Here's more photos of where I live.

Sign for my complex

View of my street looking South

The pool across the street from me.

The city has been working up one side of my entire street, putting in new light poles. Before they were spaced quite a distance apart, leaving a lot of unlit areas to drive past. Now, at least on one side, there are about three times as many lights, so once they are working, the street should be lit much better. Now if the Management Company would only do that for my parking lot, lol. Once the lights are completed, and hopefully working, I'll try to take a picture at night to show how they look. And maybe I can get a picture of my parking lot to show you how little light we have there, too.

Here's a couple pictures so you can see just how big my balcony is. This is the end of the building, around to the left of the picture of the front of the building. My balcony is the middle one, I'm on the second floor. It's hard to see in the picture but hanging from the bottom of the balcony above me on the right corner, is my birdfeeder. I've seen Cardinals, Sparrows, Red-Winged Blackbirds, Grackles, and Mourning Doves, feeding at or under the feeder.

My balcony in the middle

This the the view I get from my balcony of the building next door. On the first floor is a black family with a little boy. They rarely come outside, unless they are having a bbq, then they blast their hip-hop music so we all can hear it. The second floor is a white family, not sure if I've seen the wife, just a little girl, a couple young men, and an older gentleman who I think is the girl's grandfather. They tend to talk on the phone on their balcony all the time; do they not get reception inside or do they just want me to hear their conversations? On the third floor is another black family, they also don't come out often, and I think there's someone living there, or maybe was just visiting, that is scared of heights, lol.

All that for nothing!

I took the day off from work, stayed up ALL NIGHT so I could watch the lunar eclipse last night. I had my film camera with the 110mm zoom lens ready, I was even prepared to play around with the exposure, taking lots of pictures to see if I could get something half decent of the eclipse. My biggest decision was whether to go to bed and set my alarm for 4:00AM, or to just stay up all night, then sleep after it was over. Since I'm a night person, I thought it would be easier to stay up all night. I watched tv mostly. AMC had The Bishop's Wife on, I watched about half of that. I watched parts of one episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, part of another episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Then when nothing was left on tv to watch, I started reading a book. A romance novel to be specific. I like the author, I've read some of her other stories, but this one was kind of boring. Some of them get me hooked right from the beginning, but not this one. I trudjed along, killing time, and going outside to check on the moon every hour or so.

About 3:00AM, the moon was still in good viewing position, but was partially covered by clouds. I said to myself, "Please have the clouds go away so I can see this." Again at 4:00AM I went outside to check on what might be happening. At this stage, it would only be the prenumbra stage, not much to see, I was more interested in the umbra stage, full coverage of the moon by the earth's shadow. Bright full moon, the clouds had passed by, no shadowing yet that I could see, but some clouds were approaching from the west. Hoping those clouds would all go away before the viewing got good, I went back inside to wait until about 5:00AM when the show would start, back to the book that was not holding my interest. At about 5:00AM, so tired I could probably fall asleep standing up if I wanted to, I went back outside in my jeans and sweatshirt, camera around my neck, hoping for something to photograph.

Clouds! Not just one puffy cloud that would move away, a whole bank of them, with no end to the west. The moon was completely blocked from view, I couldn't even see the glow from it. I had just stayed up all night to see clouds. Looking at the clouds to the west, I decided there was no way the moon was going to peek out for me to get a decent view of the eclipse. I silently trudged back inside, up the stairs, into my apartment, stripped out of my clothes and went to sleep.

The next lunar eclipse is supposed to happen in early February of 2008. That upcoming eclipse will also be viewable from the Americas. Given the time of year, and the typical weather here in the U.S., I'm going to go out on a short limb and say the weather will not co-operate then either. That's the last of the three known lunar eclipses that were expected. I have not heard of when there might be more in the future.

Now I have a fresh roll of film in my camera. I wonder what I should take film pictures of?

I'm thinking it's time to make a change to my blog. Not to the colors, maybe just the background. I'm not sure, let me think on it for a bit. In the meantime, let me find a picture or two to sooth the angry mob that demanded more pictures from me.

