"A RUSH AND A PUSH AND THE LAND IS OURS"

Not terribly surprisingly, Leah Jones' flickr stream documents a lot of the adventures I've found over the last several days. Let's take a look, shall we?

After a few homebody weeks, Wednesday evening last week I spent a very fun social media sort of evening at Matilda's to welcome YLove to Chicago the night before his concert at Spertus. I chatted and chatted and suddenly, it was, um, quite late.

Ahem. Moving along.

Chicago got a ton of snow. Again, documented. Saturday was mostly about negotiating snow. At least my Saturday. But, this is what we do living here in Chicago. We negotiate our lives around the snow. Anyway.

Fast forward to Sunday. Sunday afternoon, I had a nice long chat with Jason Pettus from Chicago Center of Literature and Photography, about Pilcrow, about podcasts, about books, Ben Tanzer's latest book, about Savannah Schroll-Guz's forthcoming book, about books down the road at CCLaP, and about books down the road at So New.

Then, I met back up with Leah and we visited Megan Stielstra at Webster's Wine Bar, where 2nd Story's regularly scheduled reading happens. We ordered the mixes flight of four wines, each paired with a different storyteller/essayist, and listened in the sold-out crowd as each story, its thoughtfully-selected soundtrack and well-paired wine all mixed perfectly. Stielsta introduced us to her cohorts at 2nd Story, and all were delightful and enthusiastic about the work they do together.

And then, well, the story takes a few twists and turns here. You see, we ventured out of Webster's to find my car-- my just-returned-from-the-bodyshop-in-Pittsburgh car!-- minus a window, along with a handful of other vehicles in the lot, which you can see here. I can't complain, really. I only lost a few CDs and a few coins to the window-breaking thieves.

The police left, so we left. We drove across town, in a car without a window. It was a very cold night, and we drove with the heater blasting as best it could against the cold. The cold won, but we lived, of course. And, after driving in quiet for a minute, we laughed very hard, mostly at the really??-factor, and of driving without a window in January in Chicago.

And, this afternoon, a glass shop in Pilsen came out, replaced my window glass and vacuumed the glass left in the car, and the whole thing faded off into funny story status.