We walked the 0.7-mile circuit around Volkening Lake on Monday evening just as the light was fading. But there was still enough light to illuminate the dog.
On the other side of the lake — which is really a large pond — we spotted geese and goslings crossing the path. 
We wisely held back as they waddled across, since we didn’t want the geese to get any wrong ideas about what our dog was up to.
I thought about going to a new (to us) forest preserve on Sunday, which turned out to be warm and pleasant, unlike Saturday. But I decided that I didn’t want to drive too far, so we went to Poplar Creek FP instead.
That’s the dog, sitting under a tree. We were doing the same. A little context:
After a walk of about a mile and a half or so, we found a shady spot to rest. Just another of spring’s delights, when it actually gets warm.
This was in a window we walked by in west suburban Wheaton not long ago. I like the neon. Who doesn’t like neon? Who doesn’t like gelato? I’d never had any gelato until I went to Florence. That was a great place to experience it for the first time.
We didn’t stop by for any gelato. We did buy a couple of most delicious pastries at a nearby place called Suzette’s.
I found this card in Peoria recently. Near Bradley U. Not at the store itself, but while picking up food at Jerk Hut, where we bought some tasty jerk chicken.
Interesting that the students of Bradley, some of whose parents weren’t around for the original iteration of hippies, would support such a business. Then again, the key might be in that now-obsolete code term tobacco accessories.
I heard a few seconds of an ad on YouTube recently featuring a young Brit walking along the Thames, with the Tower Bridge in the background, to make absolutely sure we know he’s British, as if his dialect didn’t tell us that. He said something along the lines that such-and-such was going “redefine the way you think about men’s makeup.”
Fat chance, ya limey bastard. I can sum up my thinking on men’s makeup in one pithy sentence that isn’t going to change: I’m never wearing any.
Got a press release the other day from someone — some automated mailing list — that doesn’t appreciate my commercial real estate beat.
“With #chlorophyll and #chlorophyllwater trending on social media, I wanted to put Chlorophyll Water® (the only bottled, pre-made chlorophyll drink on the market) on your radar, as it’s selling out in retailers across the country,” the release asserted.
“A favorite amongst Kourtney Kardashian, Rosario Dawson, Mandy Moore and Aly Reisman, Chlorophyll Water® is a plant-powered purified water enhanced by nature with the addition of Chlorophyll, a key ingredient and the distinct green pigment in plant life.”
I probably won’t be a consumer of that product, but who knows? Chlorophyll might be tastier than I think. Also, glad to report that I’ve only heard of two of those celebrities, only one of whom I can acknowledge has some talent.
Received some direct mail the other day promising better lawns through chemistry. It is spring, after all. As chilly as temps have been, it’s still green out there. Anyway, on the outside of the envelope, it says:
Dandelions. Crabgrass. Weeds.
Act now to stop those lawn problems and receive your 20% neighborhood discount.
Plus a FREE Core Aeration. See details inside.
Problems, you say? I say it’s biodiversity. The suburbs need it, too.
This is a gimme letter envelope I had to scan, from a statewide advocacy org with its eye on utility rates. I suspect the risk is pretty small, considering the distinct history of the two states.
You know, in some other context, some other organization might be sending letters screaming, Texas Cannot Become Illinois.
Finally a day warm enough to eat lunch on my deck. Worth noting, and I just did.
A small road crew showed up on my street not long ago and did work on some storm drains. They posted orange cones and MEN AT WORK signs. How long will it be before the village preemptively starts using WORKERS AHEAD? Not because anyone complained, just because they worry that someone might.
The sign was accurate, however. It seemed to be an all-male crew. They disappeared for lunch at one point.
That afforded me a good look down the hole.
Under our feet all the time, yet invisible almost all of the time. That afternoon the workers returned and installed a new storm drain, so this small bit of underground is invisible once more.
