I like a little humor with my weather. Be safe all you, my friends, traveling in Chicagoland today!

weather report for today from Chicago Sun-Times

I come from a family of packrats. Both sides, unfortunately– my mom and my dad were both packrats. I have aunts, uncles, cousins… we’re all packrats. At least I recognize this and can fight against it, but I still, often, lose the fight.
Tonight I found myself looking for something I’m sure I would have packed away somewhere. Something that, when I’m fighting the packrat, I would look at and say, “I’ll never need this,” but then, the packrat says, “Hey, you never know!”¹ So then when times like tonight come along, I have to wonder: who won? The packrat? Or the other guy?
What I needed tonight was an insignificant piece of metal. One that I would have kept around for a while, and I’m sure if I look a while longer, I’ll find it.  But I probably did get rid of it at some point, thinking, “I’ll never need this… if I do want to remove a PCI card, I’ll be replacing it with another one,” or, “I’ve got loads of old computers sitting around here doing nothing; If I need one, I’ll just take it from the stock.”  As I spent 30 minutes or so digging for that little piece of metal to block the hole in the back of my G4, I of course didn’t find one. I did, however, find some other things…

• 1 Memory Card Reader that I’ve been missing for 5 years. I thought it got lost in the move. I thought maybe I’d left it at my last job. Nope– right there in a box, waiting for me to find it tonight.
• 1 voice recorder (iRock VM150- apparently the company is offline, but I found a review here) that I’ve been missing for approx 5 years. I remember taking it to San Francisco where I recorded the sound of the cable cars and their bells as well as to a Flaming Lips concert- New Years 2003 in Chicago. Unfortunately that audio wasn’t still on there, but seems I did use the MP3 player function for 1 song: This one, which was a major player on our San Francisco 2003 soundtrack.
• 1 Graduation card. Signed, sealed, addressed to a friend who was a year behind me in school. High School. So apparently I’ve had that sitting around for… yes, 10.5 years now. How did that ever get into a box here in my house halfway across the country?? It’s even in a new box, so I apparently transferred it there at some point.
• 1 credit card from a bank I’ve never heard of. The bank likely does not exist anymore and the expiration date on the card was… 1999. It had a credit limit of $500, which wouldn’t get me very far these days. So apparently I have heard of the bank enough to apply and receive a credit card from them. When I was a freshman in college.

There’s loads of other great stuff in there, I’m sure, but for now I must rest. It is a school-night, after all.

¹ “You never know!” is a phrase which I will always attribute to my dad. Fortunately it goes through my head every time I try to ‘find a place’ for something I don’t really need, so I think of him often

Each time I begin to get into a habit of posting, I end up falling off track after a month or so. It wasn’t so long ago that our girls’ night into the city to see Wicked! was so far off into the future that it wasn’t really even on my radar. Now it’s already 2 months past.

So to recap: Like many movies, I wanted to read the book before seeing the musical. The book was good– I enjoy knowing the full background to stories. But in this case, I think I enjoyed the musical even more. It’s been quite a while since I’d seen a musical- I forgot how much I love them! The sets were wonderful- I did snap a couple of pictures before the show started. It was funny as several of us who had read the book remembered things differently- the changes between the book and the musical. We knew the differences were there, but couldn’t always agree as to what the differences were, exactly. Becky remembered someone being red, I thought another character was blue, and none of us could recall exactly how the shoes were depicted in the book. Not surprisingly, being limited in length and a musical to boot, the ending of the theatrical version was more preferable than that in the book, but then I’ve always been a fan of fantasy.

Also since then… a new car and the first of the long end-of-year holidays! Less than a month now until we’re off to Aberdeen for Christmas!