OK, one of the best books I’ve read recently. Here’s the review of it that I wrote back in 2016:

This non-fiction book – released in 2016 – is the memoir of Jahren’s life as a woman scientist.

But it’s so much more – it’s about her upbringing, education, her battles with depression and misogyny.

It’s also about plants – written with passion and clarity. You’ll never look at a seed the same way again; ditto for trees.

And it’s also about her long, platonic relationship with her, well, “work husband,” a strange but compelling character called Bill. She writes of him with empathy, affection, and an almost maternal love.

If you like botany, or even if you just like science, give it a spin. Hell, if you just enjoy a well-written book, this is just that. Pick up the book at a store or the library, and if the forward impresses, you’ll like the rest.

And now, President Obama has selected this book as part of his 2019 Summer Reading List (it’s a Facebook post, so I won’t link to it).

He’s what he had to say about the book:

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren is a beautifully written memoir about the life of a woman in science, a brilliant friendship, and the profundity of trees. Terrific.

I hope Obama’s endorsement gets more people to read a book that’s well worth reading for many reasons: The clean prose, the science, the love of science, and the vagaries of friendship, romantic entanglements and the rest of the human experience.

Again, read the the book’s forward – if you enjoy, the rest of the book will be a winner.

Highly recommended.

Three years ago, Amazon purchased the rights to the BBC comedic TV series “Fleabag.”

Based on her one-woman show, Phoebe Waller-Bridge brings her joke-shotgunning, eclectic, eccentric (and decidedly British) tale to television.

IMDB describes the show as the following:

A comedy series adapted from the award-winning play about a young woman trying to cope with life in London whilst coming to terms with a recent tragedy.

This is accurate, but there is so much more. And on May 17, 2019 – three years after the first season, the second and final season of “Fleabag” dropped. I had heard a lot of good things about “Fleabag” when it first came out; the reviews for the second season were basically saying the new season out-Fleabagged the outstanding first season.

Time to binge.

Each season has only six episodes of approximately 25 minutes each: I watched Season One last Saturday, Season Two the next day.

Six hours of incredible genius, brilliant writing, pathos and (overwhelmingly) oh-so-sly and did she really do that? humor.

We are introduced to Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag (listed in the credits as her character’s name, not that it – or any other name – is ever uttered in reference to her) as a damaged woman, trying to get past some grief with random, manic sexual hookups and generally odd behavior. The reasons for her grief are soon shown – the early death of her mother (never seen) and grief and guilt over the death of her closest friend, Boo, whom she has opened a cafe with (and whom we only see in flashbacks throughout the series).

Fleabag is not the only character that really isn’t named. Her father is Dad, her wicked Godmother (Olivia Colman, relishing every one of her evil utterances), and – in Season Two – a Catholic priest is just Priest (“What has gotten into your Priest,” instead of “What has gotten into Father O’Brian”). There’s also Arsehole Guy, Bus Rodent, Bank Manager and Hot Misogynist. Names are not needed; the characters just help fill Fleabag’s void.

In a touch of theater – this does all come out of Waller-Bridge’s play – Fleabag frequently breaks the fourth wall and directly addresses us, the audience. This happens more in the early episodes of Season One, where it’s often used as a set-up device (short episodes, so a direct comment to us about what a sleaze her brother-in-law is quickly gets us up to speed). This is a staple of the show, however, and actually how Fleabag wraps up – she walks away from the camera and at some distance away turns slightly back toward us and waves good-bye. Yes she – and the show – are (sadly) forever leaving us.

At bottom, this is a series – an utterly dense, bonkers series – about friendship, love and loss, mainly centered around Fleabag, her sister (Claire – a name!) her Dad and Godmother. In Season Two, the show ups the ante, and Fleabag fall in lust, and then love, for the very unorthodox Priest (often referred to “the hot priest”), who shares the same feelings – and no good can come of this.

I don’t know what to compare this to – the closest I can come is the British/American show “Catastrophe,” which also takes place in London. Different stories (“Catastrophe” is more about how to survive marriage and parenting), but both are brutally honest about real-world truths (Claire to Fleabag: “I’m not your friend; I’m your sister. Find your own friends.”), both are verbally profane and unafraid to show sexual activity, and both come at their issues from a different direction from what an American comedy might take.

