✶✶✶✶ Chicago MMXIV ✶✶✶✶

For a moment this morning I thought, hey, maybe Electropuf (whose website is gone, BTW) will let me have their API and I can build my own dream CTA app, which, come the fuck on, eat me, Jesse.

I've only ever drank at the Kingsbury one, but they usually have very good draft lists at both bars. Plus I have a lot of pals that go there every Friday after work.

I like that northwoods-cabin upstairs corner at the Kingsbury Whole Foods.

That Sears has been so understaffed that the few times I've stopped in there for something essential, it was never worth waiting in a long line. (No crowds--just 8 out of 10 customers in the entire store waiting in line.) Reminded me of Borders' last days in that way.

It's been varying shades of that for a long time. The last several years have felt like a protracted going out of business sale.

The guy on the radio was saying the State St store had been losing money since it reopened in 2001. The sad part was how they stopped all catalogue operations (closed warehouses, shipping centers) not long before they could have become competitive in Internet sales. Oh well!

i remember the Sears "wish book" was the most amazing thing to flip though before christmas as a kid

I would love to browse some old Sears catalogs right about now. So soothing!

Those things were nuts. They had Star Wars toys that I'd never seen anywhere else, before or since.

Oh god the Wish Book! Almost as good as actually getting toys.

I still look at catalogs as a form of self soothing to this day.

Since we lived overseas so much of the xmas experience was using Sears and JC Penney mail-order catalogs to build xmas lists. I wonder how many years I asked for, and (fortunately) did not receive, a rock tumbler.

OMG I wanted a rock tumbler so bad!

Unrelated but hilarious: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/01/23/chicago-gop-hopeful-reveals-gays-cause-autism/

She's running against Jan Schakowski!!! Lololol good luck w/ that you fucking loon.

Well no she's running in the republican primary and would run against Jan if she won. But still. LOL.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wishbook/sets/72157603419794725/

Chicago: There Is No Foreeable End To The Deep Cold Here

Unrelated but hilarious: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/01/23/chicago-gop-hopeful-reveals-gays-cause-autism/

She's running against Jan Schakowski!!! Lololol good luck w/ that you fucking loon.

― carl agatha, Thursday, January 23, 2014 5:07 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the fuck?! I mean, apart from her batshittedness, there's like a total of 3 conservatives in that district. Maybe her campaign is actually some sort of elaborate tax dodge.

ugh i am so deeply bummed about -XX degrees on the first week of school

also i might need to go to kingspa on sunday

http://galleries.apps.chicagotribune.com/chi-indiana-crash-fatal-photos-20140123/

This is horrifying.

That is among the last things I need to click on right now.
Just drove back from the airport and the story on the radio was about the brain dead pregnant woman in TX. Too much gloom for a day that's already plenty gloomy by itself.

Yeah. I watched two hours of local and national news on Wednesday, much of which was about the weather, plus reading all the politically minded people I follow on Twitter and I had my first good old fashioned anxiety incident since my pregnancy got all complicated. It sucked.

I'm sorry. It always sucks. That's why I find twitter exhausting tbh. When they're not making jokes I don't understand about things I (usually) don't care about, people are so upset about so many things (because there sure are a lot of things wrong with the world) and 1) I don't feel like chiming in with my own worthless opinion and 2) I just can't take that level of zzzzzzz on top of the shit at work, friend and family issues, etc. My constitution hasn't become weaker, there's just more noise out there than I know what to do with and it's kinda paralyzing. Better to just otherwise occupy myself.

8 hour sauna day

my office's ancient heater seems to be finally wearing itself out, so we've relocated to a meeting room with a 7th-floor view of LSD, the jardine water traetment plant, and the ice floes on the playpen

that's better than the closet you were in, right?

8 hour sauna day sounds great
will my kindle melt if i bring it in there?

I unthinkingly wore my glasses into the sauna at Thousand Waves and it felt like a terrible, disastrous turn of events though I didn't stay in long enough for anything to actually happen to them or my face.

Anyway ask a Yooper.

It depends on how hot the sauna is? I've been in saunas that made shampoo bottles melt and they're generally at least somewhat damp places so it's probably not a good idea.

Anyway the concept of reading in sauna is a bit alien to me b/c I never wear my glasses in (this also makes nudity easier to deal with imo).

Reading a newspaper in a sauna is one of life's great pleasures.

Would not recommend anything that you actually want to keep past the duration of the sauna visit. The Reader fits the occasion perfectly.

king spa has like 12 diff dry saunas, each at diff temps. some i'm sure low enough for kindle use.

there's also the lovely lounge area though

Is anyone else unable to access Gmail? downforeveryoneorjustme.com says it's working, but when I try to go to the site it says:

Temporary Error (500) We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.

It's down per everyone freaking out on Twitter.

I'm sorry our conversation as cut short. We were really making some headway.

Yeah, apparently it's down all over the world. Is this the way the world ends?

Who's drinking at Whole Foods tonight???????

Gmail is working again.

xp

so, not me

Hey Thursday and Friday next week are my vacation between old job and new job, just in case anyone else has days off for some reason and wants to catch a matinee or drink day beers. I'll probably be doing those things with or without you.

i might go see frankie rose at schuba's on monday

If it's not assbuttshitfuck cold I would bring the baby and meet you for a beer somewhere, NA.

it's my first week of classes and i'm not doing anything fun because i need to preserve my sanity

Let's get baby beers.

This winter is the hardest one I've experienced since the early 1980s when I lived way up in northern Minnesota. It feels like all my big talk is coming back to me, e.g., how winter is NBD and my Chicago apartments are always too hot in the winter (there's been a major, unstoppable draft from the screen door for weeks).

I've got to stop talking about having only experienced one flight delay in my life and hoping to see what turbulence is like.

Strangely, Brenda seems to love the draft. Which is nice b/c she blocks it when she stretches out at the bottom of the door.

Brenda useful

I'm watching a Lifetime movie about these asshole teenagers who kill their neighbor when he busts them having a giant party in their parents' house. This is about as good as it gets for a day like today.

It's called Bond of Silence (A woman seeks answers when her husband dies while trying to subdue teenage partygoers). There was a part where a woman was slicing a single stalk of celery with a chef's knife while three other stalks of celery were sitting right by her hand. LOL.

I'm watching a Lifetime movie

As soon as I saw this I knew it had to be you. We should make a Lifetime Original Movie date sometime!

Anybody got a recommendation for a tailor? Last one I tried wasn't a great experience - I got a suit jacket altered at a place on Broadway near Cornelia and the lady relied on me to tell her not only the fit I wanted, but to specify exactly which spots to alter to achieve those results.

I'd like something more like what happened at Macy's when I bought my suit - they told me how they thought it should fit, then measured, tucked, marked, pinned and a few days later I had a suit that fit nicely.

If you find a good one, lmk. I have been to three or four and for anything beyond hems (and even that was not good at the one on LaSalle and Lake) none of them have been worth the money.

I bought a suit at Nordstrom Rack on State St. and the tailor there did an amazing job fitting it to my stupid proportions. Iirc it was like $70 but totally worth it.

p sure i've posted this on ilx before but the tailor at nordstrom rack st street used to be a man named Carlos Zambrano

my roommate knows a great tailor who is kind off off the grid, i'll ask him for deets