Front of my building

The three buildings are connected

Mine is waaaayyyyy down at the end, where you can hardly see it. But I wanted to show how there are three buildings attached together, and I'm in the end one. So if the fire alarm goes off in one, it goes off in all three.

Not much to talk about here. For only the second time this month, the sun actually came out. LMAO. Ok, I'm sure it's happened more than just twice, but that's the way it feels! Anyway, since things are slow, I thought I'd post a picture I took at work, from inside my office, of a plane going in to O'Hare to land. The round thing sort of below the plane is the top of the water tower that we also get to look at every day. Next week I'll take a picture outside of the water tower. It was named "Tank of the Year" lmao!

Not much going on here today. I picked up a couple cd's this week, have already ripped them and sent them to Kerry. One was Joe Nichols' new cd, Real Thing. The other was Travis Tritt's new cd, The Storm.

Since I have nothing much to talk about tonight, I'll tell you a story about what happened last night before I went to bed. Keep in mind that I had already stayed up too late watching the Nascar race that finally ran Tuesday due to rain delays. And it was VERY humid out, I think about 96% when I checked last night. I had not turned my a/c on because I am always reluctant to turn it back on once I've turned it off during a cool-down. Anyway...

If you're not already aware of this, and most of you shouldn't be, I don't like ants. I don't like ants almost as much as I don't like spiders. And spiders really creep me out. For several years I have had intermittant problems with little itty bitty ants in either my master bathroom and/or the kitchen. Sometimes they will find their way onto the carpeting, and thankfully it's a light tan so the ants are easily seen moving around. I've used ant traps, sprayed along baseboards, etc. They go away, but the next year they come back.

This year, it seemed for awhile, that the ants weren't really going to be a problem. I haven't seen any in the kitchen, and until about a week ago, just a couple in the bathroom. Then the appearances increased to a few a day. Then several a day. Two or three in the morning, two or three more in the evening, two or three more at night before bed. Did I mention I don't like ants? LOL As usual I was annoyed that I have not been able to determine exactly where they are coming in. I never seem them by a crack, or hole, they are far away from that wandering around in the middle of the floor. Last night, during a commercial break in the baseball game, I went into my bathroom to put my bath towel in there for my morning shower, and I turned the light on in my closet to figure out what I was going to wear in the morning. While standing in the bathroom, looking around after killing a couple ants, I noticed one on the carpeting in the closet. (Keep in mind that I have to walk THROUGH my closet to get to the bathroom. Talk about a walk in closet! LMAO) I killed that ant, then noticed a couple more by it. I moved a couple things that were on the floor in that area, and noticed a few more, in a line, like they were following a trail from somewhere. I moved a few more things, including a couple pairs of shoes, and discovered about 50 ants underneath one of the pairs of shoes. I had already gone and grabbed my can of Raid, so after uncovering the annoying pieces of shit, I sprayed them and committed mass murder. I will not apologize, I feel no sympathy for their relatives, I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Guess there's no reforming me!

So it's now almost midnight, I've missed the come-from-behind rally by the Cubs to win the game in the top of the 9th, and my closet/bedroom is all messed up. I can't even vacuum it up because it's too late. Remember that humidity level I mentioned above? I was so hot and sweaty by this time, I could have taken a cold shower, lol. I'm hot, exhausted, and my bedroom smells of Raid, lol. I laid down on the couch, under the ceiling fan to cool off. I was almost asleep when one of the guys upstairs comes home. I hear the door slam downstairs, their door close, then a few seconds later, BOOM! Like he was stomping his foot down to kill something. That woke me up but good. Now I was too alert and listening to every little noise from upstairs. I decided it was way too muggy to sleep, so I got up, closed the windows and sliding glass door, turned the a/c on, and went to bed.

