The Next Dark Age
We're in it Now
Chop it Up
There is this new sandwich place in the Glen Town Center that my mother had been hearing raves about and yesterday, since I had eaten Noodles & Company for three meals in a row, I tried it.
Chop it Up, on Tower Road, it a Wrap and Salad place. They have a menu of specialty wraps and salads as well as a “custom hand craft” menu for high maintenance picky eaters like me.
The store itself is nothing to look at – flooring like a warehouse, and the tables are rather uninviting. There were only three of us in there at 11:30 on a Saturday. But I imagine that if it gets really crowded in the lunch crowd you won’t be able to hear yourself think.
You pick a lettuce: spinach, iceberg, romaine or (for a 50 cent upcharge) the “spring mix”. Then you pick a wrap flavor and four menu items to put inside it. The portions are huge – I took half of mine home.
Here is where they get you:
A standard wrap starts at $5.75. Every single type of meat has an upcharge, starting with tofu at $1.50 and up to $3.25 for steak. Six of the eight available cheeses have an upcharge, as do various other options like mushrooms and avocado.
I ordered a wrap on the golden wheat tortilla with turkey (an extra $1.75), romaine, cheddar, cucumber and avocado (an extra $.50) with the house secret ranch. It was fine. Required a fork to eat the filling before I could pick up the actual wrap. On the first bite, I was pleased that the “secret ranch” had a kick to it. Then I realized that the kick was just black pepper and there was way too much of it. But it was decent.
They win points for having Diet Dr Pepper at the soda fountain. They lose those point for charging $1.75 for cups smaller than those in my kitchen.
I will try this place again in the fall, when soup is a better idea. I’m thinking that for carry out, splitting a wrap and getting some soup for dinner sounds pretty good. But this is not where I want to go to have a quiet lunch and read my book.
Tricia
The summer after my freshman year of college, a girl from my high school was murdered. Her name was Tricia. I didn’t know her well, and I hadn’t talked to her in a couple of years, but I remember her as a nice kid and a great student. She was a year behind me and a week away from leaving for college when she was stabbed to death on her front porch in the middle of the night. It rather rocked my town because:
A. This stuff never happens in Glenview
B. It was a victim that we knew
C. The police were convinced that she knew her killer. Which means that we knew her killer.
I remember the talk around town at the time. She had her housekey out in her hand. The dog didn’t bark. No one heard Tricia scream. And I remember that one of the rumored suspects was a kid that lived on my street.
Glenview was totally unprepared to investigate such a case, and it went unsolved. My friend Rich, who is the director of the bird rescue where I volunteer, is also a police officer and part of a suburban taskforce that was formed to investigate these crimes. It is my understanding that Tricia’s case was a catalyst to the creation of this task force and I can tell you that decade later, when next a woman was murdered in Glenview, there was an arrest in about five minutes. That was a domestic abuse case.
Anyway. It seems there has been a break in Tricia’s case. The Chicago Tribune reports that Michael Gargiulo, formerly of Glenview and now living in California, was arrested in an unrelated attempted murder. He is now being tied to a 2001 murder in California, a 2005 murder, and to Tricia.
I was on the phone with my brother when I read this, and we both grabbed our yearbooks. I graduated GBS in 1992, Tricia graduated in 1993, Gargiulo graduated in 1994 and my brother graduated in 1996.
I didn’t know this guy, but he played football as a sophmore. He would have been a teammate of several people we knew. And he would have been all of seventeen at the time of the murder.
I don’t know if this guy killed Tricia. I don’t know if I want him to be the one, so that we can close the case. Or if I just don’t want to know that a kid in our town could do such a thing. But somewhere out there is someone that got 15 years of a life that Tricia didn’t get and I had forgotten until today how angry that makes me.
You can read the new developments here and here.
The Deep Tissue Massage
The first time I went to the suburban chain, Heavenly Massage, it was with their $99 Day at the Spa advertisement. Facial, massage and pedicure. My verdict was that it was perfectly functional, but I felt very shuffled around and it was not the place for the “relaxing spa” experience (they don’t put you in a big fluffy robe with a tall glass of ice water, and the reception area shares space with the waiting area and the manicure room. Loud.) . Particularly awkward, I remember, was that the three ladies that took care of me were all of the eastern European – little patience for modesty – types.
Having said that, when I want a good deal on a massage that grinds my muscles into pudding, this is where I go. And since by Tuesday I knew I wasn’t going to make it through this week, I took today off and called this morning for an appointment.
The Deep Tissue Massage is not what you do when you want to “relax”. It is what you do when the muscles between your neck and shoulder blades actually hurt to touch. This is not for the la-di-da spa experience. In fact, it is sometimes actually painful. And afterward, your skin might even “feel the burn”. Hot stone treatments are good for the kind of relaxing that could put you to sleep. Swedish massage is the thing in between. Good for the newbies.
I needed it. You know how I know I needed it? Because the therapist, Meloney (yes, I did spell that correctly), spent so much time on my shoulders that she skipped other parts of my body to keep the appointment to an hour. But I feel so much better now.
Next Time: Edumacation on the Therapeutic Facial
At the Refuge – Henwen
I first met Henwen two weeks ago, when I worked in his room. I let him out to hang around the top of him cage. Tough to get him back in, though.
