Labor Day and the Chicago part of my trip

I like the idea of labor day. A day just to reflect on the labor movement and work and the improvements in working conditions and where we still have to go. Personally, I would be for an increase in the minimum wage. For me this year, it will be a day of rest. We've been much too busy the last few weeks.

Now to summarized recent trip (Chicago part):

After flying half way across the country to Chicago my wife spent her entire time there no further than five minutes away from O'Hare . Our hotel was across the street from the airport and so was her class in low vision. I on the other hand got to hang with some friends. Friday night we arrived in town late enough to miss dinner, but not late enough to be West Coast sleepy. Killer and his wife, Heather, drove forty minutes from their home out to the "godforsaken, mob infested, suburb" to have a drink and chat. They wouldn't be able to hang the next day because they were attending a wedding in Wisconsin.

The next day, I hopped on the CTA and made my way to Bucktown where my friend Dave lives. His directions were to get off "Western." Note for any travellers to Chicago. They reuse names on their CTA trains going in and out of town on the Northside and Southside. There were 3 stops called Western and 2 called California all on the same blue line.

Anyway, I found Dave's place. We hopped back on the train and went downtown and walked around a bit. We then tried to see the Bodyworld Exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. That Exhibit was sold out, but we walked around that Mueseum for a couple of hours. It features a couple of Midwestern things that I appreciated because I had never seen them in a Museum before. The Museum has a working coal mine underneath. You can go down and learn all about methods for extracting coal from the old centuries until the present. Neat stuff. They also had a John Deere display about agriculture that taught about the hundreds of uses for corn and soy and an actual German U-Boat from World War II.

Dave is a writer with about two dozen short stories to his credit and a novel that was just picked up by an agent. We spent a bit of our time talking about writing, which was sort of nice because I don't do a whole lot of that around here.

We ended up having dinner back at the hotel with Sandra. That's all we did in Chicago. The next morning we flew out to New York. I'll get to that later.