I was about to randomly bring up my Flickr page when the midday ticket employee mentioned he'd just got a digital camera. I had an excuse and we talked about Flickr/photography for a while, and I told him and the man who "hired" me as a volunteer all about my legitimate and less-legitimate architectural photos. (I mean, the ones that aren't quite obtained legally...)

So I got out early and ate at the Bongo Room (South Loop version) for the first time--excellent croissant sandwich, and I've never, ever gotten my food so fast at a place like that! Coffee was a little slower. Eventually I got home, then out again.

Then a Flickr friend and I spent nearly two hours wandering around a school under demolition. Then I got some tiramisu gelato in (area that used to be Maxwell Street).

I'll give you something to cry about

Just a figure of speech; I haven't been crying. Wow, there I was complaining about Flickr and getting nothing done in life (hey, I've at least moved laundry from the futon to the hamper since then)...Since then, the good: I had two Flickr meetups in one day (one an official meetup, one more of an adventure) which were great fun. I've gotten a lot more page views, though a lot might be from one person who's picked a bunch of my photos as favorites (thanks!) including one that's of ME (mildly disconcerting, but at least it's a person I've met).

And I had the most exciting photo shoot ever, even better than the factory two weeks earlier. But my SD card went nuts for no reason about 2/3 of the way into our adventure and said "Error" and "0 Images" and I haven't been able to read it on any camera or computer. I may have to retake 150 images (and the many great shots I missed after the card quit), which isn't completely bad because the place we shot at will be virtually identical next time I see it. But is partially bad because it's not easy to go to this place myself. (Just being on the street outside I get lots of men honking their horns at me.) I'm always doing things people consider "risky": I take the CTA by myself late at night, I walk or bike by myself late at night (through less scary areas), I bike or take the CTA (during the day) through nearly all the "bad" neighborhoods of Chicago. But going into an abandoned building by myself just seems much scarier. Even though our group didn't run into anyone there. There are people who'd like to go back; but I don't know if they'd hang around while I reshoot 200 or so photos.

Hey Katherine, why don't you ever post any photos HERE? Yeah, I'm working on it...

I just need inspiration to do my laundry

I'm drinking tea because I don't want to overdo coffee today. I'm wondering why it's raining when it's supposed to be sunny and another fabulous day for me of bicycling. I just watched an Oprah episode that's supposed to be all inspirational and stuff (a whole hour with one guest--the author of Eat Pray Love, which does sound good), you know, a woman leaving an "ideal" life to find herself through spirituality and pleasure, and how when you do all that finding yourself, that's when you find love. You know, how you find love when you're "not looking." Uh-huh, not looking has worked out REAL well for me. I'm resorting to bad grammar ("real" instead of "really"). I'm wondering what will inspire me to wash the unwashed clothes on my futon from my trip to Iowa a month ago. At least I'm doing dishes; having a roommate forces you to not fall completely into disrepair.

And worst of all, I'm taking out my crankiness about finally posting photos on Flickr from my most-fun photo shoot ever (68 consecutive photos with no photos of the El or cats or neon signs or anything inbetween) to crushing indifference by writing pissy comments in my photo captions. Everyone else is a better photographer/posted theirs already/has been doing urban exploration much longer (I just bought the book on it last night). Whatever, I had fun. (I've promised myself to no longer complain here about no one reading my blog; now I come to the blog to complain about my Flickr page. While I'm at it, I need friends on GoodReads.com).

All Flickr and no sleep

...makes Katherine do crazy things like go out in almost-90 degree weather to bike 10+ miles to rephotograph something amazing I haven't seen posted on Flickr yet but really really want to put up there. (And here too, of course.) It's not just the photo; it's that I haven't had a crazy long bike ride since...two days ago. (I rode the entire length of Broadway going north [2800-6400 north] and the entire length of Ravenswood going south [7100-3000 north].)

Finally.

Yes, I've learned to post a photo.

And a link to more.

Once again I have the cheapest phone on earth

First, here's a shout-out to the utterly incompetent traffic aide standing a few feet away from me during my long wait at the intersection yesterday, while I got out of the turn lane and waited to go straight, unaware I'd be heading onto an expressway no matter which direction I took. (I thought the cabs honking at me were just being jerks.) By failing to say anything, you made my life more exciting, and helped me overcome adversity--in this case, possibly getting run over by any of the 1000s of cars swarming around Soldier Field for a massive sports event I hadn't even known about until I was biking downtown. (It wasn't a Bears game.)

In other news, I have a functioning cell phone again. Circuit City doesn't sell T-Mobile pay-as-you-gos at all. Best Buy has them on display but hasn't stocked them for weeks. (Enraging.) Target sells them at a higher price, but it'd been 5 days, I wasn't going to run around anymore. A woman at Target got one just before me and at the register, her young daughter was oddly thrilled that I was buying the same phone. (Like when a little kid meets someone with their same first name, I guess.)

