Late Bloomers

Posted on September 15, 2022 by admin

Summer is ebbing away, but it’s still warm. Looks to be for a little while longer.

Took a photographic survey of our back yard flowers this afternoon. The hibiscus are mostly gone, but other blooms whose names I don’t know carry on during the declining summertime.

Such as this blood-red bloom.

Less intense, but still a vivid color.

On to pink.

White.

One more — vivid red again, but this one was worth a look not only because it’s striking, but because its a bloom on what many people would probably disdain as a weed (before it flowered, that is).

The term weed ought to be specifically plants that interfere with agriculture, as well as old slang for cannabis. Mostly it just means plants people don’t like. There are plants I don’t like, and sometimes — when I have the energy — I uproot them. But usually I think of plants such as the one above as volunteers, whether they produce vivid flowers or not.

Budget Buster

Posted on September 14, 2022 by admin

I’ve been seeing items in various stores advertised as “inflation busters,” which is vacuous as most other ad-speak, and not very original. But it did seem to inspire this variation, found on a circular for a local pizza joint.

Made me smile. Budget buster, eh? What was the thought process that went into that choice of words, which ended up meaning the exact opposite of what was probably intended?

Unless, of course, they meant to say that the place is expensive, so it’s got to be good. Somehow, I doubt it. If you really can feed 20 people — let’s take the low-end estimate — then $8.25 each isn’t bad.

Bob Chinn’s Crab House

Posted on September 13, 2022 by admin

Sunday did not, it turned out, represent the top of a long steady slide into the miseries of winter. Still too early for that. Monday was cool, today warmer, and 80s are predicted for the coming days. Many of our meals are still being taken on the deck.

Except for the late lunch-early dinner (linner?) we had recently in honor of Yuriko’s birthday. We went to Bob Chinn’s Crab House in Wheeling and had delightful plates of fish, but no crab.

This is just one room of the enormous Chinn’s, which has 736 seats and claims to feed a million patrons a year. We arrived before it got too busy, which I hear is often.

Volume, for sure, but high-quality food as well, and a solicitous wait staff. That will keep you in business for 40 years.

I had the opakapaka, an Hawaiian snapper. Those are potatoes, not apples, on the side.

Yuriko had the macadamia sauteed basa, a fish native to Southeast Asia. We opted for a dessert that the menu called “Bob’s Slice of Heaven,” made from purple Okinawan sweet potatoes. Oh, yes.I learned while at the restaurant that old Bob Chinn died in April at 99. Born in 1923 in Duluth to Chinese immigrants, he’d been in the restaurant business since he was a teenager, founding Bob Chinn’s in 1982. A daughter and granddaughter run it now.

“The Crab House was modeled, according to various sources, either after fresh seafood restaurants in Hong Kong or Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami, which Chinn had long admired,” the Chicago Eater says.

“But unlike Hong Kong or Miami, Chicago had no access to fresh seafood. Chinn solved that problem by getting up early every morning and driving to O’Hare to pick up shipments that had been flown in from the coasts, some of which were still alive. (He invested in special tanks in the restaurant basement to hold the crabs and lobsters.)

“He kept costs low by buying in volume from wholesalers — he had a separate business in Honolulu to scout the fish markets — and by using only the cheapest dishes and silverware.”

Bob Chinn’s isn’t precisely cheap, but I did get the sense that we would have paid more for the same in other high-end fish houses. Good for you, Bob. RIP.

Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir

Posted on September 12, 2022 by admin

Heavy rains started around daybreak on Sunday, continuing through until mid-afternoon, at least around here. Some parts of Chicago suffered flooding.

Just before sunset the same day, we walked the dog and noticed very little in the way of puddles, even in the low ground of the park behind our house. Odd, I thought, considering the heavy volume of water, but then it occurred to me that it’s been a warm two weeks since the last rain. The ground just soaked it up.

Saturday was one of those warm, sunny days. About an hour before sunset that day, we went back to Wood Dale, but this time walked around Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir.

