Bead World

Posted on January 31, 2022 by admin

I’m a little less ignorant these days about beads, but only a little. For instance, I found out over the weekend that you can buy such varieties as gemstone beads, Indonesian glass beads and trade beads.

That’s because we took Ann to Bead World in Palatine, Illinois, a suburban shop that has all manor of beads, with sidelines in piercings (there is a separate room for that) and watch repair.

“It’s overwhelming,” she said when we went in. Certainly quite a stock.

We bought her some beads and charms as part of her birthday present.

But no cowboy art, which was on display in the back.

I’d never connected Indonesia with beads. “Indonesia has a centuries long history of glass bead making,” the Bead World web site says. “We carry many contemporary designs of ‘manik‘ as well as many beads in the traditional colors and patterns of the Indo-Pacific Trade.”

Indeed, among Indonesian beads, you can get rondelle-shaped beads, flat ovals, square, cubes, “Java trade beads,” melon shaped, triangle shaped, tubes, barrels, recycled glass beads and more. Who knew?

I’m never going to take up beads as a hobby myself, and I’m certainly not going to open a bead store. But if I ever did, I’d call it the Venerable Bead. Wait, someone’s already done that.

Honey Bee Beads By Ann

Posted on January 19, 2022 by admin

Over the holidays, Ann set up her own microbusiness selling necklaces on Etsy, Honey Bee Beads By Ann. It’s an outgrowth of a hobby of hers, putting together necklaces from beads and charms.

While we were in downtown Bloomington on Sunday, we had a look around a resale shop called 2 FruGALS Thrift, which is in the 400 block of Main Street. That’s how the name of the shop is styled, with a cartoon image on the window outside depicting two women whom I assume are the two gals who own the place. One of the gals, clearly recognizable from the cartoon, was behind the counter when we visited.

It’s nice shop.

For sale, a buddha. I didn’t buy the buddha, or rather the buddharupa, even though the price wasn’t bad. The Wisconsin Buddha is still in our back yard.

Ann went looking for beads and other raw materials for her hobby, and found some items, which I bought for her as my support for an Etsy craftswoman.

Main Street, Bloomington

Posted on January 18, 2022 by admin

Seems like the pit of winter has arrived. That’s not necessarily a time of blizzards or ice storms, though it can be. Mainly the pit is unrelenting cold, and some years the pit is deeper than others — more unrelenting, that is.

So far this year, winter has been bleak-midwinter-ish enough, but not viciously so in my neck of North America. There’s still time enough for northern Illinois winter to turn more vicious, of course.

Ann returned to ISU on Sunday, facilitated by me driving her there. It’s a task I don’t mind at all. We had a good conversation en route and listened to music we both like. I won’t go into the details of that right now, but there is a Venn diagram that includes some intersection. Larger than one might think.

Just before I returned her to her dorm and drove home, we visited part of Main Street in Bloomington. It’s an impressive block. Bloomington should be glad it has survived down to the present.

Not only survived, but the buildings are home to one kind of shop or another, mostly nonchain specialty retailers. In fact, all nonchain as far as I could see.

The 400 block of Main between Market and Monroe Sts. has the strongest concentration of late 19th-century commercial structures, with facades looking well-maintained in our time.

Featuring artwork from our time as well.

Not a lot of plaques that I saw, but I did spot one.

An organization that’s still very much around, but these days, the Harber Building is home to Illinois Tattoo. Ralph Smedley lived quite a long time (1878-1965), mostly in California, where the organization really took off.

Over a storefront occupied by Ayurveda for Healing, which promises a “holistic path for wellness and optimal health,” there’s a remarkable set of metal figures.

Detail.

Ayurveda for Healing, which I assume takes its inspiration from South Asian practices, has three locations, including this one in Bloomington, along with Chicago and Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Just a block over, the 500 block of Main isn’t what it used to be. This is what it used to be, in an image borrowed from the McLean County Museum of History.

This is what I saw, let’s say roughly 90-odd years later.

To take that image of the mural, I was standing in a parking lot where a Montgomery Ward store used to be. Too bad for what has been lost, but fragments are mostly what we have of the past anyway, and it’s good to spot them.

Scopes Don’t Match

Posted on January 5, 2022 by admin

Temps not much higher than 10 degrees F. this afternoon, but not only that, wind gusts to drive home the point that it’s early January, with relief a long time coming. This is the back yard wind chime, moving and clattering.