“Catastrophe” – Whenever the American husband (Rob Delaney) gets a call from his wife (Sharon Horgan, met through an extended business-trip hookup), the caller ID is “Sharon London Sex” – they didn’t even know each other’s last names until he came back to London (Norris and Morris, respectively).

“Fleabag” – The Second Season premier (after “previously on ‘Fleabag'”) has Fleabag in a non-residential bathroom in an elegant black dress, attending to her bloody nose. Someone unknown knocks on the door and says, “They’re all gone; are you alright?” She says she’s fine, and then hands the paper towels she’s been using to an unknown woman kneeling on the floor, also with a bloody nose. What’s going on?

I’m glad I waited until the Second Season dropped to watch; that way I didn’t have to wait three years for the next. I did the same for “Catastrophe” (four seasons of six half-hour episodes), and that worked out well, for the same reason.

Waller-Bridge is in high demand these days – she was a writer on Season One of “Killing Eve,” is writing for the new Bond movie, and voiced a droid in Solo: A Star Wars Story. I hope she makes time for other small projects like “Fleabag,” because it is one of the biggest things I’ve watched in some time.

Beginning with a preliminary planning trip in 2012 and ending with a cross-country flight in 2017, Jim (James) and Deb (Deborah) Fallows spent more than four years crisscrossing the United States, trying to take the pulse of the country.

The husband and wife team are both highly respected journalists/writers, and are veteran travelers. In all, their inspection of American took them on a 100,000 mile journey. Three items make their travels different than you might expect:

• They flew: Jim Fellows is an experienced pilot, and they flew their two-seater Cirrus from coast to coast for all those trips.
• The focused on community: Even through the madness of the 2014 midterms and the crazy election of 2016 might tempt a journalist to pry about national news, the Fallows’ focus was on “How is your community doing today?” and not “Should Hillary be locked up/Is Trump even qualified?”
• They emphasized the so-called fly-over states: Presidential elections have candidates focused on the population-rich East and West Coasts, with visits to large cities in swing state. Small town visits are mainly for show, to get the “man of the people” photo op or to highlight a small-town virtue that aligns with the candidate’s platform (Wind power! Business with in-company day care! Small manufacturing making a difference!). The Fallows stuck to small towns in often out-of-the-way places: Ajo, AZ – right near the Mexican border and adjacent to an Indian reservation; three worlds in the middle of nowhere; Eastport, ME – right across the Bay of Fundy from Nova Scotia and next to New Brunswick; Dodge City, KS – a historic town smack in the middle of the country. The largest city they visited was Columbus, OH (raise your hand if you knew it was the 14th most populous city in the US. Didn’t think so…).

In all cities, the Fallows gave an overview of where the city had been, and then spoke with civic leaders, local influencers and business people to find out where the city was today and where it was headed (up? down? steady?).

The remarkable subtext of the book, to me, is how virtually every city viewed their city, at the very least, as on the way up – they were moving the right direction, even if the break from the past had been difficult (think of one-factory towns when that monolithic factory closes). One hears over and over on the news and reads in articles that America is at a tipping point where one wrong move will push us over a cliff; these cities, overall, felt very optimistic. They had plans for today and the future.

Some set-in-concrete “truisms” that didn’t really appear in this book are the constant wailing over political gridlock, fears of immigrants and how both major political parties are unwilling to step outside their circle of core beliefs to accomplish what is desperately needed.

While I’m sure these and other truisms do affect the towns the Fallows visited to some degree, the opposite was the big story: Business and government worked together, most towns thought immigration was not just a reality but something encourage and embrace. Deb Fallows usually visited the schools and other community facilities, and the stories of immigrants and their families – and their role in the civic fabric – are some of the most though-provoking parts of the book.

And take the very red (Republican) city in a very red state: Dodge City, KS. The lore is that virtually zero Republicans in Washington, DC will ever vote to raise any tax for whatever reason. In Dodge City, they decided they needed a modest sales tax that would go directly to city infrastructure and schools’ needs. So they put it up for a vote.

It passed easily. It even had the support of the downtown businesses, which probably had the most to lose.

The book was a bit long – approximately 400 pages – and, by the end, it was tough to keep the cities straight (“…unlike in Greenville, SC…” Which one was that?), but a pleasant and informative read.

The book ends with a summary of what the Fallows learned about what makes a town succeed – I won’t give many spoilers, but some of the success indicators involve bike paths and brew pubs.

