Rocky Glen Waterfall

Posted on April 20, 2022 by admin

When you see a sign like this, it’s good to follow it to the named destination. Especially if you already know something is there.

The last time we tried to visit Rocky Glen Waterfall was last summer. Apparently there’s swimming in the area, because when we got there, parking was scarce, but people in bathing suits were common.

I figured in April, particularly a cool April day, crowding wouldn’t be a problem, and it wasn’t. We arrived in the area in mid-afternoon Easter Saturday.

The waterfall, on Sawmill Creek, is part of Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve in DuPage County. One short trail goes to the waterfall, others snake around near the creek.

The waterfall. Niagara, it ain’t, but it is pleasant.

A nearby sign says that the falling-water feature was built by — of course it was — doughty members of the CCC. They were from a camp in the nearby Fullersburg Woods, V-1668, and its men quarried stone near the current site of the falls, and built other infrastructure along Sawmill Creek.

V for veterans. So not just doughty, but doughboys. That same camp did work at Fullersburg itself.

The creek just downstream from the falls, forming a pond-like spot. Rocky all right.

We followed a path downstream along the creek a quarter-mile or so. The view of the falls from some distance.

A short distance away, ruins of the CCC presence.

Our path doubled back to a short bluff overlooking Sawmill Creek where it makes a bend.

Look at that, I told my family. Besides the size, how is that different from that Instagram- famous river bend in Arizona? My family scoffed at the comparison, mildly, but I stand by it.

Summit Station

Posted on April 19, 2022 by admin

Easter Monday morning.

The rest of the day was as raw a spring day as I can remember, with the air moving around enough to give a good simulation of winter. Good thing a warming trend is poised to begin.

The days before were more pleasant. We were glad to have Ann come to visit for Easter. This time, rather than get a ride with someone she knows, she caught the train that runs between Bloomington-Normal and Chicago. Except I didn’t pick her up in Chicago, which would be at Union Station downtown. Rather, she got off someplace a little smaller.

That’s the station — just a step above a flag stop, looks like — at Summit, Illinois. A curious name for such a flat place, but in any case it’s Amtrak’s last stop before Chicago, and more accessible for suburbanites.

One more note: the Friday evening train was pretty much on time. That isn’t always the case with Amtrak, but when it is, I’m happy to say so.

Thursday Grab Bag

Posted on April 7, 2022 by admin

Sluggish progress toward spring here. But some progress. Plants in a nearby park.

The croci in my own yard have been very slow this year — no blooms even now. I don’t keep an exact track every year, but that seems a couple of weeks late. Some years, I remember seeing their very first green sprouts at the end of February. And of course, croci don’t mind a little snow.

On a bench in the same park. What is that thing?

A Soofa sign. The company web site says it makes electronics for advertising or as part of “smart city” communications. This doesn’t look like that, and it also looks inactive. Since I’d never noticed it before, it could be that it isn’t operational yet.

Or is it? According to a park district web site I couldn’t access fully — but could see a bit of, from my Google search — you can charge devices there. Solar-powered, and the top does resemble a solar panel. Wonder how much juice it has these many cloudy days.

The latest snack food to enter the house: Calbee brand Takoyaki Ball-flavored corn snacks. Though Calbee is Japanese, not a product of Japan, but rather Thailand, where ingredients and labor are no doubt cheaper.

No octopus, which is the main ingredient of actual takoyaki, is listed among the ingredients. Still, it’s flavored to taste like takoyaki, which it does, though the simulation isn’t quite spot-on. A little too sweet, Yuriko said, and I agree. Sweetened for North American tastes? Just how many North Americans are going to buy takoyaki-flavored snacks? But not bad.

Calbee, incidentally, began as a candy company in postwar Japan (1949) and acquired its name in the mid-50s, a portmanteau of “Calcium” and “Vitamin B1.” Soon the company found its way into crispy snack foods, especially wheat crackers. I suppose that was something of a novelty in Japan at the time, compared with rice crackers, which go way back. Calbee’s early confections caught on, and so the food technologists there have been working hard to make new varieties of snacks since then.

I see that the fifth season of Better Call Saul has appeared on Netflix. That’s good. I’ll watch it. Once a week or so, that is. That’s how new TV should be, according to Leviticus, I think, though it doesn’t apply to shows that might have been watched every day after school.

Ruth Macintyre Conservation Area

Posted on April 6, 2022 by admin

Fell asleep to light rain last night. I could open the window a crack to listen to it, for the first time this year. Today was merely cloudy, and yesterday’s warmth has mostly ebbed away.