Tonight when I got home I moved the last couple things out of that side of my closet, brought the vacuum into my bedroom, cleaned up the mess, sprinkled some carpet deoderizer, vacuumed it again, then put everything back. I sure hope that took care of the ants. My boss at work suggested I buy some Boric (sp?) acid and sprinkle that along the baseboard in the closet to take care of the ants. That's IF they are coming in from there. Well, I'm hearing a bunch of thunder outside, so I better finish this up. I hope that's all we get, thunder. We really DON'T need any more rain.

A co-worker of mine sent me an email that I had to post here.

A girl from Chicago, and a girl from the East Coast were seated side-by-side on an airplane. The girl from Chicago, being friendly, says, "So, where ya from?"

The girl from the East Coast says, "From a place where they know better than to use a preposition at the end of a sentence."

The girl from Chicago sat quietly for a few moments, then replied, "So, where ya from, bitch?"

This joke was being discussed at work because this same co-worker of mine ends many sentences with a preposition, such as "Do you want to come with?" That style of speaking drives her husband's family nuts, and they've tried to correct her on it, to no avail. Now one of her sisters-in-law is starting to speak that way, lol.

Been a very boring weekend here. The weather sucks! Cloudy, cold, rainy, NOT what I want in the month of August. It feels like mid September right now. Where did summer go???

Anyway, with the weather being so gloomy, I haven't been in the mood to post anything, and I really don't have anything to post anyway, since I've done nothing all weekend. I'm hoping that if we can get away from the rain, my mood will improve and I might actually get motivated to start taking pictures of my shot glasses to show you. In the meantime, you get this stupid post which says nothing much at all.

Unfortunately, my funny story about trying to get home last night turned out to not be quite as funny as I thought. But since I mentioned it, I'll go ahead and tell you the story anyway. Here's a little background information that will come in handy, not that it will mean much to those who have never been to Chicago.

I work right by O'Hare International Airport. The most direct route to get between home and work is I-88 (runs E/W) and I-294 (runs N/S), both tollways. Because we have two seasons here, winter and construction, both of these roads, in addition to every other road in Chicago, are very busy during rush hour. I also have a couple of alternate routes I could take, but they are a little longer travel time, so I only take them in emergencies. I have set up two traffic reports that I get each afternoon, via email, about 10-15 minutes before I normally leave work. They tell me travel times, average speeds and list any "problem spots" on the two specific roads listed above. That way I know whether I should take an alternate, or just be prepared to sit in traffic.

To yesterday...I got an email at 3:45pm that said there was a car on fire on the shoulder on I-294 about a mile before I would exit off to get to I-88. It sounded pretty bad, and based on the other information, I believed traffic was going to be a nightmare. So I decided on an alternate route home. I checked the two alternate roads I would take to bypass the car fire, and decided traffic was light enough to make it worth my while to do it. That particular alternate was I-90 West (sort of goes in a NW direction), to I-355 South, which then meets up with I-88 a few miles before I would exit off for home. Traffic on I-90 was great, hardly any slow spots. I got onto I-355 South and everything was looking good. However! I got to the one toll booth on I-355 and traffic comes to a dead stop. At first I was thinking it was just backed up because of people who were paying with cash had to merge back in to traffic, and once we got past that we'd get moving again.

Nope. We'd move a couple car lengths, and stop. Then we'd move another car length and stop. This went on and on and on for about a mile. Trying to stay calm, which is hard for me to do, I looked at my clock for the umpteenth time, and realized I could get the traffic report to hopefully find out what the heck was going on. I listened as the traffic reporter went through the various roads, he or she finally got to I-355, and they said there was a car fire on the right side by an exit up ahead of me. I looked to the right, the sign for that exit said it was still 3 miles ahead. THREE MILES? I have to sit through this for 3 miles? But wait, wasn't the car fire supposed to be on I-294? I kept listening. Nothing about a car fire on I-294! Could my emailed traffic report have listed the wrong road for the car fire? Surely not!

All I was thinking about was that I was trying to avoid a traffic jam due to a car fire, and it wasn't even on that other road, and by taking my alternate, I was actually in the middle of the traffic jam. I fully expected to go into work, mention to my co-worker Cathy about the car fire, and she was going to tell me there was no car fire on I-294. THAT was why my story about getting home last night was funny.

That all changed when I went in to work today. I asked Cathy about the traffic on I-294, expecting her to say there was no traffic, and that she "flew" down the road to her grandma's house. Nope. She said the traffic was horrendous. She said there WAS a car on fire on I-294, that it was completely destroyed from what she could see while it was on the wrecker. In addition to that, someone going North on I-294 must have been paying too much attention to the car on fire, and lost control of their vehicle and smashed it into the cement barrier between the North and South lanes. So there was now a second problem on I-294 for everyone to gawk, looky-loo, rubberneck, etc at.

I think I'm glad I took my alternate after all. I only had the one car fire to deal with, not additional idiots crashing into cement barriers. The joys of living in the big city.

Spent another nice quiet evening at home. I've been watching a lot of the Hallmark Channel on tv. Last week, there was a different Mystery Woman movie on each night. It stars Kellie Martin as the owner of a mystery book shop, who helps the police solve, what else...mysteries! This week the channel is showing Jane Doe movies, starring Lea Thompson as a secret government agent by day, wife and mother by night. It's part of the August Files, mystery movies and shows all month. Last Saturday I taped a movie with Valerie Bertinelli in it, called Claire. She's a psychic who helps the police catch a murderer. And tomorrow I believe I won't have the Hallmark Channel anymore, as it's being moved to a higher cable tier, and I'll have to pay more to get it. Waaaaaaaaaa!

The nice thing about watching these movies, is that I can sit here in front of the computer, and while I'm watching the movie, I can work on my music. I'm still trying to get all my files "converted." Meaning, I am taking all my files that are at 128 kbps or larger, and what Musicmatch calls converting is actually shrinking the file size (compressing?) to a smaller kbps. It makes the files smaller, so they don't take up so much room on my hard drive, and I will have more room for my music! I'm all the way up to Barbara Mandrell. But as I come across a song that is from a cd with various artists, I just do all the songs from that cd at the same time. So by me saying I'm only at Barbara Mandrell, doesn't mean much, because there are a LOT of songs in other letters that are already done.

Tonight I stopped at Target on my way home (oh that's ANOTHER story) and bought a couple new country cds. Luke Bryan and Halfway To Hazard. I've never heard of Luke Bryan, but he's listed on the CMT website, so they must have played his video at least once, lol. Halfway To Hazard is another new group I just heard about Sunday. I was driving home from my aunt's house, listening to the country music station in the car, and there was a promo for one day this week when the afternoon dj was going to be someplace, can't remember where, and she was going to be talking to Halfway To Hazard. Well, when I saw that their cd was out this week and on sale at Target, I figured why not buy it! Maybe tomorrow I'll get them ripped so they can be added to the stack to send to Kerry. Oh damn! Forgot to send her another cd tonight! Oh well.

While at Target, I also bought a new phone. The battery in my current phone, although rechargeable, finally is about charged out. It happens. In the past, when I tried to replace a rechargeable battery in a different phone, it never worked right after. The buttons didn't want to work, and I eventually had to just toss the phone and buy a new one. So I figured I'd save myself the hassle and just buy a new phone. It's the same brand as what I have now, Uniden, and when I compared the battery in the new one to the battery in the old one, they are identical. So what I might do is insert the new battery in the old phone, see how it works, and if I have any problems, I have the new phone that I can always hook up instead, and switch the battery over to that one. Haven't decided, and I got distracted watching the movie and reading blogs, and working on my music, and and and...

I also have a story to tell to AK. If you don't want to read about a spider, stop reading now and go to another page. This morning my alarm goes off, I get up, go into the bathroom to start getting ready to take my shower. I'm naked as the day I was born, going potty, after I'm done I stand up and turn around to put the lid down to set my towel on the lid, and there, on the lid, right where my back had been was a black spider! I barely held back a scream, I jumped and wiggled and got all jittery, went quickly into the kitchen (still naked mind you), grabbed the flyswatter cause there's NO WAY I'm killing a spider that big with anything else, go back into the bathroom and swat the spider dead right into the garbage, lol. I don't know where it came from, and I don't care, I just didn't like seeing it right by where I had been sitting, where it could have crawled on me. Ewwwwwwww.