The water is visibly the haunt of birds, including some herons, and probably fish that can’t be seen. The level looked low, which is reasonable, considering there hadn’t been any rain lately.

The trail goes more than a mile all the way around, not always with views of the water.

O’Hare isn’t that far away.

As the name says, the point of the basin is to catch floodwater, rather than have it damage the surrounding suburbs. The facility was completed in 2002.

“Floodwater enters the pump evacuated reservoir through a diversion weir made up of series of four sluice gates located at the end of School Street in Wood Dale,” says Du Page County.

“During flood events the sluice gates are opened, allowing stormwater to flow down the spillway into the reservoir. The stormwater is temporarily stored until flood levels along Salt Creek have receded. Stormwater is then pumped back to Salt Creek through a pump station and discharge channel.”

There’s a short bridge over the spillway.

That got me thinking about the origin of “sluice,” which I didn’t know. So I looked it up later. Mirriam Webster: “Middle English sluse, alteration of scluse, from Anglo-French escluse, from Late Latin exclusa, from Latin, feminine of exclusus, past participle of excludere to exclude.”

The Demise of Nabih Berri the Ficus

Posted on September 11, 2022 by admin

Below is the text of a paper letter I sent from Arlington, Massachusetts, in September 1995, to a friend in Texas. Most of the letters I sent that year are trapped on a disk readable by an ancient world processing machine that’s in our laundry room, but ones from September through November (for some reason) were written using another machine, copies of whose documents are more accessible.

The last time I fired up that ancient machine — some years ago — it worked, but retrieving the text would either mean printing every page, or taking pictures of the screen for every page. Either would be time-consuming, so it’s possible that that correspondence will be as lost as the Amber Room, except that no one cares.

Got your e-note this morning when I got in. We’ve got a correspondence going! Reason enough to like the new medium, no matter what the neo-Luddites think. But I won’t quit letter or postcards. As you can see.

Sorry to hear about your current difficulties. What happened to your car? Thought it was up & running. Maybe your can learn to live without a TV, though.

No need to replace Nabih Berri the Ficus. Sic transit gloria mundi. (Sic transit gloria fici?). Gone, but not forgotten. A plant among plants, it was.

My friends Matt and Jill from Australia have come and gone. Fine people, but exhausting. They’re out to see America between beers. Did get to try a pretty good Mexican restaurant near Harvard Square during their visit. The place has Lone Star Beer. Hm.

Want to get away, before it’s absolutely freezing, to Montreal. Don’t know when yet, but of course you will be informed by postcard. I’ve bought some maps and a guide to the city at my company’s expense, because we do genuinely need them for research, besides the fact that I might use them myself. We have an account at Globe Corner Bookstore on Boylston Street, and all I have to do is sign my name. Now that’s an expense account.

Cold (for September) (high 50s) and miserable outside. Gotta go home through it anyway. More anon.

I had just started using email that summer, as mentioned. I’m not sure anymore what his “current difficulties” were, but it sounds like car repairs and a burned out TV.

As for Nabih Berri the Ficus, that was a twisted ficus of mine that died that year. As for why I called it that, call it youthful whimsy. I think he was in the news when I originally got the plant. I was surprised to learn today that he original Nabih Berri is still alive.
As for Montreal, we didn’t make it that year. It had to wait till 2002.

RIP, Your Majesty

Posted on September 8, 2022 by admin

On occasions like this, it’s fitting even for citizens of a republic to say, Long Live the King!

Here’s the image of Elizabeth II that I like best.

That’s for strictly personal reasons: I picked the coin up in change in Australia over 30 years ago.

I was glad to see 50-cent pieces in circulation somewhere.

Palatine Prairie Nature Preserve, Again

Posted on September 7, 2022 by admin

On Monday, which was like a Sunday in terms of work schedules, we took a walk at the Palatine Prairie Nature Preserve in Palatine, a not-too-far-away suburb.

We’ve been here before, I told Yuriko.

We have?