After a fruitless attempt to get to a LadyFest-fundraiser sale (The Reader had the wrong hours) I got to the T-Mobile store at Lawrence & Damen at 6:10. The sign said they closed at 6, but one employee was in there helping out one customer. I went inside and waited. Until 7:00. She was getting a real phone and real contract, which takes an eternity, which is another reason I like my cheapskate phone. I wasn't annoyed at them, just tired, and sad as I watched the last real hour of sunlight ebb away. But hey, I got to listen to "lite" music, including "Dancing Queen," and bizarrely, "Wild Thing." It took literally two minutes to get my new phone set up. I went into the twilight, walking to Andersonville, dialing almost everyone I knew to get their numbers in the phone, reaching only one person. (Later I got my first call and my first missed call.)

Internet days of yore/joining the 21st century

All right, kids, this is when I'd put on a grandma sweater and fix some chamomile tea (if it wasn't 85 degrees) and we'd settle in for my tales of ye olde Internet (when you probably did have to walk miles through the snow just to get to 4800 speed modem access, but never mind the technical details). The kids growing up with so-called Web 2.0, or anyone who's just gotten online in the past few years, have a vastly different experience from when I first got online in 1992.

I used Prodigy message boards and email--the main competitors were AOL, CompuServe, and Delphi, and I suppose local bulletin boards and university accounts. The communities on Prodigy fell apart when Prodigy started to charge per hour of use instead of a flat fee--the other services already charged per hour. It's amazing to think of paying a fee per hour to be online (other than using an Internet cafe). People fled to AOL. The other thing I find astonishing now--you couldn't easily (or at all?) email between the different service providers.

Anyway, so I was online (though not technically on the Internet yet, unless I was looking at my dad's university account) since the very early 90s, back when most people barely knew what you were talking about, and you could brag about having communities of friends all over the country. Well, it was hard to brag if you had all these friends because you barely had friends in real life.

(And more than any technical changes, to me the most incredible change in the Internet has been from its function as a community for people who often didn't have great real-life relationships--i.e., the unpopular kids--to a place to show off your popularity by collecting friends on social networks. It's bizarre to me, and surely the kind of thing some people my age have written dissertations about!)

But since then, I've been incredibly late to most of the big developments online. The hype shifted from discussions of bulletin boards and chat rooms to the World Wide Web--but I don't think I ever actually looked at a website until 1996. My friend Jason had a blog (back when they were "online journals") by 2000 (earlier?) but I didn't really look at blogs until 2004--2005, when I first explored the very-well-developed political blogging communities. (Weren't blogs talked about for the first few years mainly as "self-indulgent" personal sites, then all the hype about political bloggers came along?)

As you can tell, I still have a lot to learn about blogging--but after 2+ years of this blog's existence, I just TODAY learned to change the template, add a subtitle, and add links. (I wasn't totally incompetent for 2 years, I just didn't post here.)

More on how very, very far behind I've fallen: I didn't look at Wikipedia in earnest (I'd discovered it accidentally a few years ago) until this summer. (I haven't yet edited anything.) I've almost never seen Ebay, though that's out of a smart reluctance to spend time online trying to add to the unbelievable clutter of my place. I hadn't looked at MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr until 2007. I've never downloaded a song or listened to a podcast. I'm trying to figure out RealAudio to catch up on massive amounts of public radio. I've looked at Amazon reviews as long as they've been around (did they use to rate books on a scale of 1-10?) but have never posted one. (Once you were able to rate other people's reviews, it got intimidating.) You get the idea.

But I've CHANGED! I've done more in the past week and a half than in the last few years (and 4 of those days I was away from the internet entirely):
Last week: I put up a Flickr page. I restarted this blog (after having to switch to Google). I emailed a photo for the first time.
This week: I put up a MySpace page. I looked up dozens of people I know to see if they're on MySpace. (I haven't added friends yet.) I got several Flickr friends/contacts. I went through my entire email inbox and unsubscribed to some junk lists that have scared me away from it for a while. I got a second email account that I actually plan to use (unlike the ones I created to respond to people on Craigslist, then got scared to look at). I made the aforementioned changes here.

I know I'm only doing what millions of other people easily do every day--but it's a huge deal to me.

Away in Iowa/R.I.P. first cell phone

So, I left for Iowa (on Greyhound) early Sat. morning and got back early Wed. morning (over an hour late because of slow boarding, and morning traffic--don't they factor that into the schedule?). I very, VERY badly wanted to post here from Iowa, but wasn't willing to do it on my parents' computer (partly because they have dial-up, mostly because I haven't learned how to erase my browsing history). I didn't have a big block of time to try it at the public library, and Ames doesn't have any Internet cafes that I know of (wi-fi access, sure, but obviously I don't have a laptop). I have a LOT of Critical Mass stuff to write, and the Iowa trip story.

