Chicago Weblog

The weather here has been San Diego-like lately. This means it’s a little cold for me (long sleeves in June?!), but I admit I’m probably the only one who thinks so. The air is very clear, and the sky a beautiful blue. CVH likes the 20C degree, low humidity weather, so we went for some walks.

We went to the Wrigley Building, which due to a fortuitous bend in the road, still enjoys a prominent position in the northbound view of Michigan Avenue from downtown.

The Wrigley has a stunning Walgreens, too. With public restrooms. Good to know when you’re walking around downtown. Very good to know.

We walked along the Riverwalk. Some of the pandemic restrictions are lifted, and you’re starting to see more people downtown. We sat here by the water. I don’t know where everybody went when this picture was taken; it was pretty busy when we were there.

As sightseeing boats went by, with tourists on their decks, I waved at them and called out “Spend moneeeey!”

We walked down to Wolf Point, where the three branches of the Chicago river converge. This is symbolized in the Municipal Device, which is kind of Chicago’s logo.

The next day we took the number 36 bus from our neighborhood to another neighborhood. It, like ours, is mostly residential, but along the commercial street it seemed like every other business was a restaurant. Nothing against restaurants, but how much can people eat out? A lot, it seems. We have several grocery stores in our neighborhood, and they all look pretty much the same on the inside – meat counters and dairy cases in the back, produce bins on the right, and aisles of packaged groceries in the middle.

But when we entered the grocery store in this other neighborhood, there were no produce bins. No dairy cases. No aisles. Just lots and lots of food that has already been prepared and cooked. No ingredients. To be fair, I think there was another floor upstairs where they kept all the real groceries, but there was an entire grocery store-sized ground floor with no groceries. Apparently people in this neighborhood never cook. Maybe apartments in this part of town don’t come with kitchens; I’ll need to look at some real estate listings.

We got postcards to send to the grandchildren’s parents. We wrote messages, added stamps, and took them down to the mailbox in front of our building.

“That’s a mailbox?” Grandchild Two asked.

“Yes, of course,” I replied.

“I’ve only seen those in movies,” she said.

This trip has been quite the learning experience for her.

I saw the John Hancock building going up when I was a little kid.

I dreamed that one day I would live there. Alas, that was not to be. But I can still visit as a tourist, and we took the grandchildren there today. Here we are looking out toward the building that I did end up living in.

I even bought one of the tourist trap photo portraits:

The grandchildren came to visit this week and we took them to the zoo.

We saw the bird house, the lizard house, camels, seals, etc, but they were particularly smitten by the pink flamingos.

News item:

An out-of-control Chinese rocket plunged out of orbit and reentered Earth’s atmosphere. The rocket, which is about 108 feet tall and weighs nearly 40,000 pounds, had launched a piece of a new Chinese space station into orbit on April 29. After its fuel was spent, the rocket had been left to hurtle through space uncontrolled until Earth’s gravity dragged it back to the ground.

Most rockets used to lift satellites and other objects into space conduct more controlled reentries that aim for the ocean, or they’re left in so-called “graveyard” orbits that keep them in space for decades or centuries. But the Long March rocket is designed in a way that leaves these big stages in low orbit. In this case, it was impossible to be certain exactly when or where the booster would land. The European Space Agency had predicted a “risk zone” that encompassed “any portion of Earth’s surface between about 41.5N and 41.5S latitude”.

We’re at 41.9N.