I'm on the balcony at work, drinking a cold Diet Dr. Pepper and enoying the wireless and the weather.

My life doesn't suck too hard today.

I'm a mean cat-mama right now because we just got back from the vet's office. At least she now has her checkup for the year, her distemper shot, and her semi-quarterly claw trimming out of the way, but boy, she was complaining at full volume all the while! On the way out to the car, I passed by three neighbors and the postman who all looked at the carrier and the loud animal within with pity for both me and her.

And it's strange how the horrible carrier turns into a refuge while we're in the waiting room for the vet. She immediately leapt down from the examining table to the floor and scratched to get into the carrier after the nurse left. It took her a few minutes of the comfy darkness before she ventured out to explore the room and rub her chin against the cabinets. She was on her way to climbing in the sink when the vet showed up.

Uh. One of the Marina City Towers is on fire.

They had a fire there not too long ago that was just a small in-unit fire--is it bad enough to be seen outside the building?

I think it's another in-unit fire. I can see the smoke.

The Bob Newhart buildings!?

I don't think that Bob Newhart used Marina City for either his office or his apartment, but they are locally known as the Corncob Towers for obvious reasons.

So I managed to get a virus on my work computer today. Every time I tried to delete it or run virus software, the computer would restart. That's fun. I think I may have to ship it off to IT on Monday.

Am home now.

Those cats looked pissed.

Haven't seen anything on the Tribune, but this is cool:

World War II dive bomber recovered from lake

Do people know that the US Navy did much of its training of aircraft carrier pilots in Lake Michigan during WWII? They took these old ferries and made little aircraft carriers out of them. The worlds only fresh-water, coal-fired, paddle-wheeled aircraft carriers. If a pilot made a bad landing and went over the side, he'd fall onto a paddle wheel.

I was late getting to the vet's because I had to have the IT people down in Texas do a remote virus scan for something I picked up earlier this week while I was looking for info on my mp3 player.

Followup to tom's post: George HW Bush did his Navy flight training at Navy Pier.

ETA:

They took these old ferries and made little aircraft carriers out of them.

One of those old ferries was the Eastland, which was pulled from the Chicago River after it flipped over, killing over 800 people in 1915. It was renamed the USS Wilmette and operated as a ferry throughout the 1930s and only after the war began was it converted into a training vessel.