RIP, Helmut Jahn. I never met the man, but I worked in the same building in downtown Chicago as his office, once upon a time. The superb 35 East Wacker, as it happens, where Jahn had his showroom in the top dome. We were on the seventh floor. We could always tell when architects were on the elevator, headed up to Jahn’s office; they were the gentlemen with ponytails.
Lilacia Park, like Cantigny, is in the western suburbs, in Lombard as it happens, only a few miles to the east and a little north. Early May is the time of the lilac blooms there, and it’s been a fair number of years since we went, so we decided to drop by Lilacia on the way home on Saturday.
The park didn’t disappoint, though I think it was a few days past peak for lilacs, to judge by the effusions of flowers I’ve seen in earlier years.
But not for tulips. Definitely peak blooms for many of them.
Lilacia was crowded too. Especially with prom and quinceañera celebrants.
“Lilac bushes are not native to North America,” explains Flower magazine. (Just like most of us.) “The Common Lilac originated in Eastern Europe in the mountains of Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania. For centuries, the Turks cultivated the species.
“Then, in the 1500s, lilac bushes arrived in Vienna and Paris. The French developed so many varieties that Common Lilac is often called French hybrid or simply French Lilac. Finally, these European specimens made the journey to the New World, and lilac bushes graced the gardens of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.”
And, I have to add, the former garden of Col. William Plum and his wife Helen Maria Williams Plum in Lombard, Illinois.
“Colonel Plum moved to the Chicago area in 1869 and settled in Lombard when it was still a new village. The Plums purchased land and filled it with lilacs, which they fell in love with after traveling to the celebrated gardens of Victor Lemoine in France,” Atlas Obscura says.
“The couple returned from the trip with two lilac cuttings, one of Syringa vulgaris, ‘Mme Casimir Périer,’ a double white, and the other of Syringa vulgaris, ‘Michel Buchner,’ a double purple — the initial cultivars of the collection that stands today.
“The acclaimed landscape architect Jens Jensen — responsible in large part for the design or redesign of Chicago’s Columbia, Humboldt, Garfield, and Douglas Parks — agreed to design the Lombard Community Park, now known as Lilacia Park.”
It looks like Cantigny Park has taken the opportunity posed by the international health crisis to do some work on Col. McCormick’s mansion. This is what the outside of the mansion looked like on Saturday.
We didn’t visit to see the mansion, which we toured some years ago. Instead we wanted to see the grounds in spring. The day was cool — it’s been a cold spring lately — but not bad for a walkabout among the greenery.
And the flowers.
Lots of flowers.
Along with other plants.
We haven’t been to Cantigny in a number of years. More recently than 2010 or 2011, but I don’t remember exactly when. On Saturday we also spent a little time at the McCormicks’ grave, in the shape of an exedra, which isn’t far from their mansion.
Though a little chilly (mid-50s), it was a festive day at Cantigny.
People are gathering in groups once more this spring, or so anecdotal evidence, such as seeing them at Cantigny, tells me.
Back again on Easter Monday, April 5. Happy Easter to all.
On a day like today, and in fact today and no other day, I wake up and think, It’s April, fool. I could do that each day for the next 29 and still be right, but it’s not the same somehow.
Well below freezing this morning, but such temps won’t last. Not long ago I was pleased to see clover underfoot.
I’ve seen two (?) four-leaf clovers over the years. I can’t remember exactly. I know I spotted one in Nashville years ago. This source at least, claiming an empirical survey, says that one clover per 5,076 has four leaves, so it is a rarity. And five-leaf clovers are one in 24,390. Never seen one of those, or the one-in-312,500 six-leaf clover.
How is that most “clover-leaf” interchanges have four circular ramps, like the variety we aren’t likely to see? Shouldn’t we think of another name? Maybe Buckminster Fuller did. Quadrocircles or something.
A cell tower I saw last weekend near Jelke Creek Bird Sanctuary.
