I’ve been a longtime fan of I am Robot and Proud, but shamed to say I haven’t been an active supporter. Until now, as I purchased the latest album on Vinyl.
I was re-listening to older albums over the holidays (November), and realized I wanted an album I could hold in my hands. It took a while for shipping, but it was worth it.
Looking more, I realized bot lights were actually piped, with conduit lines leading to someplace official.
It’s been ages since I was downtown, and even longer since I was here at night. I’m not sure if these lights are meant to be decorative or utilitarian. Or perhaps both.
If you imagine the CTA lines around the Loop as a clock: I was expecting to travel Clockwise, exiting at 3:00. Instead, I was actually traveling counter-clockwise (because we were “operating like a Brown Line train”), exiting at 9:00.
So I had a bit of walking to do. Ah well, more exercise.
I walked downstairs this morning to see this: a whole mess of shellac flakes sitting on a coffee filter.
To get them off the tops of our sawhorses, we had to do this threading motion (feeding them in at an angle). A little challenging given that these were super-long boards, in a basement.
The storage we have against the wall is made of three sawhorses. Think about making a tight three-point turn in a car, and you’ll kind of get the gist of what we had to do.
“Anger wants a voice
Voices wanna sing
Singers harmonize
‘Til they can’t hear anything”
Liz, looking over the window trim. We set up a set of horses, where we were able to stack and assess each piece.
Our first fire! It’s New Year’s Eve, and better late than never. Glad we got this in, in 2025.
I do have to say – this has been a long, long time coming. With the cost of fixing and updating a fireplace, we’ve held off on this for years because our money was better spent elsewhere – on more critical, infrastructure type work for the house.
To have this done and working is… difficult to describe. It’s a nice, warm feeling, both literally and emotionally.
Liz was a whirlwind around the house, today. Of the many things she was working on, she applied some mortar between the fireplace and our newly installed hearth.
We were fortunate to have Coast to Coast Masonry come back to our house, after the holidays… and to do a bit of adjustment work for us.
I had big plans to do a lot of blog catch-up, today. But instead, I chose to take a pretty long nap (or, more accurately, a series of naps) after breakfast. So those plans worked out well.
No actual photos from today. We had a lazy morning, then met up with Tricia over at Jenny and Gil’s house, in Wicker Park.
It ended up being a kind of informal hanging out there, witt Katie and Tim showing a bit later. It was incredibly kind and gracious for Jenny/Gil to host Tricia and everyone else, and we just more or less hung out in their kitchen the whole afternoon.
The Holders were away on a travel vacation over Christmas proper, but flew back in to Chicago yesterday. And so we made plans to hang out, and to have a late birthday dinner/celebration for Kirt.
After showing folks around our house (and our newly updated floors)… we decided on something for our afternoon: mini-golf.
Post breakfast, everyone gathered in the new addition (a part of the house that I still refer to as “new,” despite it being over 30 years old). L to R, it’s Stacey, Shane, Liz, me, Nathaniel, Jasmine, Jahnu, and my mom (photo courtesy of dad).
The goal is to steal a jewel from the museum. To do so, you need to move the locks off the top of a jewel, relocating them onto other locks… and to move the jewel onto a pedestal in the middle of the board.
The catch: each player gets to use just one tiny hand. The crew gets 90 seconds to complete the task, without bumping any of the lasers.