I couldn’t remember exactly when (till I looked it up), but I knew that we had — and we’d seen guys playing Frisbee golf there. Besides a walking trail, the preserve includes a disc golf course. It still does.

Something I noticed this time that I never did before: the players were all carrying bags with more than one disc inside. Maybe a half dozen discs. Like a golfer has different clubs, a — disc-er? — has different discs for different shots? Must be.

We didn’t go to toss discs, but just to walk.

And read a bit.

Gold is a prime color of late summer.

This little memorial, under a tree, looked fairly new.

This Tony Esposito? Probably so, considering his long tenure with the Chicago Blackhawks.

Salt Creek Greenway, Wood Dale

Posted on September 6, 2022 by admin

What’s our idea of a good way to spend a few hours on a long weekend at home? A long walk between a small creek and a large electric substation.

After a fairly inert Saturday, on Sunday we walked a section of the Salt Creek Greenway, which runs 25 miles or so from Busse Woods in Elk Grove Village to the Brookfield Zoo. The part we walked was in Wood Dale, Illinois.

We started at an empty parking lot. Signs call it a bike trail, but the entire time we were there — on a pleasant, cloudy weekend afternoon — we saw exactly one bicyclist, along with a handful of walkers, including one other family with a dog.

The trail is decidedly obscure, at least to judge by its emptiness on Sunday, and we liked it that way. No dodging bicycles, for one thing. We walked a total of two miles or so, one there and one back, since the trail doesn’t loop.

Early September is still a lush season along the trail.

Salt Creek. The trail crosses it at one point, but mostly runs at some distance from the creek along this section.

Maybe people are put off by the ComEd substation on one side of the trail. It’s impressively large. I get a kick out of getting a good look at important infrastructure, but that’s just me.

Part of Illinois 390 is also visible from a short section of the trail.

Note the birds. For a moment, especially when they took flight, you could imagine you were in a Hitchcock movie.

Small Insects, Big Rocket

Posted on September 1, 2022 by admin

A really pleasant evening to start September. I could sit out on the deck in a t-shirt and be quite comfortable late into the evening. These nights will be fewer and fewer in the weeks ahead.

Crickets are signing their little hearts out. Wait, do insects have hearts?

Insect Cop says: “Insects do have hearts, but they look very different to our own. The insect heart is a long, tubular structure that extends down the length of the insect body, and delivers nutrient-rich blood to the organs and tissues.

“Insects also have their own version of blood, called haemolymph. Unlike human blood, insect haemolymph does not carry oxygen and lacks red blood cells.”

Back to posting on September 6. It’s good to take Labor Day seriously and not work. We ought to have two labor days, come to think of it — add May 1 as a springtime holiday.

A public domain shot, lifted from NASA. Photographer: Joel Kowsky.

Hope all goes as planned. Yet I can’t help thinking — how is it so different from the Saturn V? An improvement in any way, after 50 years? Hard to say.

Why orange? Black and white were good enough for the Saturn V, after all. Turns out it’s a weight issue, and with Moon rockets, every ounce counts.

“The orange color comes from insulation that covers the vehicle’s liquid hydrogen and oxygen tanks,” noted an article published by the Planetary Society about seven years ago.

“This is the same reason that the Space Shuttle’s external fuel tank was orange. The first two shuttle flights, STS-1 and STS-2, in 1981, featured tanks painted white to protect the shuttle from ultraviolet light while sitting on the launch pad. But after engineers concluded the protection was unnecessary, the white paint was discarded, freeing up 600 pounds of weight in the process.”

One more thing, NASA. Get a better name for the rocket. Artemis and Orion are good; they go together in history and lore. But Space Launch System? That just doesn’t have the panache of Saturn.

Dimming Summer Light

Posted on August 31, 2022 by admin

Goldenrod has started to turn golden out toward the back yard fence. I noticed that as the sun was going down for the last time in August 2022. It’s been an eventful month.

The dog was patrolling the yard at that moment.

Her patrols know no season, but various creatures to spy — including dogs beyond the fence — are more likely in the warmer months

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling