MeghanIsMe

Now that masks are required in Saskatchewan indoors again, I'm feeling much better about thrifting.

I found a 2002-made IBM 9494 monitor at the thrift store yesterday. When I picked it up and found that it was far heavier than I expected, I was intrigued. Often that indicates higher quality components. It was only $5 CAD! Other, lower quality, monitors were more expensive. I set it up this morning and the image quality and contrast ratio are significantly better than my nearly new Samsung unit. It's smaller, but at 18.1" and a 4:3, non-widescreen aspect ratio, it's plenty usable.

We humans in industrial societies rarely get to go foraging for tasty food and useful supplies in the wilderness these days, but finding good deals at thrift stores is a great runner up!

By the by, the last four pictures I've posted were taken with the macro range on my thrifted K-mount medium telephoto lens. So very worth the $35 I paid for it, new in box. I've tried various ways to get nice close-ups of things with my phone, my 10-22, and even my longer telephotos, but having a lens actually intended for it makes things *so* much easier.

My bike had been making a new squeaking noise for a couple days. I decided the first day that it was a pedal or the crankset because it matched my pedaling rotation. Oiling those (and the chain which needed it anyway) didn't help. Then, Tuesday, experimenting with body movements, I decided it was the seatpost because I reproduced it by turning my hips back and forth. Squeak squeak.

I planned to look at it at home. A bit later, going north through Rogers Park, I realized that my sitting position felt...wrong. Soon, the change was significant enough that I realized I was slowly sitting further and further back and down.

Getting off and looking, I found that the two metal rails that hold the Moonsaddle had broken, leaving sharp points. One of them, it turned out, had put a hole in one of my really nice pairs of jeans. I sighed.

I squished the saddle back sort of into place and made it the rest of the way to Nathan's place for our scheduled evening of thrifting. The saddle lasted me about five or six years and I don't mind buying another one. I don't think I'm ever going back to a typical saddle with a nose.

I *do*, though, think I'm going to raise my handle bars to be a little kinder to my wrists. This may involve buying an extender for the stem and replacing all the brake and shift cables with longer ones. While I do that, I may replace a brake lever that probably has a bad spring. Stuff to do over the holiday break when I can take my bike in and put it on the stand.

Nathan and I had a fun time talking and exploring Goodwills in Skokie and Des Plaines. I found four more nifty shirts (including one with a nehru collar; I love those!), though no pants to replace my punctured pair. I threw them out right away so I wouldn't see them and be sad.

I was a little anxious about taking the time for a long shopping trip, but I turned out to have been in the right place. As I was browsing the Salvation Army store, there were suddenly two big dogs wandering around the aisles. With everybody in the store asking anyone around them "Are those your dogs?" it was clear that nobody knew where they came from. They were very friendly and excited to get attention, so it was easy for me to get one by the collar to look at its tags. A couple who were there together were talking to store staff as I was trying to get the wiggly dog to hold still long enough to read the phone number. A staff member wanted to call the police, and the couple were vehemently telling him not to. The three of us got both dogs corralled. The second one was a little difficult since she didn't have a collar; they grabbed a belt from the nearby rack and I improvised a leash. One of the couple had called the number on the tag and got no answer, but the address was just across a street and down a block so two of us decided to walk the dogs back home while the third met us there with their car. I wanted to get a sense of the conditions the dogs were in and make sure they weren't breeding or fighting dogs; they certainly didn't act like it and generally seemed well taken care of, but one of them had a wound on her paw that concerned me.

It's funny; this is basically the same thing that happened when Danae and I were leaving Evanston for our trip to the Soo Locks. I, and another woman who happened by, ended up chasing an escaped dog for blocks back to its owners house, said owner having no idea the dog was gone. Keep an eye on your dogs folks; they're like kids but can't even talk to tell people where they came from!

It turned out the dogs had escaped the back yard through an open gate and the woman who owned them had no idea they were gone. I'm not terribly impressed with that, but I'm hopeful it was a one-time mistake. I suggested she get tags on both dogs since if they got separated one of them would have no contact info. This is particularly important since they were bull terriers of some kind, and I'm sure a lot of folks would freak out about them. That was another reason I and the couple (who do dog rescue, it turns out) didn't want the police called; authorities respond irrationally to bully breeds. These two were happy and enthusiastically friendly and I'd hate to see them get seized and killed. So I'm glad I happened to go to that store when I did; I feel like I did something really valuable and worthwhile this week!

It was a nice ride other than that. restoman had told me that there were a couple of streets in the area that are so steep the city has left them paved with cobbles to provide extra traction; I found one of them. John Street near 1st North Street. I thought the road my building is on was a climb, but this is the steepest street I've ever biked on. When I first saw the hill down the road from me, I thought I was looking at a wall. I love the terrain in this city!

I have bedsheets. I also picked up a second-hand iron for $2 (now I just need an ironing board...), a cylindrical cheese grater of the kind you use for grating hard cheese over food on a plate, headphones that fit my big ears and head, and a cute black fabric belt with a white heart pattern. I've never owned a belt that wasn't plain leather, and looking at myself in the mirror it's amazing how much something with a strong pattern draws focus. I really like it.

I had some great time off in Chicago today! My dad and I drove down to Microcenter where he picked up a few things. Then we went to a new, upscale Salvation Army Store (there is such a thing, believe it or not) on Clybourn. It turned out to be too upscale for our tastes. The old grungy one down on Union near the Loop was much better. I used to walk there from the Merchandise Mart on lunch breaks when I worked downtown. I found a few shirts and things, while he was really impressed by the furniture selection. He wished we had a truck to haul some things back to use as set furniture. We tried to get to a third store, but soon realized we were out of time to meet folks for lunch. Hopefully we can do this again some time and spend more time at more stores when I'm not limited by using someone else's car.

We met with Danae and Lisa for all you can eat sushi around two o' clock and it was so nice to see both of them! It was a great way to end the day before driving back to Kenosha to pick my mother up. Which, it turned out we were going to be late in doing due to traffic. Fortunately my brother was able to borrow his girlfriend's car and get her home. As for my dad and I, since our schedule was newly free of a constraint, we stopped at another thrift store in Zion on the way home where we picked up a 21" flat screen monitor with a stand that swivels to portrait orientation for my brother. Yay!

And tomorrow I'm going to spend a few hours with a friend exploring storm drains for the first time in years! Wish us luck and an absence of hypothermic lower digits.

And in addition to all of that, I wrote up some more of my history mid-term!