Yep, it's a bunch of random stuff!

A few days ago, Rick said something like, "I think it's time to update the blog..." To which I'm sure I gave some snarky reply... but I suppose I really SHOULD update the blog, lest it appear I have fallen off the face of the earth...

No, no, have not fallen off yet... I am still here on Earth -- slightly shivering in my rather cool Chicago condo. (And by "cool" I am referring to the temperature... although I would also assign the "cool" adjective to this condo when referring to its general existence. It IS a pretty groovy condo... No? Not groovy? Uhh... rad? Totally awesome?? Well, whatever... the point is, I like my condo...) I broke down and turned the heater on yesterday, for the first time since the weather started cooling down. I've just been making do with long sleeves during the day, and a blanket on the couch for watching TV at night when it's even cooler. But yesterday my long sleeves just weren't enough... after a couple hours of trying to warm my icy hands, I gave in and fired up the heater.

So fall is definitely here... but as I was telling Faisal a couple weeks ago, I have some kind of weird, arbitrary rule for when it is acceptable to wear a sweater. I can't pull my sweaters out until at least October. September is long-sleeved t-shirt weather, and October is the beginning of sweater weather. (Yeah, I don't get it, either. But I'm just gonna go with it, because it seems weirdly logical to me for absolutely no reason whatsoever...)

This afternoon, after I'd worked out and showered and was hanging out in a bathrobe, trying to decide what to wear out to dinner, the fire alarm out in the hallway by the elevator began wailing. This is not a totally unusual occurrence -- that thing seems to randomly go off every couple of months. However, usually, when it starts ringing, it stops after two or three minutes, at the most. (It's kind of a "boy who cried wolf" thing -- because when the fire alarm obviously so often sounds for no reason whatsoever, how are we supposed to know when it's going off for a REASON??) When it went off this afternoon, it didn't stop after the usual few minutes... and after about ten minutes of incessant, unrelenting droning, I heard the sound of sirens out on the street right outside (which is also not at all unusual). That's when I asked Rick, "is there REALLY a fire this time??" I actually did the whole "feel the door and make sure it's not hot" thing, and then I opened it to see if I could smell any smoke out in the hallway... but nope. Everything seemed normal... except for that maddening fire alarm...

Still, part of me wondered if I should've been changing into something more substantial than a bathrobe... because no way would I want to frantically evacuate my building, in a bathrobe, in the middle of the 5 o'clock influx of pedestrians who crowd the sidewalks right outside every weekday. Rick finally decided to just head downstairs to get the mail, and see if he could figure out what was going on. When he got back, he informed me that there were, in fact, firefighters milling about in the lobby... but none of them looked panicked or were moving very quickly. What's more, Rick reported that other residents were going about their days as usual, collecting their mail, etc. So basically, there seemed to be no reason to go running out onto the street in my less-than-proper attire. But we decided to stay put until the fire alarm stopped screaming at us... because if there ever WAS a reason to rush out, I would want to make sure I brought the cats along with me...

The alarm finally stopped after about a half hour. And Rick found out from the doorman that the issue was a broken water pump in the fire suppression system -- so there wasn't ANY sort of fire at all, but apparently the inability to extinguish a fire, if necessary, is enough cause for alarm. A whooooooole lot of alarm. (You'd think a broken pump could just notify the front desk or the fire department... the entire building really didn't need to know about that...)

And here's one final bit of randomness:

My nephew is starting to look less like the Cutest Baby in the World and more like the Cutest Little Boy in the World...

Remember when he looked like this?? :)

Caffeine-fueled random...

I'm on my second cup of coffee... or maybe third... I tend to refill my cup before it's actually empty, so who knows how much I've had. I'm sure it's not TOO much... I mean, if I'd had TOO much coffee I'd be bouncing off the walls and super energetic and I'd be writing long rambling sentences without punctuation or pauses or capital letters even if such things are required and id probably have a hard time focusing on what im doing hey did i mention were going to hawaii in a couple months and maybe i would rapidly change topics for no reason puppies!!!! and everything would be totally confusing i really love coffee and also chocolate and i donthinkicouldlivewithouteitherone........

