Upper left – a car that should definitely not be on the street – a Lamborghini parked right out on the street on a busy Friday night in River North. Upper right – all I could think of when I saw that ridiculous photo of a laptop strapped to the handlebars of a motorcycle was “Get a damn iPhone or a Garmin”. Really… that is plain crazy and in a nutshell explains how having the most up to date laptop has gone from a must-have to an I’ll-wait-a-while type of purchase. Lower left – can’t argue with that sentiment about spring, but funny that it is on a trash bin door. Lower middle – great license plate on a truck in front of the post office. Too true and it should say retire at 50 but that probably won’t fit on the plate. Tzar bar – popped up in my neighborhood on Ontario and funny that the name of what was essentially the Emperor of Russia is now a trendy name for a nightclub. Pictures here looks like a fun and expensive place to visit if you are under 30 and can burn a few hundred bucks / night and stay out until daylight.
Cross posted at LITGM
Summer and kids:
My 21 year old daughter flew to London last night for her first trip to Europe by herself (She meets her uncle in Paris next week). She arrived at 4 AM California time and called me every half hour until 10 AM. I’m going to bed early tonight. One call concerned her confusion about which terminal she was in at Heathrow. Her friends were to meet her at Terminal 4 and she told me she was in Terminal 4. Well, it turned out that she was in Terminal 3 but she solved that by paying a taxi 29 pounds to take her to Terminal 4. Children are wonderful !
Kids are so great ! They grow up in most unexpected ways. (As Maurice Chevalier expressed it) She got a job as a hostess in a restaurant about 18 months ago and two months later started as a waitress. She has held that job for about 15 months and is now at the point where they allow her to close some nights.
One small issue is the fact that she was living in San Diego and the restaurant is in Mission Viejo, 60 miles north. My Chevron bill has been running $1800 a month but one must not discourage one’s children’s migration to the market economy by pointing out that dad is paying 10 times the daughter’s income to allow her to have the illusion of independence.
She is moving to Tucson next month to finish her degree at U of Arizona although her first three semesters there were not very pleasant. I have established some ground rules as to major and performance. She already has a job lined up at a sports bar in Tucson.
She is very concerned that she is seen by her family as an airhead but she has shown great focus and ability the past 18 months. I am not impressed with U of Arizona as an educational institution but, as Dick Cheney learned, if you want to live in Arizona, the U might be better than Yale or Harvard.
There is a lot to being a parent that is not in the textbooks. This is my last of five attempts and I am still learning.
“a car that should definitely not be on the street – a Lamborghini”
What is the point of buying a Lambo, if you hide it away. It is not just transportation. If that is what you wanted you should have bought a Civic and pocketed the extra $220,000. If you got it, flaunt it.
“but she solved that by paying a taxi 29 pounds to take her to Terminal 4”
The myth of the London cab driver dies hard. My experience is that they are no more likely to know how to get you to your destination than any random stranger. They are also perfectly capable of taking you for a long ride to the wrong destination.
Lambo schmambo. Nothing compares to the incomparable Foochi-Manooli.
With Chicago curbs, speed bumps and potholes? Must belong to a drug dealer. Or an NFL player.
The bar owners must have a different speller than I carry around in my head:
tSar
cZar.
why? I dunno.
Re: cabbies. Heathrow is not in London, is it? Maybe it is served by local scoundrels, as is the norm the world over.
I remember reading/seeing .. whatever that London cabbies had to memorize about 16 bazillion streets and how to get from here to there… and were tested on their knowledge before license issue. Did I dis-remember?
tom
I am not going to ask her for details about the cab ride until she gets home. That ranks right up there on the dumb scale but I still can’t imagine how the cab could have charged that much for taking her about 300 meters.
That Lamborghini must spend 98% of its time in a garage to look so good. I cannot imagine anyone driving it around Chicago routinely and parking it in public places. Now, in Malibu you might see it around but Chicago is a very different place. In Orange County, you would see it in restaurant parking lots and hotels. You can rent one for a day in Newport Beach or even in Los Angeles. Maybe it was rented.
My middle daughter, when she was in kindergarten, had a little friend whose mother drove a Ferrari cabriolet. She would roar up to the house with the top down to pick up the four year old. That is southern California living, for a while anyway.
I had a laptop for exploring when I had my KLR motorcycle. A laptop worth of screen with a USB GPS device and Google Earth is a very powerful tool for picking your way through the back country. A regular GPS has pitiful maps for wilderness areas whereas Google Earth, in my part of the world, is very detailed. I have measured logs in Google Earth then motored out and measured them on the ground. You also can cache large areas of terrain in Google Earth so no connection other than the GPS one is needed. You could perhaps get some of the benefit with an iPad but laptops are tougher. The tiny screens on phones and regular GPS devices are not very good for planning a route.
A postscript on my daughter’s trip to London and Paris (She is flying home now). I got an e-mail from AT&T telling me that there was excessive texting on her cell number and we do not have an international plan. As it happens, I have been getting e-mails from AT&T asking Annie to complete a survey on her experiences when she visited the AT%T store to change her plan to add international service on June 17. It even gave the date and name of the sales person who “helped” her. I called and got a young woman with a heavy accent that I could not understand until she slowed down.
She told me that my daughter had NOT changed the calling plan and was not interested in my protestations that the AT&T e-mail about the survey gave the date and the name of the person she had dealt with. Finally, after she accused me of using obscenity (These calls are all recorded and she was lying), I asked for her supervisor. After another 20 minute wait, the supervisor agreed that my daughter had indeed attempted to make the changes I described but told me that “retail stores are not the place to make changes to international plans.” She suggested calling or going to the web site. She did make the changes which will be effective retroactively.
Another thread is about the sluggishness of utilities. What HR department hires people to deal with the public who, in turn, accuse the customer of using obscenity on a recorded call ?
I think we are doomed.