Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Last Day of August

 So we have lived here for, more or less, one entire year.  While it is still Hell's Porch Hot, it's the time of year when some days it isn't too bad in the early morning or after 5 pm.  It will still be hot in another month or so but not "cannot do anything outside" hot.

On the last weekend of July 2021, we loaded up a U-Haul and brought our kids and my Honda Element down to Olive Branch, MS.  We got the kids enrolled in school which started that Thursday and Nightingale headed back to Chicago that weekend.  


After things were settled and we realized that I needed to be back there as well to help with packing, purging, and selling whatever I could, I joined her.  

To say we made the move on the Highest Difficulty Setting is an understatement.  The crazy idea was conceived on a visit down here in June.  We would pretend to rent from our in-laws so our kids could register while we waited for our house to sell and then buy the in-laws' house.  Somehow that morphed into buying their house without the renting option.

Because it was so bleeding hot, we didn't really unload the U-Haul in a logical fashion.  It was more just getting it done and getting out of the heat.  We put things in storage but there were a few boxes I would have liked to work on while Nightingale was up north and I had nothing else to do while the kids were at school.

I'm pretty isolated down here.  Working from Home doesn't afford me the opportunity to meet anyone and since I'm not running anymore, that avenue isn't there either.  The only "friend" I've made is the grandmother of one of my daughter's friends.  We meet at the Red Park and we all went to the Zoo once.  

The good news is my kids, especially Boris, are thriving at school.  They both got into SpotLight, and love it.  



Edit from the Future:  I didn't get to finish this post back in August, but I'm publishing it just to get it out of the draft queue.




Sunday, August 28, 2022

Avocado Toast with runny eggs

I saw this on Twitter but cannot find the tweet because I forgot to like it.  Or maybe I did but the poster took it down.  Anyway, the joke is:

Made me some Avocado toast. I guess I’m not buying a home anytime soon




These turned out to be delicious.  Now i just have to figure out how to flip them over without breaking the yokes.








Thursday, August 18, 2022

Good Bye ChicagoNow, it's been a slice

 I started blogging at ChicagoNow on October 1, 2012, although I haven’t really published much since Boris and Natasha were born. Anyway, the Powers-That-Be at the Chicago Tribune and Alden Global Capital closed the site down today.

No one communicated anything to us either by email or on our Facebook Group. We knew it was coming when our last community manager resigned at the end of June and said we’d heard something in a few days.  And honestly, I suspected the end was coming when our first and best community manager Jimmy Greenfeld took the trib buyout and left.  Then the annoying ads in the middle of our posts came.  

Some bloggers continued to post even though the Front Page (landing page, home page whatever term you prefer) wasn’t updating. A few bloggers wrote goodbye posts that apparently caught the higher-ups’ attention because those were taken down.

It’s kinda crappy the way they chose to go about it. Some of those blogs brought in large audiences which I’m sure led to decent passive revenue. I suspect our site didn’t cost them much especially once they cut the monetary rewards for Best Post and Best Gallery (which I won a few times).

No skin off my nose as I wasn’t one of the paid talents (they use to pay some of the heavy hitters but stopped that years ago and the heavy hitters went elsewhere). But I was hoping to post a Last Post on my blogoversary in October and was also hoping to link to a podcast I might be on; the ChicagoNow traffic would have helped.

When I  joined CN, if you wanted to get a space there,  you needed a pitch.  My wife and I were house hunting and so Adventures in House Hunting was created.  Ironically, sometime after my first or second post, we made an offer on a house.  That house would be the home my kids were born in and filled with treasured memories.

At some point, our Editor announced that you could blog about anything you wanted.  Spoiler alert: you always could, but this just made it official.  

It was like Hogwarts for Bloggers.  I know with Rowling's TERF issues that reference is not as pure as it once was.  I said what I said.

I made many virtual and even real friendships with many bloggers here.  I also pissed off a few and we are no longer FB friends.  boo hoo.  

Some people were really cool, including the heavy hitters.  They gave my Fan Page a like when that thing had more currency than it does today.  Others felt it was a zero-sum game and wouldn't click the button, which is fine.  Except for the one person who kept asking me for tech support but couldn't click like.  WTF.


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