Do any Chicagoistas know why there have been cops and dogs everywhere on the red line downtown for the last week or two? I thought maybe it was Bush-related, but he is gone and the canines remain.

I didn't see canines last week when I was working downtown, but something was definitely up with the red line. Every day there were 3 outbound trains before an inbound would show up. Wierd.

I found out that the Rolling Stones saw King Lear at the Goodman while they were in town. Awesome!

Part of The Day After was filmed in KC (where I was in HS at the time). It was really spooky to see such familiar places in that context. Things were very quiet at school for a few days when that movie came out.

I remember thinking every big crash was a bomb of some sort. Since I lived in London in the 80s, at least twice it was a bomb. But if it was a big huge crash, I thought radiation poisoning first, nail bomb second.

No sushi tonight. I am quite sad. This is the problem with being spoiled.

Got irritable when teaching tonight. People need to be there, you know? Not just show up and amble through the class. I need more urgency and less chatter.

Hmmph. Pissy little mood. Luckily I can stay up late watching TV and eating chocolate cupcakes. That might fix things.

Skipping and poking head to post that, according to the Buffista Calendar,today is a double Buffista birthday: Burrell's and Calli's.

Happy birthdays! With lots of wishes for a great day and a wonderful year!

Can't talk about PR until this evening! Boy I wish I was at home watching that instead of here!

Happy birthday Calli and Burrell!

Have I mentioned that sushi is ridiculously expensive here? There are exactly two places you can get (non marks and spencer) sushi in this city, and both a ridiculously, hugely overprice. Por ejemplo: €4 for 1 piece of red tuna. One piece! Four euro! A small plate of sushi that would cost me about $8 in Kentucky, of all places, is €20 here. So sushi, she is not for me right now. Sigh. I can't wait to get to London where the sushi is plentiful and cheap.

Just think, you're an Irish sushi-pioneer. After a couple of months of you paying high prices, they'll be opening up more sushi shops and driving down the price!

...well, it could happen.

In other news, I am awake and it's still dark, which is both annoying and disorientating.

I'm awake and it's still dark too. I think they call this fall here. Sigh. It was wet, too, and I keep getting to the bus stop right when there's a freaky thirty-minute lull between buses. And the bus that always does arrive is the one that takes somewhere between twenty and thirty minutes to get to the hospital, way longer than the other five fifteen minute buses that never show up. Today, one bus showed up, disgorged some people, and only let like two on before shutting the door. The poor lot of us were standing in the cold, wet rain befuddled until we realized there was a second bus just a couple minutes behind. Thus my feet have been wet all morning.

I had a middle school teacher who loved to talk about nuclear war and the effects of such on the skin of people.

Same here. We actually had a school-wide assembly about the whole subject, with films shown and so on. I freaked big time, and had nightmares for years afterwards. I think the teacher who organized the thing got some sort of reprimand, actually, since the parents of the kids were unaware of just how horriffic the A/V portion of the assembly was.

Sumi, I'm pretty much with you on all of that. And despite the unpleasantness, I thnk Laura might have won it for Jeffrey by forcing him to lose the OMGWTFLeatherBubbleShorts. I also think that if Uli had been a little more attentive to color transitions from one outfit to the next (in the latter half anyway, the early pieces she did it beautifully) she'd have made it a tougher decision.

The two pieces of Jeffrey's that the judges called out as not working - that was interesting. It looked to me like he was trying to do an Uli piece and a Laura piece - I need to look at the collection again and see if there's something in there that might have been a Michael. If so, interesting strategy, to sort to take them on directly.

Overall, pretty satisfying.

::chafes at the PR talk because it is waiting for me at HOME::

Errr. . .I think might have the aforementioned internet addiction as I am posting/reading posts when in fact I should be taking an exam so that I can make it into work ontime. Instead, I'm trying to remember if I ever had a teacher/professor who ever discussed nuclear fallout, and I'm blank. Though, living in the South, I've heard my fair share of "You're going to burn in the fiery pits of hell!" Does that count?

Okay. Seriously. Gotta take this test.