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stormdogI just made it to school/work this morning, but the archivist is out for now and there won't be anyone with a key to let me in for half an hour or so. So I'm going to catch up here a bit! I realized yesterday that I've been mostly away for a while.
I've done a few things in the last week. I went to the Chicago Ginza Festival (an annual Japanese cultural festival held at the Midwest Buddhist Temple in Chicago's Old Town neighborhood) last weekend. Lisa and I went together, and met up with her friend Peter and his wife Masami. There were several martial arts demonstrations that were fun, but I think the two groups (playing three sets!) of taiko drummers are what were really memorable for me. They and the classical Japanese dancers were very enjoyable to watch, and quite photogenic. In fact, I think I got good photos of most everything I saw. While there, we also met up with another friend who had just been hired after some time spend unemployed. Yay! Afterward, Peter and Masami were kind enough to take Lisa and I out for a nice dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant.
That was Saturday. On Sunday, there was a board game meet up in Evanston that Danae and I talked about going to, but I didn't feel up to being social with a bunch of new poeple. Instead, we went out to visit a labmate of hers and played my new boardgame over some cookies. We were at a grocery store looking for particular cookies for Danae. They did not have them, but we happened to walk by the Oreo display and I commented that my brother had told me about a new version of Oreos that were like the Double-Stuf version (with double the normal filling) but even more so. Then we found them and decided that we had to try them. Danae commented that they might just have enough filling! It was a fun evening of low-key social interaction.
The new boardgame, by the way, is Tzolk'in, the Mayan Calendar. When I first saw the box in a store a while ago, I dismissed it as gimmicky. Then I looked at the board game with it's big plastic gears that spin around and decided it was potentially much more interesting! (Still gimmicky, but in a good way I suppose.) It's a worker placement game wherein you place your people on positions on several gears that are each connected to a central gear. The central gear spins one position per turn, which moves everybody around until you want to take them off. It has several strategies that seem viable, and I think it will be quite replayable. I've played half a dozen games with friends and family now and I'm very pleased that I seem to have something that everybody enjoys and willingly keeps coming back to together.
I have a new saddle for my bike. I bought it on Monday in Evanston, while Danae was at school and I, in one of my short weeks at the archives, was doing some errands and grad school research. I went to the bike shop near her place and planted my butt on the ass-o-meter. To my surprise, it determined that the saddle I'd been riding was about the right size. The staff looked at it and said that it's probably too old and/or soft to support me correctly. I'm giving the one the pointed me at a try, and so far I think it's working. It feels notably stiffer than the old one, and after riding for a few days, the skin over my sit-bones is sore, which tells me that it's supporting them more directly. The down side is that now that I've spent $120 on a bike saddle, I feel like I need to start locking it up when I park my bike.
On Wednesday, my advisor and I went on another Pike Creek exploration adventure. I think this will likely be our last one, unless something comes up in further research that we want a better look at. We've seen basically all of the creek and former creek sites. I suggested we wend the day with a trip to the municipal building (appropriately enough, on the former site of the Allen Tannery at a major bend in the former creek path) to look at a large 3D map of the local watersheds. The map made a lot more sense to me now than when I looked at it this past winter. I know the area much, much better now and can recognize most of the depicted water features. There was one, though, that we realized we hadn't seen and that looked kind of out of place. So we drove out to see it! It was a large retaining pond with a trunk sewer and several small drains all feeding into it. It doesn't seem to have been part of the original creek bed, but we're pretty sure that it is part of the current watershed. I'm going to do some historical research on the property now that I'm back in the archives today.
I have my new phone and have been playing around with it off and on. It is, in fact, rather nice to have a smart phone again. It will likely take the place of my MP3 player and my car GPS unit, among other things. The case I ordered isn't here yet, so I'm being quite careful with it. It syncs with my Fitbit, which is pretty awesome. I'll know how much food I can eat without having to be at home, and I can log food on the go. I've installed an app for Endomondo, another activity tracking site that I use for logging bicycling miles, and it should keep me from having to manually enter all of that as well. I can look at my calendar without having to have a computer in front of me, which will be a huge help in planning various things with various people. Oh, and there are a bunch of yaoi (and other) dating sims available free on the Play store, which made me squee.
My grad school search continues. I'm looking at a few more programs that I found by searching specifically for urban geography programs. There's an interdisciplinary program at Temple University in Philadelphia that has potential. It's both qualitative and quantitative, and has a focus on policy making. I could live in Philadelphia, I think. It's an old city, and near both New York City and Washington.