This is your America.

I watched Amazon Prime’s Catastrophe this past weekend.

I had heard about the show over the years, but it just seemed to pop up a lot by the end of last week (turns out the fourth and final season dropped on Friday, March 15).

The basic premise for the show flips the rom-com script on its head. The typical rom-com keeps the characters apart for as long as possible for whatever reasons, before they realize that they love each other and can’t live without the other blah blah.

Here, Rob (Rob Delany) plays an American advertising exec who goes to London for a sales conference. He meets and has a one-week stand with Sharon (Sharon Horgan), an Irish-born elementary school teacher living in London. They part on good terms, but then – 32 days later – Rob gets a call from Sharon, who tells him she’s pregnant.

Rob flies to London, and they try to figure out what to do next.

And this is in like the first 15 minutes of the show.

The series – while much more – is about marriage and children, so that’s nothing I can personally identify with. (Note – the kids are largely seen but not heard, or just mentioned in the context of how having kids affects the adults. No “kids say the dardest things..”)

I almost passed on watching it, until I looked up the show’s episode guide: Four seasons, six episodes each, each episode under 30 minutes,

So I thought that I could give it a shot; could always bail if it wasn’t for me.

Watched about 10 hours on Saturday and finished on Sunday.

The last episode (no spoilers) – a funny, heartfelt half-hour – kind of spelled out, as Rob and Sharon are talking at the very end, what the entire four seasons were about: Hey, life – work, kids, spouses, relatives, friends – is a lot of work and stress. And one way to approach all of this overwhelming life is to do it with someone who’s always got your back (Rob & Sharon), and to just take it one day at a time. Plans are great, but just get through the day.

Delany and Horgan (both use their real first names as character names) wrote the entire show together, and it is tight. Dialogues just work: passive-aggressive parrying gives way to laughter, profane truths are acknowledged.

Nothing is off-limits: For a relatively short run (12 hours total), this show tackles a vast range of issues. Cancer, loss of family, alcoholism, infidelity, work realities, strange friends and family.

And while there is a lot of sex in the show, there’s not a lot of talk about sex – just as in real life, people just do it when they both want to.

The supporting cast is exemplary – both rock-solid and bizarre. The evolution of their close friends and family over the series is almost as interesting as the main characters’ change over the same period. This is decidedly different from most sitcoms, where the whiny sister or horn-dog cousin supporting characters never really change.

And anyone reviewing this show is legally required to note the brilliant eccentricity Carrie Fisher, as Rob’s mom, brings to her role. Fisher died between the thrid and fourth season, and the show deals with this in an extremely touching, yet hilarious way.

At the end of the day, this is all about Delaney and Horgan: Their on-screne relationship and the brilliant, coming at issues sideways dialogue for all characters, but particularly for Rob and Sharon when they are alone together.

One thing that stood out for me was the way, like in the sitcom Mad About You, each of the two main characters could be the idiot or the voice of reason. A lot of shows – especially sitcoms – lock characters into a certain role, much like they do with supporting characters (see above).

All in all, this is a great series – and I’m glad I discovered it at this time, when I didn’t have to wait a year for the next six episodes.

I came, I watched, I liked.

But sad to see it go.

It’s cold outside right now (12° up from -6° earlier today), but look at the forecast for Wednesday.

This is Vladivostok cold; battery-freezing cold.

Yikes.

TV ornament from Jade – a former co-worker

As just about every TV reviewer has noted at some point in the past few years, this is “peak TV” or “TV’s Golden Age” (or something similar).

Riding on the rising tide of cable with non-network offerings such as HBO and Showtime, the amount of quality television has accelerated with the streaming services – Netflix, Amazon Prime, HULU, CBS Direct – offering original content of their own. And more often than not, this original content actually is original – not another Law and Order knockoff or a stale sitcom. Think Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and Veep (The West Wing is what [liberals] want politics to be like; Veep is probably closer to reality. *shudder*).

Over the past few weeks, I read many “best of 2018” articles (books, movies, TV etc.), and one thing most TV critics had in common was a list of shows they hadn’t kept up with (season 7 of a long running show) or just hadn’t around to even starting (usually for a show in it’s first or second season). In most cases, the shows listed could be seen on other reviewers’ Top 10 lists – TV shows are so expansive yet impressive that those who get paid to watch TV couldn’t get around to watching highly regarded shows.