Why take a picture of something so pedestrian? It occurs to me that members of some future generation might quarrel about preserving some of the last standing cell towers as reminders of the 21st century. Most were long gone, having outlived their usefulness after everyone had those satellite-receiving transponders implanted behind their ears.
Also: more about governmental units from the Census Bureau. Jay once told me that Texas is fond of setting up specialized governmental districts, and so it seems.
“Texas ranks second among the states in number of local governments with 5,147 active as of June 30, 2012,” the bureau says. No townships — the Republic of Texas originally spurned such notions, perhaps, and maybe the state banned them in the 1876 constitution (everything’s in there) — but there are 2,600 special district governments.
Besides ordinary things like school districts and housing authorities, they include (and this isn’t a complete list) advanced transportation districts, coordinated county transportation authorities, county development districts, fire control and prevention and EMS districts, freight rail districts, fresh water supply districts, groundwater conservation districts, irrigation districts, levee improvement districts, local mental health authorities, intermunicipal commuter rail districts, multi-jurisdiction library districts, navigation districts, municipal power agencies, noxious weed control districts, rural rail transportation districts, rural and urban transportation districts, soil and water conservation districts, water improvement districts, sports and community venue districts, sports facility districts, and underground water conservation districts. What, no fire ant control districts?
Also: the Edwards Aquifer Authority, Palacios Seawall Commission, Riverbend Water Resources District, Ship Channel Security District, and the Upper Sabine Valley Solid Waste Management District.
Whew. To cross Texas is to cross a welter of districts. Who is number 1 in governmental units, if vast Texas is second? Illinois, with 6,936 as of June 30, 2012. What about the state with the least governmental units? I’d think it was Idaho or Vermont or Little Rhody, but no: Hawaii, with 21. Rhode Island is no. 49, with 133.
I understand that the Louvre has made all of its works available for viewing online, so the other day, I looked up “L’Arbre aux corbeaux,” by Caspar David Friedrich — “Krähenbaum” or “The Tree of Crows” (1822).
This is what I saw.
At Wikipedia, you can see this.
Both images unretouched. What’s up with that, Louvre?
From a press release that came my way recently: “Over the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of cleanfluencers from Mrs Hinch to Clean Mama. Like others, they’ve made the jump over to TikTok to provide us with their best tips and tricks, but how much could they potentially earn from their videos?”
Cleanfluencers? As usual, I’m behind the curve. As usual, I don’t give a damn. And of course, the reaction to this sort of nonsense isn’t new either.
According to Google Reviews, or at least one reviewer, Chestnut Park, which is part of the Hoffman Estates Park District, is a good place to fish. Nice to know, though I don’t plan on fishing there. The other day I stopped by for a look at the park. Why? Because I’ve been driving by it for years — nearly 18 years — and never had done so.
It’s a pleasant pocket park, surrounded by houses and probably put in by the subdivider 50-odd years ago, with the fishing pond as the central feature. Maybe we can detect the hand of Jack Hoffman himself in the configuration of the park, or least one of his draftsmen.
Note that the grass has turned green. That seems to happen overnight around this time of year, sometimes in early April, but this year in late March.
As I was leaving, I noticed a plaque on a rock. I’d never noticed that before, either. 
One of the large genre of sad plaques. It isn’t hard to learn what happened to Meghan. Not even 15 years old, she was killed crossing a major street near the park.
Not long afterward, the Illinois House passed a resolution honoring the girl, promising to build pedestrian overpasses at the major roads near Hoffman Estates High School, to prevent such a thing happening again. I drive by that location often, and I have to report that the Meghan Krueger Overpasses were never built here in chronically cash-starved Illinois.
One thing leads to another, especially on the Internet, and yesterday I found myself curious about the township as a unit of government. That led to a document published by the Census Bureau, which tells me (p. 80) that there are 1,431 township governments in Illinois, at least as of 2012. There are townships in one form or another in 20 of the several states, and in Illinois, 85 of the state’s 102 counties have townships within their borders.