What else? I'm sure I'll have more to say when I think of it. I hope everyone else out there is doing well! Sorry I haven't commented much.
I've done a few things in the last week. I went to the Chicago Ginza Festival (an annual Japanese cultural festival held at the Midwest Buddhist Temple in Chicago's Old Town neighborhood) last weekend. Lisa and I went together, and met up with her friend Peter and his wife Masami. There were several martial arts demonstrations that were fun, but I think the two groups (playing three sets!) of taiko drummers are what were really memorable for me. They and the classical Japanese dancers were very enjoyable to watch, and quite photogenic. In fact, I think I got good photos of most everything I saw. While there, we also met up with another friend who had just been hired after some time spend unemployed. Yay! Afterward, Peter and Masami were kind enough to take Lisa and I out for a nice dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant.
That was Saturday. On Sunday, there was a board game meet up in Evanston that Danae and I talked about going to, but I didn't feel up to being social with a bunch of new poeple. Instead, we went out to visit a labmate of hers and played my new boardgame over some cookies. We were at a grocery store looking for particular cookies for Danae. They did not have them, but we happened to walk by the Oreo display and I commented that my brother had told me about a new version of Oreos that were like the Double-Stuf version (with double the normal filling) but even more so. Then we found them and decided that we had to try them. Danae commented that they might just have enough filling! It was a fun evening of low-key social interaction.
The new boardgame, by the way, is Tzolk'in, the Mayan Calendar. When I first saw the box in a store a while ago, I dismissed it as gimmicky. Then I looked at the board game with it's big plastic gears that spin around and decided it was potentially much more interesting! (Still gimmicky, but in a good way I suppose.) It's a worker placement game wherein you place your people on positions on several gears that are each connected to a central gear. The central gear spins one position per turn, which moves everybody around until you want to take them off. It has several strategies that seem viable, and I think it will be quite replayable. I've played half a dozen games with friends and family now and I'm very pleased that I seem to have something that everybody enjoys and willingly keeps coming back to together.
I have a new saddle for my bike. I bought it on Monday in Evanston, while Danae was at school and I, in one of my short weeks at the archives, was doing some errands and grad school research. I went to the bike shop near her place and planted my butt on the ass-o-meter. To my surprise, it determined that the saddle I'd been riding was about the right size. The staff looked at it and said that it's probably too old and/or soft to support me correctly. I'm giving the one the pointed me at a try, and so far I think it's working. It feels notably stiffer than the old one, and after riding for a few days, the skin over my sit-bones is sore, which tells me that it's supporting them more directly. The down side is that now that I've spent $120 on a bike saddle, I feel like I need to start locking it up when I park my bike.
On Wednesday, my advisor and I went on another Pike Creek exploration adventure. I think this will likely be our last one, unless something comes up in further research that we want a better look at. We've seen basically all of the creek and former creek sites. I suggested we wend the day with a trip to the municipal building (appropriately enough, on the former site of the Allen Tannery at a major bend in the former creek path) to look at a large 3D map of the local watersheds. The map made a lot more sense to me now than when I looked at it this past winter. I know the area much, much better now and can recognize most of the depicted water features. There was one, though, that we realized we hadn't seen and that looked kind of out of place. So we drove out to see it! It was a large retaining pond with a trunk sewer and several small drains all feeding into it. It doesn't seem to have been part of the original creek bed, but we're pretty sure that it is part of the current watershed. I'm going to do some historical research on the property now that I'm back in the archives today.
I have my new phone and have been playing around with it off and on. It is, in fact, rather nice to have a smart phone again. It will likely take the place of my MP3 player and my car GPS unit, among other things. The case I ordered isn't here yet, so I'm being quite careful with it. It syncs with my Fitbit, which is pretty awesome. I'll know how much food I can eat without having to be at home, and I can log food on the go. I've installed an app for Endomondo, another activity tracking site that I use for logging bicycling miles, and it should keep me from having to manually enter all of that as well. I can look at my calendar without having to have a computer in front of me, which will be a huge help in planning various things with various people. Oh, and there are a bunch of yaoi (and other) dating sims available free on the Play store, which made me squee.
My grad school search continues. I'm looking at a few more programs that I found by searching specifically for urban geography programs. There's an interdisciplinary program at Temple University in Philadelphia that has potential. It's both qualitative and quantitative, and has a focus on policy making. I could live in Philadelphia, I think. It's an old city, and near both New York City and Washington.
What else? I'm sure I'll have more to say when I think of it. I hope everyone else out there is doing well! Sorry I haven't commented much.
