Woman On The Beach

Here is a woman who Sophie and I spied today. She came up from behind us and seemed like a regular old runner until she began jogging past and dropped a small plastic or rubber ball on the ground. We of course assumed she was going to play with a dog and looked around for a furry friend. But there was none. Instead she proceeded to dribble the ball down the beach. There was a moment in which the ball went down into the water and Sophie and I both thought, "uh-oh." But in fact, there was no trouble at all because she just went right in there and kept on dribbling. Who knows what kind of shoes she had on. Anyway, she went down the beach and back and unfortunately when we caught her on camera, her jog had relaxed into a walk. Still hilarious!

Rosehill Cemetery

The other day it was very sunny out and I wanted to go for a walk. I prefer to walk and run in places where there aren't other people. As I once told Sophie, I like private places in public. So I decided to take a walk around the cemetery that's near our house. On the whole, I encountered only two other people: one with a dog and one with a baby in a stroller. I took some nice photos, saw some animals and wrote a poem. I think I will be coming here very often.

The Field Museum

I had never been to the field museum until last Wednesday. Everybody talks about it and and about what a gem it is and when I first moved to Chicago it was mentioned in this book I read about a professor man who is failing at life. Anyway, it turned out that Trish works there and she offered to give a special tour to me and Sophie and Amanda in addition to getting us in for FREE! Which as a total winning point.

I will say that it was an incredibly educational and slightly surreal experience. And one of the best photo-taking events I've had in a very, very long time. We walked up a bunch of stairs to get to a bird area, where we walked in the door and there were just tables of people sitting around and talking as they plucked feathers out of birds and piled the red, meaty carcasses in these bowls. They were specimens. We then visited the room where these specimens have their flesh eaten off by bugs. It smelled a little terrible like rotting things and looked just amazing! The non-waste of it and the thoroughness of the bugs was impressive.



Trish also showed us a great number of skeletons, dried out animal bodies and pickled animals that are being saved. It's both fascinating and horrifying to think that scientists feel the need to have extraneous bodies lying around just in case. Which is pretty much how science works and how we've discovered a lot of important things, but it's so creepy how practical it all seems. There are dead things lying around all messed up and weird looking and it's all just very normal. Which made the whole experience super cool.