I looked into townships when I found out that Jelke Creek Bird Sanctuary is a township park, not part of the Forest Preserve District of Kane County. Specifically, the sanctuary is overseen by Dundee Township, which occupies almost 36 square miles in the northeast corner of Kane County.
Last weekend was another divided one, at least as far as the weather was concerned. Saturday was pleasant and warm, while Sunday proved blustery and chilly. So on Saturday we headed mostly west and took a walk at Jelke Creek Bird Sanctuary. We took a loop through the property that didn’t happen to pass by Jelke Creek, which is a tributary of the Fox River and, of course, ultimately the mighty Mississippi.
Why there? I found it by one of my usual techniques: scanning Google Maps.
The sanctuary is fairly new as a public space. “This open space site was formerly owned by Chicago Elmhurst Stone and the Schuetz family,” the township explains. “The property was purchased as two separate parcels in 2000 and 2001 with grants from IDNR’s Open Lands Trust program at a cost of $4,128,709. The site’s 244 acres are partially protected by an IDNR easement.”
Saturday was a good day for a walk there. Summer would be less pleasant, since there isn’t a lot of shade along most of the trails.
There are some water features. Mid-sized and small ponds. A few spots along the trails were muddy, but mostly they were dry.
Not too many people were around, though at one point we did see four horses and riders. Not the Four Horsemen, fortunately.
All together, we walked about a mile and a half, I’d say. The dog seemed to enjoy the walk too, including the opportunity to lap up a little muddy water. She wisely stayed clear of the horses.
As for birds in the bird sanctuary, we heard some singing, but didn’t see more than a few sparrows and red-winged blackbirds. We passed by one small marshy spot and heard the croaking of frogs, which I took to be males in search of females for springtime action. As we got closer to the spot, the croaking tapered off. Maybe the frogs don’t like large animals eavesdropping on them. More likely, they’re as wary as small animals tend to be at the approach of something bigger.
Today was fairly chilly, and wind and rain is forecast for the evening. But I’m glad to see croci in the back yard.
The main event today, after filing a couple of stories, was a drive to the south suburbs for my first Covid-19 vaccination (until a few weeks ago, my publication’s style was COVID-19, which was too much like screaming). The site was an ordinary chain drug store. I found the appointment via a non-official web site that tracks drug store-based vaccinations that was set up, as far as I can tell, by Some Guy.
That’s the American way, I suppose. Government action for a big thing, ad hoc initiative to fill in the details. Sometimes that works well enough, sometimes less so.
The process wasn’t quite as efficient as that run by the 101st Airborne, but I didn’t have to wait too long after my appointment time. The injection itself took only a moment, of course, and I was rewarded with my own CDC card, which is sure to be a vaguely remembered relic someday, like ration books.
One jab down, five to go for this household. Three of those are scheduled.
I was far enough south to stop here, at the Chicago Southland Lincoln Oasis on I-80, not far from the Indiana line. On that most congested of metro Chicago highways, especially with trucks.
Here are some of the trucks, resting temporarily from the role as part of the congestion.
The other day I spotted an abandoned booklet in a public park. Even at some distance I could tell the content was religious, so I picked it up, hoping for the strange fascination of a Jack Chick work. I assume that his work has continued, even though the man himself might have died and gone to —
Anyway, it wasn’t a Jack Chick, but another brand by an organization I’d never heard of based in… it doesn’t say, and mostly it offers text, with a only scattering of pictures to illustrate the thing. The booklet is, however, trilingual: English, Spanish and Korean, so I’ve picked up some interesting phrases in Spanish.
Life is short! ¡La vida es corta!
Man is a sinner. El humano es pacador.
The wages of sin is death. Las paga del pecado es la muerte.
One more thing. A web site devoted to an incredibly obscure aspect of popular entertainment.