Walked another northwest suburban conservation area recently, which is called the Ruth Macintyre Neighborhood Conservation Center on the entry sign.

In the park district materials, the place is known as the Ruth Macintyre Conservation Area. That matches the nomenclature of the other three such areas in the district, so I’ll go with it. This area is less wooded than Kay Wojcik, but worth the walk all the same.

Hard to believe these tall grasses and cattails will be green in a matter of weeks, certainly by May. Plenty of birdsong about now, but we didn’t hear any throaty frogs looking to mate, as we have in some other wetlands lately.

The trail was muddy in places. I hadn’t worn my best shoes for that, so it slowed me down. Good thing we weren’t in a hurry.

Ruth Macintyre is a total of 36 acres, the park district says, including a five-acre pond.

“Named for the longtime 8th grade science teacher at Frost Junior High who was active in environmental and conservation concerns and created a 13-acre sanctuary adjacent to the school that ballooned to the 36-acre conservation area,” according to the History of Schaumburg Township blog. “She taught in District 54 schools from 1956-1979. Rededicated on September 24, 1994 from Munao Park to the above-named conservation area.”

Kay Wojcik Conservation Area

Posted on April 5, 2022 by admin

Not every recent day has been wet and chilly here in the northwest suburbs. A few have been dry and chilly. But not so cold that we can’t take walks in places like the Kay Wojcik Conservation Area.

In full, it’s the Kay Wojcik Conservation Area at Oak Hollow, which sounds like a compromise renaming to avoid getting rid of the old name (it was just Oak Hollow CA before 2009). Whatever the name, it’s a pleasant place for a stroll, and one of those parks tucked deep in the suburban fabric, so that few outside the immediate area probably know about it.

Part of the conservation area is a pond.

The park is a 17½-acre remnant of the pre-settlement oak grove, marked by a small network of trails. How it didn’t become farm land and then suburban housing, the park district doesn’t say, but perhaps it was a bit marshy for either of those uses.

After getting home from our walk, I looked up Kathleen “Kay” Wojcik. Now retired, she was a Schaumburg Township clerk and later a member of the Illinois House of Representatives, from 1983 to 2003, and in the Illinois Senate from 2003 to 2005. Hope she’s able to stroll in her namesake park from time to time.

April Snow

Posted on April 4, 2022 by admin

Not long after noon on Saturday, snow came pouring down. Large, fluffy flakes. That went on for a good while, though sometimes it was more like sleet, other times borderline cold drizzle.

It took a while to stick.

But eventually it did.

Been a cold spring most of the time so far this year, with lots of cold precipitation, chilly winds, overcast skies and mud underfoot. But I don’t want to be churlish about what our life-sustaining atmosphere is up to, at least if it isn’t a violent storm. Warmer or warmish spring will come. Saturday’s snow was gone by the end of the day Sunday.

Poplar Creek Forest Preserve on the Equinox

Posted on March 24, 2022 by admin

Sunday and Monday were warmish and mostly pleasant. In typical March style, at least in Northern climes, the rest of the week has been chilly and damp. The persistent drizzle, I suppose, will be a factor in the greening of April. But for now it merely inspires muddy paw prints whenever the dog comes back in.

On Sunday, we took a walk in a section of the Poplar Creek Forest Preserve — officially Arthur L. Janura Forest Preserve, but I’ve never thought of it as that — that we hadn’t been to before, despite having lived in these parts nearly two decades. It’s just off Shoe Factory Road, a name I’ve always liked.

That day might have been the vernal equinox, but the flora knew it wasn’t quite spring yet.

Near the intersection of Shoe Factory and Sutton Road (Illinois 59) is a place called the Great Egret Family Picnic Area, at least according to Google Maps.

The sign in situ makes no such naming claims.

In fact, so weathered is it that it barely makes any naming claims, though I can make out FAMILY PICNIC AREA. The sign is the only way we’d know that, since there is no evidence of tables or any other picnic infrastructure. Just a place to toss your picnic blanket, it seems.

ToreOre Chicken & Joy

Posted on February 16, 2022 by admin

“Rain in the evening will transition to a wintry mix overnight,” the weather savants say. It’s already pretty wet out there already, more of a late March rain than mid-February. But not to worry: it will devolve into snow and ice by tomorrow.

