7 posts tagged “cta”
By the way, here's another cool shot I got during yesterday's unexpected fog attack. This was taken from the platform of the Chicago Avenue brown-line (Ravenswood) platform, looking east towards the Magnificent Mile.
A sudden cold streak has clashed today with the warm weather here, producing a fog as thick as pea soup; here, for example, is the view from the Sheridan el platform, as I wait for the train that will eventually get me to Pearl Art Supply (Chicago and Wells), where I am shopping today for drawing supplies. More later!
Actual temperature in my neighborhood right now: -5 degrees (-21 C); wind-chill temperature, -30 (-34 C). Sounds like it's time for my militia gear! See, my parents have bought enough stuff now through mail-order catalogs over the years that they now have hundreds of these catalogs sent to them, including a couple for the survivalist militia member of your family; and it was while looking at some of this survivalist winter gear in one of these catalogs one holiday that it occurred to me that the stuff would work well at battling Chicago winters too, which is how I ended up getting six or eight pieces of it for Christmas a couple of years ago. The stuff works great, but one looks like one of those creepy survivalist "I always dreamed of being a ninja" types when wearing it, which is why I don't usually wear it all at once; if a 30-below day, though, can't inspire such a thing, I don't know what can.
Wind chill temperature in my neighborhood today: -15 degrees (-26 C). And believe me, when it's 15 below zero, you no longer care about what you look like when you're outside. Serial killer? Crazy old man? Hey, it's 15 below zero -- think whatever you want, I don't care, I'm just trying to make it to my destination without my nose getting frostbite and falling off. Nonetheless, after four days straight of fucking around in my apartment, I promised myself yesterday that I'd get out this morning and get some errands done, no matter what the temperature; so here I am on the Broadway bus, looking like a crazy old man or serial killer while doing so. Sigh.
I have nothing to do tonight, and no one to do it with; so fuck it, I'm going down to River North and seeing "City of Children" ("Children of Men! Children of Men!") by myself, since I've read so much cool stuff about it, and have been by the website which has like ten mini-trailers and I've seen them all, and each one of them rocks my ass. And I wore my leather suit jacket, too, so that I could go out to the Redhead in River North afterwards, before heading home.
Pictured: me on the red line, listening to my new first-ever iPod. I automatically feel like a badass when listening to my iPod; maybe this is a reason for why Apple has 90 percent market share in MP3 players, that everyone feels like a badass when wearing an iPod?
It's just above freezing in Chicago right now, and raining, which means that rain is about as cold as it possibly gets before becoming snow. No, not the most hospitable conditions at all for travelling to the airport with rucksack on back, like what I'm precisely doing today. More updates coming.
I spent all day getting online things done, so before the cold of this evening I thought I'd get out for some coffee and a little face time with the Hoo-Mons. I'm at Emerald City, to be specific, which just happens to be next door to the Sheridan el stop on the red line.
The network of train stops that make up the CTA, maybe 100 or so altogether, make for interesting viewing; the overall system is so old now, and with station improvements happening so randomly over the decades, that no two stations here look entirely alike, nor do most even have a unified design scheme. Take the stop in my neighborhood, for example; how the building's exterior is clearly an ornamental style from the 1920s or '30s, with a modernist glass front added sometime in the '50s or '60s, and a glowing outside sign in the '80s. (And let's not even start with the patchwork of styles found inside the station itself.)
I'm surprised, frankly, that no one yet has done a glossy coffetable book about the various el stops you find throughout the Chicago system; it's certainly a book I'd enjoy owning.