Clattering because it’s a wooden wind chime, which I acquired as an omiyagi, a gift-souvenir from a trip for someone at home, in San Diego way back in 1999. It is intensely weathered, and the strings holding the chimes have broken and been replaced more than I can count. In fact, a fourth clime needs to be rehung even now, but I haven’t gotten around to it.

The new year isn’t very far along, but the bots are back to annoying me. I have in my possession a gift card — it was gift — from a major retailer. I went online to check the balance. I’m absolutely sure I put in the numbers correctly (but whited out in my screen grab), and I get this.

Scopes don’t match. What the hell does that mean? Was any human being involved at any point in determining that that would be a response to a customer? If so, was it a software engineer who didn’t give a moment’s thought to the fact that no one but software engineers know that term? Or is it random term never originated by the mind of a human?

In logic, I have read, a “scope” is “the range of a logical operator: a string in predicate calculus that is governed by a quantifier,” which really doesn’t clear up things.

That was all the time I needed to spend thinking about this nonsense. I called the 800 number and found out the balance without further ado.

Umbrella Tea House

Posted on November 23, 2021 by admin

I went out ’round midnight last night to put the car in the driveway. When I finished, I got out of the car and looked up, and there he was, bright as could be: Orion. Winter is here. Been cold much of this month anyway. Off in the distance, an owl woo-woo’d softly.

Back again on November 28. A good Thanksgiving to all, and don’t forget to be up at 4 a.m. on the day after for all those doorbuster sales. I plan to be asleep then, though I might be up to go to the bathroom.

The name of the place we visited recently, according to the sign over the door, is the Umbrella Tea House. That made me wonder: what was the place where Winston Smith hung out at the end of 1984, ahead of his eventual vaporization? The post-Ministry of Love Winston Smith, that is, who loved Big Brother.

That’s the kind of thing I might wonder. I didn’t even have to find my paper copy of the book to find out.

“The Chestnut Tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a window fell on dusty table-tops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen. A tinny music trickled from the telescreens. Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass.”

So I might call the Umbrella Tea House the Chestnut Tree, just for a bit of dark humor that no one would understand unless I explained it. Orwell might have gotten Big Brother and doublethink and maybe even memory hole into the common lexicon, but not the Chestnut Tree.

Umbrella Tea House, which is in a retail strip near the Schaumburg Township District Library, is anything but dark. It’s a bright place.

It has all sorts of interesting features, such as a tip pig, and — not sure how to characterize the second image.

Naturally, umbrellas figure in the décor. Up on the ceiling.

A pleasant place to occasionally drink fancy tea, which we did.

Miscellany Thursday

Posted on November 18, 2021 by admin

Been a cold November so far, especially late last week, except for a few hours on Saturday afternoon. So I took a walk at the Chicago Athenaeum International Sculpture Park that day. It’s pretty much the same as ever, though of course a sculpture was added in 2019.

There’s still a side path through the woods.

As well as along water destined for the Mississippi.

That same day, I went to the Sears at the Woodfield Mall. It was about to close for good; it did so a few days later. So my stroll was through mostly vacant retail space, the ghost of a once-vast enterprise.

But not quite empty.

It was the last Sears in Illinois, the state formerly home to the Sears Tower. A retailer ending with a whimper.

I didn’t buy a rug. I will say that my lawn mower before the current one, a Craftsman, was a Sears acquisition.

Even further back is the cast iron table on our deck, purchased ca. 2003 at a Sears. Looks as solid as the day we got it, so like my cast-iron frying pan — bought ca. 1983 at a Nashville grocery store, not a Sears purchase — the table will certainly outlast me.

I was glad to see that Barbara’s Bookstore, a metro Chicago chain, has opened in the mall. I don’t go to the mall a lot, so I’m not sure when. The Barbara’s branch I remember best was the store in the lower level of the Sears Tower, which I visited sometimes ca. 2000-05 (gone now).

Up with the times, Barbara is, with a twist on the old retail warning.

Most everyone in the mall was masked. Otherwise, everything was about the same as any recent year. The crowds were thick, and I’m sure they’ll get thicker still as the days progress toward Christmas.

I interviewed a British retail expert not long ago, and she happened to mention the prospects of Black Friday retail sales this year in the UK. I’d heard before that is now part of British retailing, and I told her I thought that was funny.