I’ve read a number of PJ O’Rourke books over the years, as well as other writings of his, such as the highly amusing (unless you’re a pearl-clutcher) “Foreigners Around the World.” I even remember recommending Parliament of Whores to an Australian friend of mine to help him understand American politics. RIP, Mr. O’Rourke. You were a humorist who was actually funny. No mean feat.

We had some Korean-style chicken not long ago, acquired in a bright yellow box that says it includes joy, too.

ToreOre is a brand of Korean fast-food chicken, available in metro Chicago at the small mall attached to Super H Mart in Niles, a suburb that functions as the region’s Koreatown these days.

“Thanks to patented mixed-grains crust and fryers bubbling with 100% vegetable oil, the finished product is trans fat–free and nearly greaseless, but far from tasteless,” Time Out Chicago notes about ToreOre.

I agree. We got one of the spiciest selections this time around, and may tone it down a notch next time. But it made for a satisfying meal all the same.

In South Korea, the brand is much bigger than a mere suburban outpost. Nonghyup Moguchon is the food-processing arm of South Korea’s state-run National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (Nonghyup), and oversaw the rapid growth of ToreOre beginning in the early 2000s.

“ToreOre, Nonghyup Moguchon’s main restaurant franchise business, opened the first outlet in 2003 and had grown exponentially with the number of outlets reaching 1,000 in just five years,” Korean outlet Pulse News reported in 2018. “But it was forced to reduce the number of its restaurants to 700 amid intensifying competition in the country’s fried chicken business and has remained at a standstill for several years.”

Charlestowne Mall Residuum

Posted on February 15, 2022 by admin

One reason I forgot the Super Bowl on Sunday was our excursion to St. Charles, Illinois. More specifically, we went to the Charlestowne Mall in the eastern part of that far suburb. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since we’d been there. A decade or more, probably.

So we were surprised to find the mall closed.

In the greater scheme of retail things, that’s not a surprise. A lot of malls have closed in recent years. I’ve written about that trend any number of times, but never had any reason to cover the Charlestowne Mall in particular, so I didn’t know its fate.

The mall opened in 1991, just ahead of the long slide for department stores, and when the notion of online commerce was still in the realm of speculative fiction. In other words, at an inauspicious moment for regional malls, but no one knew it at the time.

Most of the mall closed in 2017. Three of the four anchor department stores had gone dark by then, leaving only Von Maur open. As it still is.

The other open business at the mall is an 18-plex movie theater, which is where we were going. We had to circle around most of the mall to find it. The entrance was tucked away in a bleak alley-like passage, though marked by flags.

Word is that redevelopment of the site is in the works. The plan will retain the movie theater and Von Maur, but the rest of the site will be given over to residential properties and (possibly) a hotel, along with some green space. That too isn’t a surprise.

Just the 2nd Sunday in February for Me

Posted on February 14, 2022 by admin

Shucks, I forgot to miss the Super Bowl on purpose. I just forgot about it, period. Outside at dusk on Sunday I caught a nice view of the near-full moon over bare trees, though.

Pleasant to see, not so pleasant to stand around outside to see it. But the days are getting longer, the very first harbinger of spring. Otherwise, no hint of that season yet. We’re in winter stasis.

Am I right in thinking that this year’s Super Bowl is later than usual? I couldn’t let a question like that go unanswered, not when the uber-almanac that is the Internet is available.

This year is in fact the latest ever, and a major jump further into the new year from last year’s February 7. In fact, any game in February is historically late. Back in the early days of the contest, mid-January was more likely, and January was the norm for the 20th-century games. The earliest the Super Bowl has ever been was January 9, 1977.

According to this handy table from ESPN, the first February Super Bowl was only in 2002, when it was on the 3rd.

That season the league’s schedule was pushed back a week by the September 11, 2001 attacks. Wiki puts it this way: “Rescheduling Super Bowl XXXVI from January 27 to February 3 [2002] proved extraordinarily difficult. In addition to rescheduling the game itself, all related events and activities had to be accommodated.

“This marked the first time in NFL history that the Super Bowl was played in February; all subsequent Super Bowls (excluding Super Bowl XXXVII in 2003) after that have been played in February.”

The games from 2004 to 2021 were played on the first Sunday in February, after which the NFL expanded its season from 16 to 17 regular season games. So this year’s became the first to be played on the second Sunday of the month, which looks to be the schedule for the foreseeable future.

Nice to know, I guess. Maybe someday it’ll drift into early spring. I don’t think I’ll be watching, whatever day it is.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Suburban Chicago