Tomorrow I'll tell everyone about my exciting trip home from work tonight, lol.

Not much going on here today. I felt sort of "blah" when I got up for work this morning. I dragged my ass to work, but decided I would take a 1/2 sick day this afternoon and come home early. It wasn't that I was overly tired, or that I had an upset stomach. I just didn't feel "right." I came home, got into some comfy clothes, and watched a movie I taped Saturday night while hosting NTT. I'm feeling better now, so it was a case of the "temporary blahs."

I don't know if the lighting will work, but I'll try to start taking pictures of my various shotglass cases, and perhaps try to do individual shotglasses (which should bore EVERYONE to death, so I can live up to my statement of living a boring life). LMAO

I had to do quite a bit of tweaking to the following picture so you could see what I saw. One night this week, I was looking out on my balcony late at night, to see how wet it was (had rained quite hard almost every day). I had turned on the little outside light I have, and when I looked up at it before turning the light off, I noticed a HUGE spiderweb right in front of it.

The accent of the light against the back of the web gave a nice effect, but I was not able to capture that with the camera. You can't see it now, but there is a spider in the middle of the web, waiting for a bug to come along and get caught. I was a meanie though, and broke one of the lower support threads, so the web collapsed against the light. By morning the web and spider were both gone.

Not a lot happening here right now. Dog days of summer and all. Had some really bad storms go through yesterday afternoon, then again tonight. Lots of heavy rain, lightning, thunder, even some flood watches for some areas. Humidity is high, so I've been keeping my a/c on. I'm sure I'll be cringing when I look at my electric bill in a couple weeks.

I talked to my aunt in California last night. For those of you that don't know, my uncle was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease a few years ago and my aunt has been taking care of him at home. She did it alone until she physically couldn't anymore due to her health. He's a tall man, and it became physically impossible for her to help him up when he would fall. She actually hurt herself trying to. She eventually had full-time caretakers at the house, but now he's unable to swallow properly so he was taken to the hospital where they inserted a feeding tube. Because of that, it was time to put him in a care facility. I hate to call them nursing homes, simply because of the image I get, after visiting a couple of them when my father was sick. Anyway, he's in the best one in the area, and my aunt is now dealing with living on her own for the first time in her life, at 68.

I have a sister living in Colorado that is going to be moving back to California before the snow flies, and my aunt suggested how nice it would be if I were to move to California, and the three of us could hang out together, lol. I told her I'd look into it. I obviously can't make any decisions right now, my lease is up end of November, and I don't think I could realistically get everything done between now and then, even if I did find a job next week. So the fastest would be a year, and that's IF I could find a job and was willing to make the move. The weather is beautiful out there in San Diego. But I'm concerned with the cost of living, and the smog/pollution laws there mean I would have to buy a car in California to make sure it conforms, instead of just taking the car I have. So much to think about. Good thing I'm giving myself lots of time, lol.

Anyway, that's about it for now. Sorry I don't have any pictures, but I've shown you everything that was on my camera. Guess it's time to take more pictures, huh? Hmmmm, now to find something interesting to show you...

Since I hadn't posted in a few days, I thought I'd show you the pictures I took a couple weeks ago of my friend's kids in the pool.

This is Sarah, my friend Pam's youngest. She just turned 6.

Another picture of Sarah.

This is Rachel, my friend Ann's oldest. She's almost 10.

This is Jimmy, Pam's middle child. He's 7.

Here's Evan, Ann's youngest, also 7, and his sister Rachel is behind him.

Evan defending himself from Julia, Pam's oldest. She will turn 12 at the end of December.

Evan and Jimmy trying to play Alligator. A game Ann told them about where one person is the alligator, standing in the middle of the pool, and everyone else has to cross the pool as quietly as they can so the "alligator" won't hear them. And you can't swim underwater. LOL, no one EVER got across.

