Category Archives: Suburban Chicago

All the News That Fits

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Two passings to note.

RIP, Margot Paulos, whose son Dan has been Lilly’s boyfriend for more than two years now. I never met Ms. Paulos, who lived on Long Island, and I’m sorry I won’t have that opportunity.

RIP, Norris Hickerson, whom I knew in Nashville ca. 1983, because we had some friends in common (especially Mike). One weekend in particular, sometime in my post-graduation haze that fall, about a half dozen of us hung out with Norris at his family’s suburban townhouse.

Soon he would return to Hong Kong, where, owing to a career move on the part of his father, Norris had spend many of his formative years. We lost touch until linking nominally on Facebook some years ago. He seems to have made a life for himself in Hong Kong, until passing suddenly of heart disease at roughly my age.

As expected, chilly air blew our way late last week. Not fully winter, but definitely a prelude. A few snowflakes fell Saturday night, but never amounted to much accumulation. And as long as the wind is low, walking the dog is still pleasant.

Spent a few minutes today ridding our dining table of junk mail, including the last of the vote-for-me postcards. Plus a faux newspaper, one of the odder direct mail political efforts I’ve seen lately, and one of the funnier ones since Phil Crane got the boot, which involved a series of amusing anti-Crane postcards.

One difference: the Crane cards were supposed to be funny. I don’t think that’s the case for the faux newspaper.

It looks like a physical newspaper, maybe one laid out by a college newsroom (something I know first hand). It calls itself the North Cook News, and comes in at a slender eight pages. It is a newspaper only in the most technical sense, produced by an entity called Local Government Information Services in the staff box, which lists no staff by name. North Cook News is actually campaign literature of the anti-candidate sort. In this case, against Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

Here is a sampling of headlines:

Maybe Gov. Pritzker should resign too;” [sic] former governor slams current one

Why hasn’t Gov. J.B. Pritzker been prosecuted for dodging property taxes?

— and my own favorite, for sheer entertainment value:

Report says Pritzker-family foundation funding ‘overnight camp’ for cross-dressing eight year olds.

Guess NCN was angling for some O tempora! O mores! sort of outrage, but these arguments apparently didn’t persuade enough voters to neutralize the governor’s 53.8% statewide vote percentage last week, or more specifically his 65.4% in suburban Cook County.

A Flying Trampoline

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The wind kicked up here on Friday night, with gusts forecast to be as strong as 60 mph, though most of the time the velocity was probably half that. Still strong enough. Such nights make me worry that parts of our wooden back yard fence might take a tumble again, despite various re-enforcements.

Or that items still on the deck might blow elsewhere. I moved some of those beforehand, but as for the fence, there was nothing to do but wait.

Come Saturday morning, I was happy to see the fence intact. The wind was still blowing strongly, though, with periods of rain. At about 3 pm, I looked out into the back yard, and noticed something I didn’t expect.

My neighbor’s trampoline. A particularly strong gust must have turned the trampoline mat into a sail and hoisted it over the chain-link fence between our yards (a different fence from the wooden one). Its appearance in my yard astonished me.

Fortunately, the trampoline didn’t seem to be moving, since it was caught among the larger branches of our sturdy honey locust tree, despite some of the branches falling off.

Before long, my neighbor noticed it, too, and after conferring, we decided that trying to remove it in the still-strong wind would be a bad idea. Time went by and the trampoline didn’t break free from the branches, so our judgment proved correct.

This morning, with only light winds still blowing, we managed to lift it back over the fence. The structure was heavy and cumbersome and clearly ruined, but my neighbor didn’t seem upset about that, explaining that it had been given to him.

“The junkman’s going to get it,” he said, and sure enough he spent a while dismantling it this afternoon. He was glad the only damage done was to a few branches. Me too. We both got off easy.

We didn’t manage to capture its flight on video. Some people do: here’s more than eight minutes of flying trampolines.

Fall Colors

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Alternating warm and cold, with intervals of cool, here in northern Illinois since I returned in mid-October. About what you’d expect. Less expected has been the fact that most of the warmth has been concentrated on the weekends — especially last weekend, October 22nd and 23rd, but also yesterday and today.

Our coloration is past peak, but there is still color. Today —

Seasonal decoration in our neighborhood, both simple and complicated.

Our last garden harvest this year.

Other colors.

Not specific to the fall, but the pictured spot, some miles from where I live and entirely visible to the public, is still colorful in the fall.

Milwaukee Hipster Doughnuts &c.

