7.17.05 Exhausted Bike

It's been so hot lately even the bicycles look tired. This grassy expanse in Lincoln Park is usually a lush, deep green. But the heat (and lack of) rain has turned most of the lawns in the city into something resembling straw.

7.16.05 Lighting the Candles.

7.15.05 The Rainbow Room

The view looking down from my back porch on the morning of my 38th birthday.

I'm going to take the occasion of my 38th birthday (as it's just passed midnight and is now officially the 15th) to write the following disclaimer:

Looking back over the last week or so I realized one of the problems with waiting a few days to post a series of backlogged photos - sometimes I post them out of order. The fact that I put July 1 after July 2 in no way indicates that the space/time continuum was altered for a week during the summer of 2005, but is, rather, indicative of the fact that I can be, on occasion, disorganized, scattered, lazy, and that I’m bad with numbers.

7.14.05 Mark Prior.

8 IP 2H 0ER 10K.

Mark Prior (Rick spells his last name P.I.M.P) gave me an early birthday present by beating the Pirates 5-1. He also had 2 hits and an RBI.

Great seats too.

7.13.05 Great-Great Grandparents

Ok, I didn’t actually take this picture. But this blog is a record of (mostly) digital photographs, and digital photography can be about more than just convenience.

These are my mother’s great-grandparents. The photo she gave me was decades old, filthy, and…oh yeah – torn in half. With my relatively cheap (and under-powered computer and inferior software versions) I was able to splice it back together, clean up the largest scars and return it to the B&W glory it was created in.

And I printed it all on my $99.00 Canon Mp360. (4 by 6 and 8 by 10.)
A picture that would have soon been lost (it’s literally crumbling) is now stored on my hard-drive and in cyberspace, ready to be printed at anytime, for generations to come.

7.12.05 Egg Drop Soup with Howard Zinn

Taken at Y2K Chinese and Sushi on Diversey.

I've been reading a lot of non-fiction lately and I'm working on Howard Zinn's Declarations of Independence. I didn't care much for politics (and all that it entails) until the election of 2000 (shortly after turning 33.)

I still read a lot of fiction, but now I feel can't read enough about everything from history to policy to ideology...and I have a lot of catching up to do. I recently finished David Brock's Blinded by the Right.

My currently waiting list includes Chomsky's Power and Terror and 9-11, the Clinton biography First in His Class and his memoir My Life, Stephanopoulos’ All Too Human, and Atlas Shrugged.

7.11.05 Stolen From Eng. 55

I'd noticed recently that firehouses had been opening their hydrants and letting water pour into buckets and eventually over into the nearest gutter. I was thinking, "What a waste of water." Then I was told it was for passing dogs, and I thought, "What a great use of water." It’s been a warm summer and dogs need drinking fountains too. It's like a doggy powder room...they can sniff for other dogs, take a piss, get some water and wash their paws all at the same one-stop location.

7.10.05 Sunday in the Park

This summer has been hot and humid (the driest since the 1930's), and in Chicago that means hazy. Chicagoans are used to extremes in weather, and there's no way we're staying indoors in July (we'll be inside plenty from October through May).

This is a more "traditional" shot: skyline, leafy green trees, the aesthetically pleasing zigzag of boaters, reflection on the lagoon and ducks in neat, symmetrical rows. And it fits the 20-year rule.

7.09.05 Dessert 

7.08.05 Gidget and John Jr.'s first day.

This is the first time I saw John Jr., less than 24 hours after he was born, bruised and scraped like a boxer gone 12 rounds. I'd be sleeping too.

7.07.05 Oooooh yeah.
Some guy with some dog.

I had this really cool picture of a lion at the Lincoln Park Zoo, but Penny convinced me to go with this shot instead. I'm glad she did. Looking back at the lion pic I see that it's a good shot: interesting subject, well framed, good color; but it looked like any of a million pictures taken at the zoo.

One motto I've adopted is, whenever possible go with the personal. While the lion pic would maybe make a decent postcard (and is evocative of what I did that day) this smiling dude and his smiling dog say "summer." It's July, and this dude and his dog are just chillinh' in the shade.

7.06.05 White Boat. Lincoln Park lagoon, noon.  

7.05.05 Billy Corgan Sold Out

Penny has helped me crystallize the process by which I daily decide which picture to post. The central question is ‘what will I want to remember in 20 years?’

When I look back at these pictures, the day-to-day nature of them, what memories will I want them to evoke? The two most obvious answers are time and place.

The answers I will want in 2025 will have to come from these pictures as much as (if not, in some ways, more than) my memories. These pictures will be portals (as will songs, smells, movies) to the days I am living now.
What was important in 2005? Was it hot or cold that day? Is that really what Wrigley Field looked like?

7.04.05 Fourth of July, Art Institute 

7.03.05 From 600 N. Michican, facing south 

7.02.05 Jill's New Place

7.01.05 Puppies sleeping 

6.30.05 CUBS PARKING 

6.29.05 Byron's