I'll have to find my pictures from my hot air balloon ride several years ago, so I can scan them and show you what happened, lol. It won't happen tonight, since I'm keeping score for NTT later. But maybe by next weekend.

No picture tonight, so this post will probably be considered boring by some, lol.

The past few days have been tiring. I was bad and stayed up too late Sunday night and Monday night. So last night (Tuesday) I was ready to crash early. Ready but not willing. I think it was about 11pm before I actually turned the light off to go to sleep. Needless to say, my ass has been dragging all week.

Work has been steadily busy for me since the first of July. In June I had hardly anything to do, now I can't seem to get it all done each day. Because I was so slow, new customers with orders were being directed to me in the hope that at some point they'd start shipping and I'd then have something to do. Boy howdy, did that ever happen!

Plus, tomorrow I'm going to go visit one of these new customers, located in Peru, IL. About a 2 hour drive from home. The salesman that I am going with wanted to go down the night before, stay in a hotel, get up in the morning, visite the customer and return to work in the afternoon. I couldn't grasp the concept of driving an hour to work, then towards the end of the day, deal with rush hour traffic to go back the way I came, practically go by my apt, to go down to the hotel in Peru. So he agreed that I would drive down in the morning, while he went down this evening and stayed in a hotel.

On top of all this, is it's end of month, and tomorrow is the last day we can complete July transactions and date them in July. I had to try to get it all done today. Then, my boss decided he wanted to have a meeting at 2pm today about this stupid checklist/form that we will have to start filling out for EVERY ORDER as part of our Japanese Sarbanes-Oxley certification. The meeting lasted 2 hours, which I could have used to get stuff done. Our department is contesting the logic behind this checklist, because of the added time it will require of us. Unfortunately, when this was all discussed, and the areas were decided upon, as to what was going to be put on this checklist, our accounting department didn't talk to our department. They didn't even talk to our international department. They went out to California and talked to the 2 people out there, who handle a miniscule fraction of the orders we do. Are we supposed to pay because they don't follow the rules? Apparently!

Our computer system automatically checks the customer credit line when we enter an order to determine if their credit is good. Now we will also have to check the customer credit before we can invoice. What good will that do, when the mill has ALREADY shipped the material, and in some cases, the customer picked it up themselves? We HAVE to invoice it once it ships. And when we pay the mill for that material, it cross references the individual coil number and our PO number to the mill, along with the mill invoice number. Yet we are still supposed to write the payment voucher number on a line, next to the invoice number for that coil (after we've generated the invoice to the customer). I could go on and on and on with these stupid procedures we're going to have to follow. AND after the 2 hours discussing this? We weren't even DONE! We are having another meeting on Friday morning to talk more about it.

After exiting the meeting at 4pm (the time I would normally leave work), I still had work that I needed to get done since I'm not there tomorrow. Nothing important, just invoicing customers and paying mill invoices. By the time I left it was almost 6pm. Because I'm visiting a customer tomorrow, I'm driving the company car (why the salesman didn't take I have no idea). I left my car in the parking garage at work, and filled out the form so security knows my car will be there tonight and tomorrow night. Nice thing is, the company car is the same as mine, just an upgraded model. So it drives the same and feels the same. I grabbed my IPASS transponder out of my car so I would pay the cheaper toll rates coming home tonight and going to work on Friday. It's easy to just add the company car to my IPASS account for a couple days, then remove it.

I also stopped by the library on my way home. I had reserved Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, and they emailed me to let me know it was ready for pickup. Since I saw the movie on Sunday, I wanted to read the book again so I could see what all they left out. I already know of a few things, but can't wait to read it again to get all the details. At least I have three weeks to read it before it's due back, so I don't have to rush through it like I did with The Deathly Hallows.

Well, I think that's enough rambling for tonight. Keep cool everyone, and pray for the injured people in Minnesota who were on I-35W when the bridge over the Mississippi collapsed.