Says something.

Now, I like binging on TV shows – I have a lot of DVD seasons and I currently stream off Amazon Prime. And our library, Mount Prospect, IL, has a pretty good collection of DVDs to rent, both movies and TV shows (I burned through all of Boston Legal from library rentals a year or so ago).

Over this period, I have watched some magnificent TV – Mad Men, The Americans (I still haven’t finished this), and the afore-mentioned Veep.

However, I wan to focus on a few shows that I keep coming back to, watching over and over. For the most part they are just “OK” fare, and I could see someone not liking them.

In no particular order:

• Friends – Yes, lightweight but so popular. Some seasons/show arcs are better than others, but good clean fun. Hey, Netflix just ponied up $100 million to keep it for another year; it’s not just me watching…
• Monk – Tony Shaloub as an obsessive compulsive brilliant former San Francisco detective. There is an arc to the show – the one case he cannot solve is who killed his journalist wife – but each show is self-contained with a Colombo-like ending: “Here’s what happened…” Good cast of characters surround him that play (mainly) straight to his neurotic self, yet have quirks of their own. No life lessons or great art; just crime solving with brains instead of guns.
• White Collar – Premise: Master forger/thief/con man is let out of jail (on an ankle tracker) to help FBI find and arrest criminals…like him. Some good supporting characters, especially Mozzie (Willie Garson), and – like Monk – just fun, intellectual crime-solving. Downside: There’s some really bad acting in this show, in my opinion.
• Covert Affairs – Premise: Sexy (Piper Perabo; not really my type) Army brat who has great language skills joins the CIA in DC and becomes a covert agent. Lots of spy vs. spy hi-jinks. Fun, and set (maybe not shot) in locales around the world, from Italy to Thailand to Mexico.
• Suits – Premise: Brilliant, photographic memory guy who is not a lawyer hired by hotshot lawyer to work at his firm as a lawyer – with the full knowledge that he’s a fraud. The first few seasons were the best; Meghan Markle left the show to become UK royalty, and her brainiac husband left at the same time. From what I’ve read, the show went off a cliff after that. This show is a mixed bag; I didn’t purchase it, just rented from the library. I liked the shows where there were interesting cases and how they were resolved; there was too much of an emphasis at times of office politics/mergers etc. for my taste.
• Castle – Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) is a rich and famous mystery writer (think Michael Connelly or James Patterson – both of whom appear in the show as themselves, at a periodic poker game). Stanford graduate (smart) and beautiful NYC homicide detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) notices similarities between her crime scene and a Castle book murder and asks for his input. Castle is both smitten by Beckett and real-life crime solving, and they become partners of sorts. Some goofy supporting characters, especially the other detectives. Like Monk, there is an arc around a murder (Beckett’s lawyer mother), but it’s more clunky than interesting.
• Burn Notice – CIA spy burned and returns home (Miami, FL) where, with the help of an old girlfriend (ex-IRA gunrunner) and old friend Sam, an ex-Navy Seal, he tries to figure out who burned him. Along the way – and this is the fun part – the trio use their spy/commando skills to help regular people who were scammed, getting threatened and so on. For some reason, they fire weapons, have high-speed car chases and blow up (stuff) more often than Bobby Knight did with a near-sighted ref, yet they never get arrested. And the Burn Notice guy has a great car – and old Dodge Charger – that has been blown up, hit, had stuff crush it, shot at countless times. It should look like a pile of metal shavings. But it keeps coming back, the paint on the car glistening like polished obsidian. Hey – it’s a TV show! Sharon Gless plays the Burn Notice’s chain-smoking mom, and she is great. And gets better as the show goes on.

That’s the bulk of my favorite binges, at least the ones I can recall right now.

The novel

HULU – Season One

I read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale shortly after the novel’s release in 1985; it was probably a year later, when the paperback version came out.

Now, I’ve read a lot of great modern novels since that time – Jane Hamilton’s A Map fo the World, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Dan DeLillo’s White Noise and many others I could name if I just scanned a few of my bookcases.

But Atwood’s dystopian novel struck me at the time, and to this day, as something different – it has more in common with Viginia Woolf and Syvia Plath (and – of course – George Orwell) than Hamilton and the others.

The Handmaid’s Tale is on a different level, a timeless almost classic.

