Abbie's Real Life Blog

Oh, I am cold today.  I looked at the weather, I did!  And it said a high of 63, so I wore a short-sleeve sweater with pants and heels and no socks, and I am cold.  I should have followed my instincts with a heavy long-sleeve sweater.  I look forward to getting home and putting on some warmer clothes.

I look forward to getting home because I may have a shoe package from Zappos, if I am lucky.  I found some boots that just might fit me.  They just might.  I am not very optimistic but I have some hope.   Boots that fit me are hard to find.  Boots that are cute and fit me might be damn near impossible.  (For cheap.  I could spend $300 and order from the UK.  I do not want to spend $300.)  But I have hope about these boots, and I look forward to seeing them on my doorstep later, if they are delivered today.

I had a great weekend with some steamy late-summer weather at the Roots & Blues & BBQ festival.  I heard some roots and I heard some blues and I had some delicious BBQ seitan from Main Squeeze, along with a taste of jerk sauce on beans & rice from the Jamaican Jerk Hut.  The BBQ festival is not very friendly to vegetarians, but we had a really good time listening to the performers.  My favorites were probably David Wax Museum, Toubab Krewe, and Fitz & the Tantrums.  Toubab Krewe caught me at a good time, too- a mellow jam session while I had a nice seat on a curb in the shade of the Psychology Building.  It was a great time!  The rest of the weekend was pretty lazy in comparison… I did not do much.

Ugh, I don’t feel like writing any more.  I want to go home and see if my boots fit.

Here is this video I found that you will enjoy, made for Austrian TV in 1994.  It is a parody of documentaries that explore non-Western cultures.  Enjoy it!

The weekend in Chicago was a lot of fun, but my umbrella got left behind at Revolution Brewing and I really missed it yesterday.  I usually count on one umbrella in the car and another one at work, but there is now only the one at work.  I will have to pony up for a new umbrella this week to replace the one from the car.  Yesterday was a very rainy day!  It is nice to see rain and cool weather, and it coincides with the beginning of school round these parts.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember in July that it can return to cool weather so quickly.  But then once we’ve had a taste of cool weather, it can be hard to remember that we can get sweltering temperatures and humidity into late October.  Weather!  Amirite?

Chicago was a lot of fun!  We ate Chicago deep-dish at Lou Malnati’s (my first time there; I usually go to Giordano’s, but I’m glad we tried something new because I thought Lou Malnati’s was superior) on Friday night.  We met up with an old friend of my boyfriend’s.  They hadn’t seen each other since high school in the ’90s, but they had tons in common and we ended up hanging out a few more times over the weekend because it was just so much fun.

On Saturday, I enjoyed the fact that we could listen to our favorite Saturday radio programs directly on WBEZ, Chicago Public Radio, which produces Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and This American Life.  Ironically, the subject of This American Life this past week was a theme park in Kansas City.  So we Missourians visiting Chicago listened to a Chicago Public Radio-produced program about Missouri.  Nice, right?

Later, we went to some record stores and book stores.  I got a few things but I always have a hard time in record stores because I never remember what I’m looking for.  It’s kind of dumb to say it like that, but there it is.  I’m faced with a big bins of alphabetic band names and poorly standardized genre labels, and it’s all I can do to wander around listlessly, browsing while racking my brain for things that I might want to look for.  I come home with two random CDs, smacking myself for not remembering the other forty CDs I’ve been thinking about getting.  So stupid.  But the first record store we stopped at also had a back room of ’80s arcade games, demo versions so that you can play for free.  I had a pretty good time with that, despite my stellar lack of hand-eye coordination.

On Saturday night, we had a lovely dinner at Lula Cafe.  We were warned that the wait might be really long, but I think the rainy day kept most people close to home and our wait for a delicious meal was only 15 minutes.  The restaurant was chosen for a good selection of both meat and vegetarian entrees, and it made us both very happy.  We wandered around on Sunday in Millennium Park near our hotel (I got a Priceline deal on the Chicago Hilton, which was huge and ornate and fancy-schmancy) but didn’t end up doing much touristy stuff other than driving along Michigan Avenue and seeing the buildings.  Someday I will see the planetarium and the Art Institute and the History Museum, etc., but it was not this trip.  After our little tromp through the park with coffee, we headed back to our car (I parked in a surface lot near the hotel but not in hotel parking; of course downtown parking is expensive) and started our trip back.  We had a nice stop in St. Louis at Trader Joe’s on the way home.

And then I had a free day on Monday to do whatever!  It was very nice.

