The first snowstorm

Here's a little from last Saturday. I've got a lot to look forward to this weekend, but today's one of those gray days where I'm waiting to hear from people, and restless, and just need to get out and get a few photos even if it's gray. But first...I got a good early start Saturday and had my first trip into this ruined foundry. There's another building near it, but I chose the ones that are completely open--because they were obviously burned/destroyed some time ago. Easy to get in (and surprisingly, easy to get into a huge adjacent construction site, though I didn't have time for that), and a cop car drove by on the street when I was visible and nothing happened. I love the extent of ruin here. One of the few places where I was much more afraid of the structural damage than of running into people. But nothing happened.


It's near another place I'd wondered about for a while, but after slipping under a fence and starting to walk around the buildings, I heard dogs barking. Locked inside a building, but still, that's scary, and I didn't want to draw attention to myself so I beat it. I had my second meal of the week at the excellent new-ish diner, The Depot. Apple pancakes and hot chocolate--I seriously want to order that meal again just so I can take a photo of it. Wonderful, and only $6 total.

I took a couple buses to a factory demolition. It wasn't all being demolished; the fact that the other buildings were occupied that day restricted me to just getting shots through the fence. Luckily, I'd heard a rumor of a spot nearby, and easily got into two buildings of some abandoned auto repair place.


Not much to see there, but I went upstairs to the offices, and climbed on an upper level of a garage because if I see stairs that look even remotely safe, I'll climb them. It's always nice to get a chance to be alone in a huge empty abandoned space, but the only real excitement here is that this is my first abandonment on the north side. Okay, technically the northwest side, but still cool. (I've done a factory that's about 300 north, but that's really the West Side.)


So I'd gotten my photos for the day done by 1:00--not bad. And it's good I was done, because as I excited the garage, the snow was coming down. I walked a few blocks to a nearby Target and was snow-soaked and ruddy when I got there. I quickly bought a new cell phone. That's my THIRD ONE this year. I'd gone on a long drive with DK the day before, to show him some of the Northwest Side. We didn't go to American Science and Surplus, saw Superdawg but I decided not to push him to go there because he doesn't care for Chicago hot dogs. didn't eat at the Edgebrook Coffee Shop but did go to Cut Rate Toys, went to Oak Park where we ate at a favorite diner, the Cozy Corner, and I showed him the great bookstore The Book Table. Sometime in all that my water bottle spilled in my bag, and I'd ruined my second phone this year.


So, another $40 down the drain. I got a new one at Target--they keep changing the basic model, so this is my 3rd different phone in 7 months--and waited for the Diversey bus. FOR A WHOLE HOUR. I'm not sure I've ever had a bus wait top an hour before. It was snowing, but not that bad. That was my view for an hour. I had a nice warm visit to Powell's bookstore on Lincoln (20% discount day), a 30 minute wait for the Lincoln bus, later a 20 minute for the Damen bus. Ugh. Someday the CTA will learn about the concept of "precipitation" and plan accordingly...


I got a few shots at the Irving Park Brown Line station, its next-to-last day before closing for rehab. Got the phone turned on at the Lawrence & Damen phone store. Sadly, I hadn't actually SAVED my numbers anywhere, so I'm starting from scratch again. At least I treated myself to a nice hot dinner first at Ravenswood Grill, one of my favorites. (Yes, two restaurants in one day, rather indulgent.) I seriously couldn't believe how good the mashed potatoes and gravy were. I'd planned to see my roommate's band play that night, but the thought of taking four more buses that night was excruciating. Just walking two blocks on the icy sidewalk from the Kimball bus was frightening enough. I turned in early, for a day of exploring another abandoned hospital the next day...

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!