Mid-January goings on

As Colette often reports, some pictures have built up on my phone so it seemed like time for a post!

We did a lot of fun stuff last weekend, which was a nice way to ease back into the normal routine. On Friday night we went to the art studio open houses in the Flat Iron building in Wicker Park with some friends, Lisa and Glen. We hadn’t been to the studios there in decades! It was a lot of fun and really nice to catch some new art that’s being made here too, thanks to Lisa for suggesting this! One piece that we found really charming was a series of writings and drawings on guest checks done by an artist with a day job in a restaurant. I particularly like this excerpt from GuestCheck 79404 below right: “Two top. They need more time. They can have forever.” I think Hemingway would approve, it’s so succinct and poetic.

Here’s a photo of the artist with a swarm of guest checks.

Saturday morning we drove to Miller Beach for a winter getaway overnight with Mike and Andrea (and Monty!) The plan was to have a hike, a nap, dinner, a movie, and a walk on the beach in the morning.

For the hike, Andrea scoped out a new place for us to go on a walk, am blanking on the name but it was a wooded wetlands area. After our Stephen’s Day shirt sleeves visit, this was definitely back in the winter category, but it wasn’t brutally cold by typical January standards – it was just around freezing. We bundled up and enjoyed having a chance to spend some time outdoors!

Back at their lake house, we had naps, which means that everyone including Monty slept, but as readers may know, I cannot nap, so I read instead. Kinda like in preschool when if a kid can’t nap, they have quiet time. After everyone woke up, Monty and I had some snuggly good times.

We went to a local place for a yummy dinner, then to the movie theater in Portage to see Uncut Gems. Really good – but definitely intense! In the morning we went for a walk on the beach. All the logs below are new to their part of the beach – they have washed up because the lake is so high, it’s pulling in trees that then float around and end up on various beaches.

This may seem like a fine point I’m making, but it was brisk for sure, but not brutally cold at the beach!

It’s hard to figure out exactly how the beach has changed with water levels being so high. In some ways the beach looks to be the same size as previous years, but we think that the lake itself has just moved onto the old beach, and the resulting wind / forces / waves when there are storms (we are in serious speculation territory here, none of us being experts) stripped an area of former dunes and made it beach, and creating a new dune “front” area as seen on the left below. See the little hillocks of grassy stuff in the center? Those are rooted down into the sand, and we think part of the former dune. This area has a lot of dune land at the lake front, other lakefront areas, like nearby Beverly Shores and also over in Michigan, are not so lucky and are feeling the raise in water levels much harder.

Since I was taking pics thought I’d show that I too was on the beach 🙂 Monty doesn’t picture at all because he was sooooo into chasing after sticks that Mike threw for him.

We drove back home on Sunday and had some time with Miles, including this moment of him picking me up that John caught a pic of! This moment did not last long – I think we were both pretty scared!

Any readers who experienced our old toaster – I’m sorry. It was so bad, something you only find out when you get a decent one! Here’s Miles making some breakfast for himself.

And a close up of our new Breville (Aussie!) toaster. I am demonstrating the “Lift and Look” lever.

We love the “A Bit More” function because it’s just funny to say.

And here we go with the big reveal of my new knitting project. The Saoirse Hat (name the pattern creator gave it) is complete! It’s orange in real life. I tried color correcting the photo to reality as best I could.

Profile! Know how hard it is to take a selfie profile without showing one’s neck? This was not my first try 🙂

And speaking of in real life, one morning this week my walk to the el was really stunning, The sunrise was really vivid pink (this pic is just a mere bit of the intensity) but also the crazy thing is that it was filling the whole sky. I was walking up Rockwell, a North/South street, and ahead and behind me was pink! Not just in the east. To the west there was the teeniest bit of pink to the gray clouds. Back to stuff I am speculating on, I’d call it a 360 degree sunrise.

And this next one was kinda cool too. This is a view from one of the windows at work. Note the horizon, then the band of clouds above that all seemed to be hanging out right over the lake, which is that direction. Then go up and see a very pale, almost full, moon. Kinda sums up the subtleties one has to look for in mid-January in the midwest!