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Time for an autumnal break. Back to posting around October 16, when the tree colors will be bold and the winds (probably) brisk, at least around here. Expect photos.

Out last stop in Milwaukee on Sunday afternoon, as a light rain fell, was Chubby’s Donuts, spotted by chance and visited on a whim.Chubby's Donuts Milwaukee Chubby's Donuts Milwaukee

The place has a mascot atop. Hard to tell just how chubby he is.Chubby's Donuts Milwaukee

The doughnuts, which are really round dough-rings each about the size of an onion ring, come in bags, and are dusted liberally with cinnamon and sugar. Pretty good, but I’m not running up to Milwaukee just for them.

On Monday evening, we went to west suburban Westmont to visit my old friend Kevin, and participate in a trivia contest at a local restaurant. That was a first for me, unless you count the contest at one of my former companies, at a company event ca. 1999, that netted me some movie tickets.

I don’t remember all the various categories now, but as usual, some were easier than others, and our team (Kevin, Jay and I) came in second, partly on the strength of us knowing all eight of the comic strips in the visual part of the contest. Everyone got a piece of paper with eight single panels illustrating each comic, but without any captions, and you had to name the strip for each.

They were The Far Side, Calvin & Hobbes, Nancy, Garfield, The Family Circus, Bloom County, The Adventures of Tintin and Beetle Bailey.

I thought they were easy. Maybe it’s a generational question: who among the younger set is going to know that many of them, much less all?

Then again, I remember a high school English teacher of mine expressing wonder that any adult — including a highly educated friend of his — would spend time reading the funnies, so perhaps he wouldn’t have done very well at naming them either, despite being of the generation who grew up with Terry and the Pirates (for example).

Another category was songs with the word “love” in their titles, which of course includes a lot of possibilities. Name the artist, given the song title. We didn’t do that well — flummoxed mostly on the newer songs — but God help me, I knew that the Captain & Tennille had a big hit with “Muskrat Love” (1976).

What I didn’t know, until I happened to hear about it on the radio a few years ago, was that the Captain & Tennille’s version of “Muskrat Love” was a cover, and that the band America had done an earlier one. It was written and first recorded by Willis Alan Ramsey, of all people. In any case, it’s one of those songs not that you’ll always remember, but which you’ll never forget.

Sculpture Milwaukee, 2019

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Doors Open Milwaukee is next weekend, and I’m planning for it.

During the 2019 event, we happened across another public art event, one not confined to a particular weekend, but rather a particular year: Sculpture Milwaukee.

“Sculpture Milwaukee is a non-profit organization transforming downtown Milwaukee’s cultural landscape every year with an outdoor exhibition of world-renowned sculpture that serves as a catalyst for community engagement, economic development, and creative placemaking,” is how the organization’s web site puts it.

I don’t know about “community engagement” or “creative placemaking.” I would just say the org puts up different interesting sculptures to look at every year, but maybe that’s my editorial instinct for jettisoning publicist puffery coming into play.

Anyway, that year we saw works on E. Wisconsin Ave., including “Seraphine-cherubin” from “Teaching Staff for a School of Murderers” by Max Ernst (1967).Sculpture Milwaukee

I’ve forgotten most of whatever I once knew about Dada, and had to look him up to make sure he wasn’t the one who peed on a pile of books in public. I don’t think he was. Who was that? I know I heard that story in college. I don’t think I want to feed verbiage along those lines into Google, however.

“Pensive” by Radcliffe Bailey.

The thinker depicted is W.E.B. Du Bois, according to the sign near the work.

One more: “Magical Thinking,” a work by Actual Sized Artworks (Gail Simpson and Aristotle Georgiades) (2019).Sculpture Milwaukee

That sounded familiar. I have run across their art before, specifically in Evanston.Actual Sized Artworks 2010 EvanstonThat was in the early spring of 2010 on a short family outing.

Tempus fugit.

Late Bloomers

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Summer is ebbing away, but it’s still warm. Looks to be for a little while longer.

Took a photographic survey of our back yard flowers this afternoon. The hibiscus are mostly gone, but other blooms whose names I don’t know carry on during the declining summertime.

Such as this blood-red bloom.back yard flower

Less intense, but still a vivid color.back yard flower

On to pink.back yard flower back yard flower

White.back yard flower

One more — vivid red again, but this one was worth a look not only because it’s striking, but because its a bloom on what many people would probably disdain as a weed (before it flowered, that is).back yard flower

back yard flower

The term weed ought to be specifically plants that interfere with agriculture, as well as old slang for cannabis. Mostly it just means plants people don’t like. There are plants I don’t like, and sometimes — when I have the energy — I uproot them. But usually I think of plants such as the one above as volunteers, whether they produce vivid flowers or not.

Budget Buster

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I’ve been seeing items in various stores advertised as “inflation busters,” which is vacuous as most other ad-speak, and not very original. But it did seem to inspire this variation, found on a circular for a local pizza joint.

Made me smile. Budget buster, eh? What was the thought process that went into that choice of words, which ended up meaning the exact opposite of what was probably intended?

Unless, of course, they meant to say that the place is expensive, so it’s got to be good. Somehow, I doubt it. If you really can feed 20 people — let’s take the low-end estimate — then $8.25 each isn’t bad.

Bob Chinn’s Crab House

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Sunday did not, it turned out, represent the top of a long steady slide into the miseries of winter. Still too early for that. Monday was cool, today warmer, and 80s are predicted for the coming days. Many of our meals are still being taken on the deck.

Except for the late lunch-early dinner (linner?) we had recently in honor of Yuriko’s birthday. We went to Bob Chinn’s Crab House in Wheeling and had delightful plates of fish, but no crab.

This is just one room of the enormous Chinn’s, which has 736 seats and claims to feed a million patrons a year. We arrived before it got too busy, which I hear is often.Bob Chinn's

Volume, for sure, but high-quality food as well, and a solicitous wait staff. That will keep you in business for 40 years.

I had the opakapaka, an Hawaiian snapper. Those are potatoes, not apples, on the side.Bob Chinn's

Yuriko had the macadamia sauteed basa, a fish native to Southeast Asia. We opted for a dessert that the menu called “Bob’s Slice of Heaven,” made from purple Okinawan sweet potatoes. Oh, yes.Bob Chinn'sI learned while at the restaurant that old Bob Chinn died in April at 99. Born in 1923 in Duluth to Chinese immigrants, he’d been in the restaurant business since he was a teenager, founding Bob Chinn’s in 1982. A daughter and granddaughter run it now.

“The Crab House was modeled, according to various sources, either after fresh seafood restaurants in Hong Kong or Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami, which Chinn had long admired,” the Chicago Eater says.

“But unlike Hong Kong or Miami, Chicago had no access to fresh seafood. Chinn solved that problem by getting up early every morning and driving to O’Hare to pick up shipments that had been flown in from the coasts, some of which were still alive. (He invested in special tanks in the restaurant basement to hold the crabs and lobsters.)

“He kept costs low by buying in volume from wholesalers — he had a separate business in Honolulu to scout the fish markets — and by using only the cheapest dishes and silverware.”

Bob Chinn’s isn’t precisely cheap, but I did get the sense that we would have paid more for the same in other high-end fish houses. Good for you, Bob. RIP.

Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir

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Heavy rains started around daybreak on Sunday, continuing through until mid-afternoon, at least around here. Some parts of Chicago suffered flooding.

Just before sunset the same day, we walked the dog and noticed very little in the way of puddles, even in the low ground of the park behind our house. Odd, I thought, considering the heavy volume of water, but then it occurred to me that it’s been a warm two weeks since the last rain. The ground just soaked it up.

Saturday was one of those warm, sunny days. About an hour before sunset that day, we went back to Wood Dale, but this time walked around Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir.Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir

The water is visibly the haunt of birds, including some herons, and probably fish that can’t be seen. The level looked low, which is reasonable, considering there hadn’t been any rain lately.

The trail goes more than a mile all the way around, not always with views of the water.Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir

O’Hare isn’t that far away.Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir

As the name says, the point of the basin is to catch floodwater, rather than have it damage the surrounding suburbs. The facility was completed in 2002.

“Floodwater enters the pump evacuated reservoir through a diversion weir made up of series of four sluice gates located at the end of School Street in Wood Dale,” says Du Page County.

“During flood events the sluice gates are opened, allowing stormwater to flow down the spillway into the reservoir. The stormwater is temporarily stored until flood levels along Salt Creek have receded. Stormwater is then pumped back to Salt Creek through a pump station and discharge channel.”

There’s a short bridge over the spillway.Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir

That got me thinking about the origin of “sluice,” which I didn’t know. So I looked it up later. Mirriam Webster: “Middle English sluse, alteration of scluse, from Anglo-French escluse, from Late Latin exclusa, from Latin, feminine of exclusus, past participle of excludere to exclude.”