This trip was my first time taking my cell phone out of state. I had it just four months--I'm rather late in the game, I know. I made a few calls approaching the Illinois/Iowa border, including one to a friend I saw in Chicago last week. I "surprised" him with a call from Iowa and was surprised he was in Wisconsin. (It really doesn't take much to excite me.) Later, I talked to a friend in Ames (that's central Iowa); the phone worked fine except for on the underground level of our house. Oh, and until I got water on it in my purse.

The "unlock" button gave me trouble but I managed to set the alarm before bed. In the morning the alarm rang--and I couldn't work the buttons to shut it off. I could just barely hit "snooze" over and over. Afraid it'd continue indefinitely (and for some reason, I kept the phone's existence secret from my parents--why?), I threw it on the (concrete) floor. It shut off. And I turned it back on again--still no "unlock."

By the time I got on Greyhound Tues. night, I saw I'd missed two calls. I started banging on the keys and the fairly cute young guy across from me offered his pocketknife. (See, there's an advantage of Greyhound over flying.) Instead, I let the young guy behind me try to fix it--he'd fixed others--but to no avail.

I went to the T-Mobile store in Chicago where I first got my phone set up. The same young employee who'd helped before helped again. Now, I don't expect every T-Mobile employee to know how to fix everything, but he REALLY didn't need to say "Oh my god" at every step. The phone never turned back on again.

He transferred the chip/card into a used phone they had lying around. Apparently I lost nearly everything--except my pay-as-you-go minutes. He showed me text messages in it to see if they were mine, or the previous owner's. Something about "Leah" and a message just saying "I love you." "That's not mine," I said grimly. Wonderful, I hadn't YET had an existential crisis over the fact no one's ever texted "I love you" to me.

Some of my data may have been in there, but my list of numbers was gone--luckily they're nearly all on my home phone. He offered to sell me the used (camera)phone for $40, but I freaked out trying to use it. I couldn't figure out any of the usual functions I use on my cheap, crappy phone, so I had him take the card out and put my useless phone back together, to search for a new one Thursday.

I had a lot of fun with that phone. The first call I received was while browsing at Borders. Then the same person called me back in line at Borders. And at the library one day, and at at least one restaurant, and on numerous bus trips. (Not to make him sound like a pest--I'm just pointing out I've had the phone ring at most awkward situations I can think of. But I always, always turned it off before attending any kind of show.) I can't wait to start again!

I'm back, really I am

So last night I gave a couple people these flyer/card things I'd just made promoting this blog and the Flickr page I set up yesterday. I finally tried to "reclaim" the blog a few days ago, completely unaware about the Blogger-Google switch, frustrated at the hoops to jump through to restart it all. Actually, it wasn't that hard, but a few wrong starts and you can get pretty discouraged. I put City of Destiny on my Flickr page and when I clicked the link, that was the first time I'd looked at it in almost two years! The last time I saw it, with a different computer/browser, it looked like nothing, plain text. I clicked the link and now it's apparently one of those cute pink blogs. Eventually I'll figure out how to add to it, but that's fine for now.

So, this is proof I'm back. There'll be stories about this birthday, and about what I did this summer. Thanks to the one or two people out there who actually give a damn about whether I write here or not! I won't disappoint you. And I'll try not to disappoint myself, either.

Happy Birthday!

Okay, so I should make myself do, oh, 12 hours of cleaning/organizing for every time I comment on people NOT making comments here. I should stop. I sound petty.

But damn, how much publicity have I gotten recently from Jason's blog--either via the mention of my blog in Jason's post that got excerpted on Bookslut, or his account of the Quimby's show, or his (thank you!) including me in something yesterday called "BlogDay" where bloggers list blogs they like/bloggers they know? Why doesn't any of that translate into comments? I did, last month, get a few comments from people I met in Portland, which is cool. Would anyone email if I put up my address? Comments are about the only way I have to know if anyone reads this.

I had my birthday Monday. It doesn't really stray from my tradition of mediocre adult birthdays...Actually, I had fun by myself during the day. Well,. I don't feel like posting on that now.

First my place gets broken into and I lose all my emergency savings, three days before my birthday.

Then on my birthday, the worst natural disaster to hit America in anyone's living memory happens. (And now I feel guilty saying anything about the break-in. It seems insignificant. But it terrified me.)

I shouldn't even post trivial things like...whether anyone's commenting or not. I've been keeping up with the news so I'll post on the hurricane next.

Take care. And thanks for reading, even if you don't say anything.