Now students are clearly back in town this week, and especially today.  I think it must be dorm move-in day.  Ugh!  I dread this time of year so much.  It’s not that I particularly hate students, but it’s the whiplash from going from a quiet intercession time where everyone is on vacation or out of town, and then BOOM, everyone returns at roughly the exact same time, over the course of 2-3 days.  It is hard to get used to it so quickly.

Last night, I was driving downtown to my weekly trivia night (we are currently kicking everyone’s ass) and nearly had two accidents with students.  One was on Providence Road, which is a major thoroughfare in town and cars tend to drive pretty fast despite the fact that the street is lined with Greek houses (fraternities and sororities) and other off-campus student housing, and there’s no buffer between the sidewalk and the street.  A few guys were playing football in their front yard last night.  One threw the ball and two others were running after it, and the ball bounced and hit my car.  I was a little pissed about the ball hitting my car, of course, but very relieved that the kids hadn’t chased the ball into traffic.  I guess they will have to learn what it means to live right on Providence Road.  It means not playing ball in the yard if you don’t want to lose your ball to traffic.

The second near-accident was just a minute or two later when I was driving down Elm Street.  I had a green light as I approached Ninth Street, but a girl standing on the corner stepped right in front of me.  She looked at me before she did it, too, so I know she saw me.  I would have hit her or swerved into oncoming traffic if her friend hadn’t pulled her back in time.  I gave her a WTF?!!?? face but didn’t honk.  I probably should have honked.

Ugh, students.  And then school starts next week and that means student bicyclists everywhere, not following established road rules, running stop signs and traffic lights and ignoring the right-of-way of pedestrians in crosswalks.  It is crazy.

It’s just the way it is when you live in a college town.  I know that, of course!  And things generally get sorted after a few weeks; I learn to look for bicyclists speeding through intersections, oblivious to all, and they learn not to step directly into traffic unless it is a big bus or truck, because obviously you can step right in front of those.  (SARCASM.)  But I do not mind the end of summer too much.  It’s fun to see grad student friends back in town, and it’s nice to have more activities on weeknights and weekends, and I look forward to fall weather and fall clothes and Thanksgiving week when they all go away again for a bit.

Our office move in late April means that we’re now working out of one of the main campus buildings, Ellis Library.  I haven’t really mentioned much about this, but it’s been a really great move for many reasons and I feel part of a work community for the first time since I’ve been in this job.  I love it.  But there are some weird quirks to the location of my office, which is right off one of the busiest parts of the library: the basement coffeeshop.  It has been pretty quiet over the summer, with a little bit more bustle at lunchtime.  But we were here for the last few weeks of school last spring, including finals week, and it gets pretty crazy in there.  It doesn’t extend to my actual office, which is generally quiet.  But the coffeeshop area is busy most of the morning and early afternoon, enough that the restrooms usually have a line.  I would say that waiting in line to use the restroom at my office is probably the most annoying thing about the new office space.  But what are they going to do?  The building is old and historic and there’s no room for staff restrooms.  We have a lovely staff lounge if I really need to escape, and we get our own vending machines and fridge space in there.  So while there are some annoying parts, it’s really not a big deal.  I just need to learn to time my bathroom breaks, and get used to sharing a bathroom with the general public.  This has just not been the typical experience of my career, is all.

It is somehow the middle of the week already.  I have a dentist appointment this afternoon.  How do I know that?  Because they called me three times and left three messages (increasing in volume and frustration) requesting a response to ‘confirm’ it.  I am probably going to say something about this when I go in this afternoon.  Hair stylists and doctors’ offices have been making these confirmation calls for the past few years, and mostly it’s just annoying because I am already quite aware of the appointment I made, but voicemails are easy enough to delete.  But it’s one thing to leave a short voicemail reminder, and quite another to request a response from me and then follow-up with two more messages in less than three hours because I have not returned the call.  I am quite aware of my appointment, as I own a calendar and am capable of using it.  I made the appointment.  And you, dentist office, are not my mother.  (Actually, my mother would expect me to make and keep my own damn appointments without having to be harangued about it.  But then my mother is not a helicopter dentist’s assistant.)  When I finally returned the call yesterday afternoon, they didn’t even answer- it went straight to voicemail.  I assume they were busy harassing someone else.

I am chatty today, but this message is long mostly because I wrote some yesterday and then finished it today.  I will leave it up to you to find where I put the scotch tape.  Unless you are too busy stepping in front of green lights?  Hmm?