“What’s the special occasion?” I said. “The fourth Friday in November?”

She chuckled. Like Japanese merchants importing Valentine’s Day, their British counterparts have imported Black Friday — and come to think of it, American merchants are doing their best to expand Día de Muertos in the United States. About a month ago, I saw a Día de Muertos-themed box of Pop-Tarts in a mainstream grocery store.

We also discussed American Halloween, which she said the British have taken to as well. I hope not to the detriment of Guy Fawkes Day, I said. Some customs have faded, she answered, such as a penny for the guy, but there are still bonfires.

Good. We see no reason/ why gunpowder treason/ should ever be forgot….

Doors Open Milwaukee ’21

Posted on September 26, 2021 by admin

Warmish weekend, good for walking around. We did that in Milwaukee yesterday, because the Doors Open Milwaukee event has returned after last year’s cancellation. We drove up in mid-morning and returned not too long after dark, as we did in 2019 and 2018 and 2017. One difference this year was that a few — not all — places required a mask.

Another wrinkle this time is that we took the dog. Leaving her at home alone for more than a few hours is just asking for a mess to clean up upon return. So that meant for most of the places we went, we took turns, as one of us stayed with the dog, either in the car or walking her around.

First we went to the Bay View neighborhood south of downtown, a place that got its start as a 19th-century company town. In our time it seems pretty lively. There we sought out St. Lucas Evangelical Lutheran Church and St. Augustine of Hippo Catholic Church, both late 19th-century/early 20th-century edifices themselves, distinctly built of cream brick.

In the Burnham Park neighborhood of Milwaukee, southwest of downtown, you can find the Burnham Block. In fact, an organization called Frank Lloyd Wright’s Burnham Block, which is part of Wisconsin’s Frank Lloyd Wright Trail, very much wants you to come see the six small houses on that block, designed by The Genius.

Who are we to resist the call of FLW? We went there next. So did a fair number of people late that morning, more than at any other place we saw yesterday. This was part of the line to get in.

Taking turns looking at FLW’s work took up a fair amount of time. Afterward we repaired to a park for a drive-through-obtained lunch. Then we went to Forest Home Cemetery. Usually, I can’t persuade Yuriko to visit cemeteries, but the Doors Open feature was its chapel, which she was willing to visit.

Then, to my complete surprise, she wanted to walk the dog through the cemetery as I stopped here and there among its many stones and funerary art. Forest Home is an historic rural cemetery movement cemetery, as fine an example as I’ve seen anywhere.

We had time enough after the cemetery for two more churches in East Town — or maybe the Lower East Side, hard to tell — St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and St. Rita’s Catholic Church.

By the time we’d finished those, it was 5 pm and Doors Open was done for the day. But I didn’t quite want to head home. I wanted to find a place to see the Milwaukee skyline, something I’d never done in all the years I’ve been coming to that city.

It didn’t take long.

That’s the view from Veterans Park on Lake Michigan, and it illustrates one of the advantages of the Milwaukee MSA (pop. 1.57 million) compared with the Chicago MSA (pop. 9.6 million).

The logistics of getting to that view of Milwaukee were exactly this: drive to Veterans Park, park on the road for free, and walk about two minutes. To reach a similar vantage to see the vastly larger Chicago skyline, I shouldn’t have to point out, is much more complicated, and free doesn’t enter into it.

Veterans Park in Milwaukee also has some nice amenities, such as a place called Kites.

At Kites, you can buy kites, as well as snacks. We got some nachos.

People were out flying kites. The wind was up but it wasn’t too cold, so it was a good afternoon for it. If we’d gotten there earlier, we might have as well.

We walked the dog again, this time a little ways along the lake.

It was a good afternoon for that, too.

(Very) Late Summer Debris

Posted on September 16, 2021 by admin

Cool nights, but not that cool, and warm days — at least through the weekend, according to forecasts. It’s that time of the year when summer ebbs away anyway.

As for Fairbanks, I don’t know whether dips below freezing count as the leading edge of winter, or merely a chilly fall. Anyway, summer’s done.

The crickets are still chirping by night hereabouts. But I find that if I leave the window open a crack to fall asleep to them, which I like to do, I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night sneezing. Not because of the crickets — I’m pretty sure — but damned lingering ragweed.