Uhh... yeah, so anyway, I don't think I've had THAT much coffee... :)

Hope everyone had a nice weekend... mine was rather low-key, as usual. Just ran some errands on Saturday, watched a silly movie ("The Pirates! Band of Misfits"... it wasn't exactly a Pixar-quality animated movie, but it had its moments...) and did some reading. And then on Sunday night, Rick and I tried a restaurant we'd never been to in Lincoln Park. After circling the block and finding no parking, we decided to make use of the valet service. As we pulled up to the corner, we saw a man waiting to cross the street who looked really familiar... Rick was like, "is that... uh... that guy? You know, that guy... umm, you know the guy I'm talking about??" And when I looked at him, I was like, "hmmm... he DOES look a lot like that guy who used to be on Saturday Night Live..." When the valet collected our car, Rick asked him if he knew whether the man was someone famous, and the valet said, "oh, that's just some guy who lives in the neighborhood." Okay, well, that was the end of that. (For a few minutes...)

Inside, we were seated at a table close to the bar. After we'd ordered, I glanced around the restaurant and realized that the same guy we'd seen cross the street earlier was now sitting at the bar. So once again, Rick and I questioned whether it was "that guy." Since I couldn't remember his name right away, I pulled out my phone, looked up SNL cast members on IMDB, and finally figured it out: Tim Meadows. And I found this picture, which looked exactly like "that guy" at the bar (except the guy at the bar was wearing a t-shirt and jeans):

So did the valet actually know what he was talking about? I mean, was this just some guy who lived in the neighborhood and he just happened to bear a striking resemblance to Tim Meadows? And then, somewhere about halfway through my salad, I caught a snippet of conversation coming from the bar: "Mr. Meadows, did the Lions win today?" And not two minutes later: "'Sup, Tim! How's it going?" And there ya go -- confirmation that the guy at the bar was, in fact, named Tim Meadows. And that's the biggest celebrity sighting I've had here in Chicago so far. (Although my mom did remind me that we once saw Pat Sajak at the Saloon steakhouse -- he was sitting at the table right next to ours. So really, we practically had dinner with him...)

I have been loving the weather here this last week -- it's still been mild during the day (but not HOT), and at night it goes down into the 50s or 60s... every morning when I wake up, it's just sliiiiightly chilly -- the kind of chilly that announces a season change is right around the corner. This is what I love about the north -- when September hits, it's like someone flips a switch labeled "fall" and the season starts to subtly shift...

Lastly, I can't post anything without remembering that today is September 11. I'm wearing a New York Yankees shirt, in honor of the city (and team :)) I love so much. The weather here today reminds me of the perfect weather in New York eleven years ago. I had no idea -- in those few moments before I turned on the TV, wanting to enjoy the beautiful view outside my window in silence a bit longer -- that the perfect blue sky was about to be so horrifically marred and everything was about to change.

This little guy wishes peace to everyone:

And maybe a little bit of drool... but mostly peace. :)

I really AM fond of my treadmill...

A few weeks ago, I finally finished Salman Rushdie's epic (and I do mean EPIC) novel Midnight's Children -- I can't believe I haven't talked about it yet. As I've mentioned in the past, I am in awe of Rushdie's writing -- some writers are good storytellers... Rushdie not only tells amazing stories, but he masterfully weaves words together in a way that makes the simple comprehension of a sentence a moment to relish. (It might explain why it took me a couple of months to not only finish this one, but also The Satanic Verses... it's hard to speed read a book when every paragraph is a potential work of art...)

Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize in 1981, and was awarded the "Booker of Bookers" prize in 1993, when it was voted the best of all the prize winners between 1969 and 1993. And it was also awarded the "Best of the Booker" prize in 2008, when it was again voted the favorite of all contenders. Basically, a whole lot of people have loved this book for several decades, and have considered it superior to novels that have come before AND after. So now that I've read it, I feel like a smug literary genius who is totally qualified to give you a knowledgeable review... or maybe I just needed something to write about today. Whichever...

One thing Rushdie loves to do (at least in the vast lexicon of work I've read so far -- all two books), is create a very fine line between reality and fantasy. In The Satanic Verses, it was often difficult to tell what was real/what was a dream/what was a metaphor/what was some kind of drug-fueled hallucination... And in Midnight's Children, Rushdie just takes the line away altogether. The story is told from the point of view of Saleem Sinai, who tells us at the beginning of the book that he wants to recount his life before he inevitably succumbs to a bizarre bone-pulverizing affliction. He is convinced that his time is coming to an end, and, therefore, must put all his thoughts to paper...

We read about his grandparents, and then his aunts and uncles, and then his parents, who settle in a rather wealthy area of Bombay... and then the reason for the book's title finally becomes clear: Saleem is born at midnight on August 15, 1947 -- the day of India's independence, and the partition of India and Pakistan. And also born at exactly the same time, in the same hospital, is a boy born to poor parents, who have little chance of giving their son a well-to-do life. But there's a twist: a nurse at the hospital sees these two babies -- one born into privilege, one born into poverty -- and takes it upon herself to swap their name tags, so the poor boy will have the chance to grow up wealthy. So Saleem, it turns out, is not the biological son of his wealthy parents. And Shiva, the true son of Mr. and Mrs. Sinai, is doomed to a life of poverty...