Today, Jose brought him upstairs to hang out in the kitchen. He wasn’t interested in any treats, but he soaked up all of the attention. But even better was that when I left him alone to sweep the front room, he didn’t make a fuss. Just looked around, checking things out.
We had a moment when I dumped the dust pan into the garbage. It has a long stick, like a broom that scared him into flying into the sink. He wasn’t hurt, and he stepped right back up to go back to her perch. He was really a sweetheart.
Henwen is up for adoption and you can read more about him here.
My Carbon Footprint
Ha! Look how green I am!
The Chicago Tribune had an article about some British scientists talking about a good way to reduce one’s carbon footprint:
Limiting family size is “the simplest and biggest contribution anyone can make to leaving a habitable planet for our grandchildren,” the editorial’s authors said.
Before reading the full article, I thought – Hello. Is this article really going to reach the target audience? But this statistic was interesting:
In a nation where Texas‘ 23 million people account for more greenhouse gas emissions than all 720 million Sub-Saharan Africans, even small rates of U.S. population growth may have a disproportionate impact on global warming, said the UN’s Haug.
You can read the article here.
Back to School
I have my books. I just paid my tuition. And class starts Tuesday. If I have a brain cell in my head, I will spend the weekend getting two weeks ahead in the reading. Because no joke, that helps a lot.
At the end of my last class, I remember asking my mother what I did every weekend before I was in school. And a mere summer later I don’t remember how I got all of the work done. And seriously, during football season?
The course is Project Management and the classroom is online. I think I’m ready.
Pet Adoption Question
The Chicago Tribune had an article about the screening processes used by animal shelters in advance of an adoption. You might be aware that I have a side in this one.
This is what the shelters say:
“You have no idea how traumatic abandonment is for animals,” said Jim Borgelt, president of the Chicago Animal Shelter Alliance, a coalition of 15 “no-kill” shelters. “Of course, we want animals to find homes, but we don’t want to do it without any regard for the end result.”
Alliance members adopt between 14,000 and 15,000 dogs and cats annually. Of those, 3 percent to 6 percent—or roughly 750—are returned.
And the other side:
Katie Popovich recently accompanied her boyfriend to a North Side animal shelter in search of a dog. When a beagle-border collie mix immediately nuzzled against them, they were smitten.
But the 22-year-olds received a considerably chillier response from the human behind the counter. “It seemed like we were instantly thrown into this category that we were just kids and not responsible,” she said, adding that they are now talking with breeders.
The rescue where I volunteer, which is only for parrots, has a pretty serious screening process, and it does make people angry. I have heard, “They make you volunteer before they let you adopt.” Parrots aren’t easy, and if someone that once had a canary wants to adopt a macaw, we worry. The grain of truth to the accusation is that we will suggest spending time onsite with the birds so that our directors can see that the adoptors can handle the large birds.
This article does a good job of laying out the issue. But I don’t think I have to tell you that it glosses over the horror stories with the mention of the “return” rate.
It mentions expense, but let me give you numbers: two years ago my dog had a thyroid tumor. It took $2,000 in tests to diagnose and $3,000 for the surgery and after care.
There is no excuse for being rude to people that want to adopt an animal. At the same time, if you can’t manage some patience with the adoption process, do you really have the patience for a new pet?
You can read the full text of the article here.
Fired Librarian
The Chicago Tribune had an article about a Michigan library assistant that was fired for writing a fictional tell-all about her weird patrons. Here is an exerpt from the introduction:
“After working at a public library in a small, rural Midwestern town (which I will refer to as Denialville, Michigan, throughout this book) for fifteen years, I have encountered strains and variations of crazy I didn’t know existed in such significant portions of our population.”
I am fascinated and disgusted by this concept. On one hand, I want to click right over to BN and find it and on the other hand – I can’t even take reality TV – this might be too much for me.
The irony of a library firing an employee for writing a book is not lost on me. But if this article is correct in that the patrons in questions are “easily identifiable in our small community”, I would have fired her, too. And now she has all of the publicity that she needs to make a go of it as a novelist, so she isn’t getting any sympathy from me.
You can read the full article here.
Practicing Photo Stuff
You can’t possibly be interested in this, but I am practicing messing around with online photo album stuff. Because I can do that while I am watching TV. I can’t read books. Can’t even watch DVDs because there is Always. Something. On Cable. I am flipping back and forth between a LOTR movie and a Harry Potter movie. And if I weren’t doing that, I’d be watching the 100 Best SNL Moments. And if I wasn’t doing that I’d be flipping back and forth between football and the Olympics. Anyway. Let’s see if this works:
http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf
Indianapolis II
I am terrible at taking pictures. Mostly because I am lazy, but also because my eyes are obnoxiuously sensitive to light (no joke, that is a clinical diagnosis from the rock-star neurologist at ENH) so that I am either wearing sunglasses and unable to see properly, or not wearing my sunglasses and the glare is so bad I am unable to see properly. This pic, the capital building, is bad because I am too lazy to find the pretty dome shot that does not involve a tree.
This is the shark I petted at the zoo. Joy wouldn’t touch it.
I took a million pictures at the zoo. Most were like this..too far away.
This was the view of the city walking back from the park. If I were really interested in practicing, I would have taken this one fifteen different ways. But alas, I used my diskspace on all of the giraffes.
The Next Dark Age 
