Slices of Life: February 9, 2010 Winter Storm

A few scenes of the snow around town.  Click any of the pictures to enlarge them.

Last Night's Sunset in Time-Lapse

Last night I tweeted that the high clouds in the sky could make for an interesting sunset.  So I set up the iPhone and made a time-lapse movie of the sun going down behind the Chicago skyline as seen from the John Hancock Center (875 North Michigan Avenue).

Unfortunately, the clouds cleared out just as the good colors were coming on, but you can still see its light making rainbows in the ice crystals.

There are a couple of times when the picture jumps.  Those are when someone called on my phone.  Oops!

Slice of Life: Slice of Chicago

Two photographs of Chicago taken from the same location in Lincoln Park two months apart.  The frame on the right shows where we are.  The frame on the left shows what we have to look forward to.

Of course, if I was smart I would have arranged them in chronological order, but I'm not.

Slice of Life: The Boiling Seas

When you were a kid did you have that fantasy about a vein of volcanic magma opening up underneath Lake Michigan and the water boils and makes the world's largest pot of spaghetti?  Yeah, me too.

Here we see the comparatively waters of Lake Michigan boiling into the frigid air on a winter's morn with Navy Pier (600 East Grand Avenue) silhouetted in the foreground.

Slice of Life: Snowstorm - January 7, 2010

Walking around town in the snow today with my CrappyCameraPhone™.  It's very quiet in Chicago.  For a time, I was the only person at Caribou Coffee across from Millennium Park.  Normally, getting a seat here is impossible during daylight hours, let alone at lunchtime.

Orange You Glad You're Not Drinking It?

Autumn is here, and another one of Chicago's colorful aquatic traditions is underway.  It's not as dramatic or big or well-celebrated as the greening of the Chicago River, but the oranging of the Daley Plaza fountain is one method of keeping the seasons straight around here.

Why is a city on a Great Lake afraid of water?

For the last three days we've been inundated with television news coverage of the flooding happening in Chicagoland.  There have been plenty of pictures of people being evacuated from their homes because of rising flood waters.  Rescue crews have been mobilized to save these helpless victims from mother nature's fury.

Bullhockey.

What's wrong with these people that they need to be saved from six inches of water?  TV news producers, writers, editors, and reporters are trained to show us the most dramatic and important video that comes in that day.  So what do we see?  People huddled in rubber dinghies being pulled to "safety" by firefighters who are simply sloshing along in ankle-deep water.  People bemoaning their misfortune that they have all of nine inches of water in their basements.  These people need to suck it up and get on with their lives.

The storm that brought the flooding to Chicagoland was the remains of Hurricane Ike.  When Ike crossed from the Gulf of Mexico to Galveston Island it brought 21 FEET of water.   And what did the people of Galveston Island do when Coast Guard helicopters came to their rescue?

They said, "No thanks.  We're fine.  We can take care of ourselves."  With water up to the second or third-stories of some homes these people are taking care of themselves.

Meanwhile, the soft-and-doughy Chicagoans are freaking out at mere inches of water that might make the legs of their foosball tables soggy, or require wee water wings for their precious tiny dogs.

Seriously, Chicago: Grow a pair.

All cushions accounted for

Last night's storms were among the wildest we've felt since moving to Chicago six years ago.  The tornado alert for Lincoln Park and Montrose harbor was bad enough.  But when round two blew through a few hours later, our building got hit many dozens of times.



Things could have been worse, though.  Take a look at the roof of 777 North Michigan Avenue (you may know it as the Wallgreen's Building at Michigan and Chicago):

Ordinarily the rooftop pool furniture is aligned in neat little rows.  But last night's winds pushed all of the chairs, lounges, and cushions into a big pile.  Remarkably, it doesn't appear that any of it left the roof, which is good news.  Imagine your surprise if you got hit by a chaise lounge falling from a height of 30 stories.