I’ll be honest, I don’t recall a lot about the book today (I read it more than thirty years ago); I don’t even recall if it ended on a hopeful or discordant note. I really don’t. But I remember that it really chilled me, the precise, sparse writing, and the description of a autocratic, evil world that was – sadly – believable.

Which brings me to the TV version of the novel, the first season of which I watched this weekend: Season Two is already out on DVD (and I’ve purchased same), but I kept holding off on watching, simply because the book was so good, and the praise for the HULU series made it seem like nothing could live up to the book/TV hype.

Well, I was wrong. The show is dark, disturbing, brilliantly cast and performed. Elisabeth Moss – Offred (Of Fred, whom she is the handmaiden to) – is brilliant. From Zoey Bartlet through Peggy Olson to Offred, Moss has really left her mark on the small screen.

The flashbacks are, to me, the most fascinating part of the show: How we got here. From a democracy to a totalitarian society where we keep fertile women for the elite to rape and impregnate, as most women have become infertile due to seemingly decades of pollution and corporations having five-week plans ($$), not five-year visions.

It’s troubling because it shows how this happens – just one small slip, and then another…rinse and repeat. That’s how Gilead (the fictional area [state? city? Unclear.]) changed.

And it’s troubling because of how the last couple of years the US has, little by little, been showing our country’s bad side (pulling out of treaties, xenophobia, child separation at the southern border, hate crimes and speech, approval of authoritarian leaders and governments, and so much more). Could Gilead happen here?

I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn’t learned that it can happen so gradually you don’t lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. You don’t necessarily sense the motion. I’ve found it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap.

— Jane Hamilton, A Map of the World (first graph)

Yes, Gilead could happen here – very much a long shot with all our checks and balances, but you never know…and never say “never.”

All in all, very well done. I just (re-)read the first four or so pages of the book, and they are dark – I’m guessing it’s a case of the book besting the movie/TV show. Might have to read it again.

All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Source: Anna Karenina (first sentence)

How do different families handle marriage/sickness/death?

Do they differ?

My guess is each in its own way…

Bookcase with NO deletes

For whatever reason, I’ve been on a bit of a cleaning bender as of late – An Autumn Cleaning – in my home office (books, computers, stereo, plants, and pics on the wall).

Which is long overdue.

As part of this cleanse, I’ve been getting rid of a bunch of books – tossing and giving away.

The books I’m shedding primarily fall into one of three categories:

• Computer books: I’ve purchased – and used – a lot of computer books in my day. I first got into computers, beyond HS/college programming classes, in the mid-90s, as the internet (pre-web) was becoming available. But today, well, there’s this thing called the InterToobs, and it’s like a book of everything, with a really great index. Some computer books seem to be worth hanging onto (solid book back in the day), why would a book on Visual Basic v5 be worth hanging onto if Visual Basic is now way past v6? Sentimental reasons only, and I have hung onto a bunch of computer books for sentimental reasons. Additionally, there are comp books (Learning Perl, 2nd edition, forward by by Larry Wall) that I know so well that they sometimes beat a web search. Rare, but a handful (the O’Reilly/animal books predominate) are useful analog references to this day. NOTE: I have documented and recycled these books. Nice to see what I had (just for fun), but no on would really want these.
• Reference books: As with computer books, in the age of the internet, reference books are somewhat dated. Does anyone really need decades-old AP style manuals, or a 1993 or 1996 World Almanac? Didn’t think so. NOTE: I have documented and recycled these books. Nice to see what I had (just for fun), but no on would really want these.
• Everything else: I haven’t documented these, as who really needs a picture of a paperback version (or two) of The World According to Garp? These are books that I’ll try to give away, because others may want them: Poetry collections, novels, short story collections. Also non-fiction tomes about model railroading (I was a fan) and other books on history/geography that seemed interesting at the time, but no longer (for me – but maybe book gold to someone else).

  A lot of the fiction I’m giving away are titles of which, for whatever reason, I have multiple copies. For example: I have multiple copies of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim – part of paperback collection of Conrad’s works, a solo soft cover, and a Modern Library hard cover (I kept the latter). What can I say? I’ve been a bit of a book whore since my early teens and I’m not getting any younger…

Where does this leave me?

Well, I still have way more books than the average bear. Once I finish this particular purge and have my shelves organized (as well as they will ever be), the impression my office will leave on folks is: Lots of computer equipment, a crapload of books.