But things get REALLY interesting when Saleem discovers, sometime around his eleventh birthday, that he can read minds. What's more, he soon discovers that ALL children who were born around midnight on the day of their country's independence have various powers -- it's sort of like the Indian Avengers, except none of them really know what to do with the powers they've been born with. Saleem can speak to everyone telepathically, including Shiva -- who, even at a young age, is heading down a much darker path than Saleem. They are night and day, black and white, good and bad -- mirror images of each other. Saleem forms the Midnight Children's Conference, and every evening, hundreds of other kids all over India are telepathically linked, discussing their own futures and the future of their country... 

The second half of the book delves into detailed descriptions of Indian/Pakistani history, which metaphorically parallels Saleem's own life as he grows from boy to man. Parts of this took me longer to read than others... not because I don't find history fascinating, but because Rushdie references so many political parties -- like Hindu Mahasabha and Majlis-e-Ahrar-ul-Islam -- and historical figures -- with names like Mirza Basheer-ud-Din Mahmood Ahmad and Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan -- that I, as a stupid American, have little hope of ever pronouncing correctly. And I tend to be a bit of an obsessive compulsive reader -- I feel a need to read (and, in my head, pronounce) every single syllable of whatever I'm perusing. So you can imagine my frustration as I worked my way through some of the sentences in this book...

I will, however, give Rushdie credit for teaching me the meaning of "janum," which, if I comprehended the book correctly, means something akin to "life" or "my life" and can be used as a term of endearment... (I also spelled it incorrectly when I first published this post... or, at least, I failed to spell it the way Rushdie spelled it -- whether or not HE spelled it correctly is up for debate. But like I said -- I'm a stupid American... :)) And because I occasionally read the book on my treadmill, and because I basically can't live without my treadmill, somewhere around halfway through the book I started calling my treadmill "janum." Don't laugh. (Okay, go ahead and laugh... :))

Midnight's Children was pretty much on my list of all-time-favorite books before I even finished it. According to IMDB, the movie version is supposed to be out sometime in October -- I'm hoping I can actually see it somewhere, since I'm really curious how the detailed, fanciful, metaphorical, epic story in the book translates to film. But I imagine I'll wait until it shows up on HBO or another movie channel -- since I probably don't know anyone who would see the movie with me, let alone read the book.

But that's okay -- we can't ALL be smug literary geniuses... ;)           

Weekend randomness...

1. I am writing this while simultaneously tossing Riff's deconstructed green mouse toy across the room... repeatedly... this cat loves to play fetch.

2. We ate breakfast at Brunch this morning (actually, I guess it would be more accurate to say we ate brunch at Brunch -- I had standard breakfast fare, but Rick decided to partake of a wedge salad... not exactly classic breakfast food...). I love the coffee mugs at Brunch, because they've all been donated from random places and no two are alike. This morning, my mug wished me a Happy Hanukkah:

3. Any minute now, the remnants of Hurricane Issac should be pouring rain into the Chicago vicinity. Rick is quite excited about this. Me, not so much. But I am grateful for my corner-unit condo with all of its big windows -- even on cloudy days, there is lots of light in here...

4. It took me until mid-morning to realize that today is September 1st. Summer really is almost over... and while I DO love summer, I also love changing seasons and I'm looking forward to autumn -- it's one of the reasons I wanted to move up here. I like a place with an actual summer, fall, winter and spring. Austin has two seasons: warm, and really super crazy warm. (Okay, sometimes in the winter it'll lean towards cool... for about two weeks... and then it goes back to warm.) Today is also the first day of college football... this might be my favorite time of year for sporting events -- football is starting, and baseball is getting more exciting as the pennant race heats up. (Speaking of which -- I'm getting a bit worried about the Yankees... they are in a perilous first-place position at the moment...)

5. My plans for the rest of the day consist of taking the recycling downstairs, going out for coffee, grocery shopping, possibly working out (unless grocery shopping counts as a workout??), cooking something for dinner with said groceries, and then probably sitting around like a lazy person for the rest of the evening. (By the way, why do I let the recycling pile up for so long? I mean, the recycling bins aren't THAT far away... just four floors down in the parking garage... all I have to do is grab my pile of glass and plastic and hop on the elevator. And yet there it sits, next to the front door, collecting dust... I suppose you should refer back to that part about me sitting around like a lazy person...)

6. Hope everyone has a good Labor Day weekend!