That happened more than once last night, despite a decongestant I took at about 2, and despite closing the window after the first time. I woke up tired this morning. I managed to get my morning work done, took a siesta in the early afternoon, and felt better after that, well enough to finish the day’s work. Such are weekdays sometimes.

When visiting Wisconsin recently, we wondered whether the dog would want to go swimming.
She did not, though a walk on the beach was fine.

Spotted at a shopping center parking lot recently.

The charging station appeared sometime recently, not sure when. Eventually, they might be so common that no one will comment on them, but I don’t think we’ve reached that point yet.

The Washington Post reported on September 14: “Automakers are betting tens of billions of dollars on the expanding adoption of electric vehicles in the U.S. But a big hurdle for some consumers is the much longer time it takes to charge an EV than it does to refuel a gasoline-powered car. Buc-ee’s Inc., a Texas-based chain of gas-station convenience stores that’s expanding rapidly in the Southeast, could have the answer.”

The gist of the story (for those who can’t access it) is that Buc-ee’s will make — has made — itself so interesting that people won’t mind spending extra time there to charge their cars. Could be. Or it might be the next step for Buc-ee’s toward world domination.

Skeptical? The article also says: “The chain’s origins and most of its locations are in Texas, but they’ve recently added two locations each in Georgia, Alabama and Florida, with new locations under construction in South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi.”

Wednesday Debris

Posted on July 21, 2021 by admin

Warm days and cicadas at dusk. Back to posting around August 1.

I saw this in my back yard yesterday.

Imagine my surprise. A lawn circle! The suburban version of crop circles. (In the UK, they’re called garden circles.) Clear evidence that space aliens visited.

Spotted in a northwest suburban parking lot the other day.

I ought to look that up, but I don’t want to.

Dear streaming service that I subscribe to: When you send me an email with links in it, the links should not take me to this.

This statue was just east of the commuter rail station in New Buffalo.

“Gakémadzëwen,” which is Potawatomi for “Enduring Spirit,” by Fritz Olsen, dedicated only in 2018. The plaque says it was erected by the city of New Buffalo “in recognition of the generous contributions to the city by the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi.”

“The 1833 Treaty of Chicago established the conditions for the removal of the Potawatomi from the Great Lakes area,” says the band’s web site. “When Michigan became a state in 1837, more pressure was put on the Potawatomi to move west. The hazardous trip killed one out of every ten people of the approximately 500 Potawatomi involved.

“As news of the terrible trip spread, some bands, consisting of small groups of families, fled to northern Michigan and Canada. Some also tried to hide in the forests and swamps of southwestern Michigan. The U.S. government sent soldiers to round up the Potawatomi they could find and move them at gunpoint to reservations in the west. This forced removal is now called the Potawatomi Trail of Death, similar to the more familiar Cherokee Trail of Tears.

“However, a small group of Neshnabék, with Leopold Pokagon as one of their leaders, earned the right to remain in their homeland, in part because they had demonstrated a strong attachment to Catholicism. It is the descendants of this small group who constitute the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians.”

Even so, it wasn’t until 1994 that Congress reaffirmed the federally recognized status of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi. The band now owns some Michigan casinos, including Four Winds New Buffalo, which features 3,000 slot machines, 70 table games, four restaurants, bars, retail venues, and a 415-room hotel.

Got a boring email from Amazon the other day. It said:

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to cancel the items you requested and these items will soon be shipped. We apologize for the inconvenience.

You can track your package at any time. If you no longer want these items, you may refuse delivery or return them after they arrive. You can visit Your Orders to start a return.

There’s no style to that. How about:

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to cancel the items you requested and these items will soon be shipped. No force in the universe can stop an Amazon order once it is past the FailSafe Point.®

Not even the mighty Jeff Bezos can stay your package from its appointed delivery, even from his perch in space. You may refuse delivery or return them after they arrive. You can visit Your Orders to start a return.

Also from Amazon: One of our updates involves how disputes are resolved between you and Amazon. Previously, our Conditions of Use set out an arbitration process for those disputes. Our updated Conditions of Use provides for dispute resolution by the courts.

Well, well, well. The Wall Street Journal reported in June: “Companies have spent more than a decade forcing employees and customers to resolve disputes outside the traditional court system, using secretive arbitration proceedings that typically don’t allow plaintiffs to team up and extract big-money payments akin to a class action.