And they would not be wrong. (Refer back to my book whore comment.)

And I have not – and will not – touch my photo book collection. Well, there are a couple that might go, but I’m happy with my photo books (and that bookcase of stuff is in the living room, not part of the office clutter).

I will always have too many books.

He gripped more closely the essential prose
As being, in a world so falsified,
The one integrity for him, the one
Discovery still possible to make,
To which all poems were incident, unless
That prose should wear a poem’s guise at last

— Wallace Stevens

Last Friday – Sept. 14, 2018 – Romy and I once again ventured into Chicago for a day of just goofing off.

I hope to post some pictures shortly, but – in the meantime – some thoughts on what we saw and did.

Anyway, we took the train into the Loop and then set out on our Chicago Adventure.

Beautiful day – clear and low 80s, Nice.

• Elephand & Castle: We hit the one on Adams (just east of the Rookery), as it was about 8;30am, and the one on Wells doesn’t open until 11am or so. Surprisingly busy this time over the other times we had been there.
• Riverwalk: By this, I mean the relatively new river walk on the south side of the Chicago River from roughly Franklin to Lake Shore Drive. we only went as far as Michigan Avenue, but they really did a nice job on this. Lot’s of plantings, restaurants, small jettys so you could get out of the moving crowd and just watch the boats go by. We went on the Riverwalk later (going the other way), around noon or so, and th restaurants there were packed. It was Friday, and it was a nice day, but good to see that these places are making a go of it. Well done, Chicago!
• Apple store in Pioneer Plaza: I’ve read a bit about this in The Chicago Tribune and online, but I found the space to be somewhat of a let-down. The expansive views of the river and the tiered seating was nice, but maybe the high sealing (you enter from the plaza – high above the river – and walk down to the store, which is at the river’s edge). The one we went to in Portland, OR, was – to me – more “applee.” Don’t get me wrong – nice store and all, but I guess I had high expectations that were not met.
• Art Institute of Chicago: Going to the Art Institute was basically our excuse for taking a day off and hitting downtown – the John Singer Sargent exhibit was getting close to closing, and we wanted to see it. It was nice, especially his portraits: lush & classy. I was more stuck by some of his work that I had not seen, such as an orchestra rehearsal that reflected Impressionistic/Cubist influences. And he had some nice watercolors of architectural scenes (mainly in Florida) that I could see hanging in our house.
• Art Institute Deux: We also saw a photo exhibit that focused on Chicago photography (taken in Chicago, primarily South Chicago). Outside of some Gordon Parks photos (related to some Life magazine assignments, some published, some not) it was a generally weak exhibit. I’m glad we took the time to see it, but I wouldn’t have kicked myself if we have missed it.
• Millennium Park: As is the law, we had to wander around Millennium Park and – as strictly enforced by the tourist police – we had to take pictures of The Bean (Cloudscape). The Bean is probably the most photographed place/object in Chicago. I can’t even think of what would come next: The Wrigley Building? Wrigley Field (if one gets up that way)? Like The Riverwalk, Millennium Park is a real gem. It seemed to take forever to get built, but now that it’s there (and mostly done), I have to again give a round of applause to the city: The Bean, the Frank Gehry-designed pavilion, the abundant planting, the restaurants, the bridges over Columbus (to Maggie Daley kids park) and to the Art Institute. Well, that’s a lot jammed into one place – but it doesn’t feel jammed. And it’s right downtown, next to the Art Institute, and it’s free.
• Lunch time!: We had decided on eating at Shaw’s Crabhouse – we just can’t seem to get decent (or a wide variety) of seafood up by us. Turned out to be an excellent choice. Shaw’s is, as Romy put it, “an adult restaurant.” It was a nice change, and excellent food.

After lunch, we hit the Riverwalk again to head back to the train station – we went a bit further west on it than we had earlier in the day. There was a stretch were there were just a bunch of brightly colored Adirondack chairs on a grassy slope, just facing the river about where it divides into the North and South Chicago rivers. I don’t know if you rent the chairs or what (didn’t appear to be any place to pay…). But people were just sitting there, reading, eating lunch or just soaking up sun.

We grabbed a beer while waiting for the train (tasted good; we did a fair amount of walking and it was ~ 80 degrees with no clouds) and then headed home.

We should do this more often!