Oh, to be a Lap
This
exhibit in Lapland made entirely of ice blocks is really cool!
Sparkly socks -n- sparkly sex!
Yesterday we went thrift shopping in Boys Town, which is the gayest neighborhood I've ever been to. We stopped in a store that was booming Madonna. They marked everything down 50% because they were moving and I got two pairs of sparkly socks for only $4 apiece! I yelled at the owner, "Why are you moving?" He looked at me like I was crazy and yelled back, "Well, it's not exactly a retail street." I asked him what he meant, justifying my ignorance along the way, and he said, "Let me put it this way. 44 stores have closed here in two years. Five new porn stores have opened in this block. We sell to ages 16 to 40. When you were 16, would your mom have let you come here?"
I said I understood. But the truth is that my mom would've let me go there. The problem would've been keeping her out of the sex shops. The store owner said, "You were lucky."
Pictures of our neighborhood!
I found this nice little
slideshow online. It makes our neighborhood look so pretty! Leaves, flowers, and no filthy slush. M-spot just ordered a digital camera so perhaps there will be some real photos from us online soon.
It may help for me to explain that slides 1-7 are Lincoln Square, a neighborhood that is not ours, but where we plan on looking for a condo someday, if I ever get a job. (The houses look just like ours, though.)
Slides 8-15 are from Lincoln Square to our neighborhood, Wrigleyville.
Slide 17, the "infill," provides a most excellent example of what's wrong with Chicago architecture (other than the Prairie crap, which by the way is not uniformly as bad as I thought). When someone wants to build a new condo, they build a townhouse that is so square, so cut-off, it looks JUST like it was built out of Legos! Here's a
front view of one. The new condos in Baltimore and Philly may look yuppified, but at least they're designed to imitate and blend in with the older homes surrounding them. Oh me oh my, I don't even know where to begin on this.
The infill is about a block away from our house, as is Wrigley Stadium.