“With no announcement, the company recently changed its terms of service to allow customers to file lawsuits… The retail giant made the change after plaintiffs’ lawyers flooded Amazon with more than 75,000 individual arbitration demands on behalf of Echo users.”

This is the flag of Greater London. The officially approved flag of that political entity, I’ve read. It looks like it was drawn by a ten-year-old.

One more thing: National Geographic now asserts there is a “Southern Ocean,” hugging Antarctica below 60 degrees South. That’s a term that I know Australians have long used — I heard it from Australians in the ’90s, and saw the term on a sign at Cape Leeuwin — though I believe they mean the “waters south of us.”

Speaking of ten-year-olds, I understand that part of Nat’l Geo’s mission is educational, but a headline asking whether I can name all the oceans, as if I were that age?

New Buffalo

Posted on July 19, 2021 by admin

A Mediterranean pattern has set in, here on the brief plateau of high summer. I’m taking as many meals as possible out on my deck.

Not long ago, we went to Buffalo, so by my idiosyncratic lights, that meant we ought to visit New Buffalo too. So we did on Sunday. Good thing that town is only about two hours away, assuming good traffic, which in no safe assumption. Even so, it isn’t that far, with New Buffalo hugging the eastern shore of Lake Michigan just inside the state of Michigan, only about two miles north of the Indiana line.

New Buffalo has been a nearby vacation destination for metro Chicago for many years. I first visited in 1987, when I spent a short time at the vacation house of a Chicagoan I knew, and went back occasionally after that, though not in about 20 years.

A lot of people go for the public beach, but Waikiki crowded, it isn’t.

We didn’t spend long this time, since it was nearly 90 F, and our idea of a good beach is an almost empty one in the 70s F. It was nice to see the lake, though. And the marina.

A boat belonging to the Berrien County sheriff’s office, docking.

Not far inland from the marina is the town’s commuter rail station.

Not much to look at, but the station and the line facilitated New Buffalo’s growth in the early 20th century, providing easy access from Chicago in the days before the Interstate or major suburbs. Come to think of it, if I were planning to be in New Buffalo and nowhere else for more than a few hours, that would be the way to come, so as to avoid pain-in-the-ass traffic jams south of Lake Michigan.

We parked on a leafy residential street and walked a couple of blocks to the main tourist street. One of New Buffalo’s two main streets is Whittaker, which connects the shore with I-94. About three blocks of Whittaker is lined with retailers, restaurants and new-looking residential properties, such as these.

That told me that, except probably for recessionary downturns of a few years at most, the second home and residential rental business in New Buffalo has expanded over that last few decades, taking advantage of the fondness among well-to-do people for parking themselves close to water. Not an ambition I share, but water does have its allures.

The street wasn’t overly crowded on Sunday, a very warm summer weekend day, but busy enough. We wandered around and looked in some stores, and came away with a t-shirt, refrigerator magnet and some postcards, as one does.

Interesting mural.

I’ve been able to find out that it’s painted on the side of Michigan Mercantile Building, home to a recently opened Starbucks. At the end of a short alley under the mural is the New Buffalo Farmstand by Mick Klug Farm. As for the mural, it looks new as well, but that’s all I know. I didn’t check for a signature.

A detail.

One reason we spent the day in New Buffalo was to have lunch at Redamak’s.

Since 1946 is a telling detail, since the restaurant is on Buffalo Street, the town’s other major thoroughfare. It isn’t a pedestrian-friendly road and the train doesn’t go there, so for Redamak’s to prosper in its early years, it needed car traffic — which was booming about then.

Currently the place is owned only by the second family ever to own it, which makes for continuity. I had a good hamburger there more than 30 years ago, and we had good ones there on Sunday: one with bleu cheese for me, a barbecue burger for Yuriko.

The road out front is also U.S. 12. Ah, where does that go? I wondered as we waited on the porch for a table. My phone wasn’t connected to the Internet at that moment, so I had to wait to find out. Just like in the not-so-old days.

All the way from Detroit to Aberdeen, Washington, running almost 2,500 miles, it turns out. We had a table next to a window. There’s something satisfying about sitting in a storied burger joint that looks out on a 2,500-mile highway. Not a nostalgia-industry highway like the defunct U.S. 66, but a genuine active part of the U.S. highway system in the 21st century.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Retail