I don't know what life is like where you live, but we've been in the middle of a drought that's gone on for about two months. We did have several days' worth of rain right in the middle of the drought, but it wasn't enough to actually break it. The occasional thunderstorm hasn't exactly helped much either, since the rain simply rolls off of the hardened earth and down the storm drains.
The heat hasn't been unbearable --save for this week-- it's just been dry.
So with that in mind, there haven't been a lot of reasons for me to work outside much.
I've been taking a couple weeks' worth of break from working on the deck because I needed to recover from helping my oldest move, and I wasn't planning on baking outside in that heat this week.
So, what have I been up to?
Cleaning. And organizing.
Not exactly fun work per se, but it is satisfying to see some of my stuff finally get organized.
We also have an electronics recycling coming up in a couple of months, so I finally decided that it was time to clear out some spare parts and whatnot that I won't be using ever again. Such as 15 year old graphics cards from our old Microsoft Vista machine that is also going away. That PC missed the last recycling day because I hadn't properly wiped the hard drive, so I'm not going to take any chances and will do that work sometime in late September.
That cleaning was how I rediscovered my old scanner, and I've also found some of the doodads you need to set up a shortwave antenna outside. As I organized the parts, I noticed I was missing a few items so I hopped on to my go-to site for all things shortwave, Universal Radio, to see what the prices were to fill in the gaps on my supplies. Universal is in the suburbs of Columbus, a couple of hours' drive away, so I always felt good about supporting the semi-local economy when I bought items from them.
Alas, this is what I found when I went to their online catalog.
You have to expand it to read it properly.
I knew that this day might come, but November 2020? How did I not know this before now?
***
This isn't the first store that I've supported that has closed its doors for the owners' retirement. Boardwalk Hobby Shop on the east side of town shut down in 2020-2021, and if I had the money I would have loved to have bought the place to keep it running. Since I knew I didn't know beans about actually running a business, let alone a game store, I had to pass.
I first walked through that door in 1991, not knowing what to expect. From Davion M. via Yelp.
It hurts seeing this. From the Mt. Lookout Business Association.
But still, I spent a lot of time in that store. My kids grew up going there with me, and Marilyn --one of the owners-- used to hold the kids when they were infants.
Myra's Dionysus, a small Mediterranean inspired restaurant near the University of Cincinnati, was a fun place to eat at.
It was in the storefront of a century old building, a hole-in-the-wall place, really, but it was one of the first places I'd ever eaten at that had a heavily vegetarian menu. When my youngest decided to become a vegetarian, Myra's became more than just a place to eat at, but an inspiration. When Myra's closed because she was in her 80s and wanted to retire, that hurt. I couldn't begrudge her retirement years, but I really miss that place. At least Myra's daughter has begun posting some of Myra's old recipes at Myra's Kitchen Legacy. I've made the hummus, and it is dead on for what we used to eat at Myra's.
***
These are all memories now.
I never quite understood when people my grandparents' age used to talk about places that don't exist, such as some of the theaters downtown, but I do now. It's both a blessing and a curse of aging, I suppose, to see things change and long for what once was. But time does move on, and new memories are always made. We don't live forever, so we shouldn't expect our world to remain constant either.
One of the things I've just gotten into the habit of doing is logging into CurseForge before I enter into WoW. Considering that it only takes a few seconds to make sure my addons are updated, it's not a big deal.
But yesterday, I just realized that something is a bit out of date:
No, not my Addons.
She's nice and all, but why hasn't Alexstrasza been replaced by that elf that looks like a purple female version of Kael'thas?
Either someone at CurseForge is lying down on the job or Blizz hasn't provided a new graphic for use. I remember that when Dragonflight released, this graphic was already set at about a month before the Dragon Isles opened up.
I've been on a bit of a 70s kick lately, and that doesn't mean I've been wearing loud clothing* or considering putting in wooden paneling in the house.
Sorry, that's not Boston, but The Doobie Brothers. (True story: my dad had absolutely no clue what a "doobie" was, so when I made a joke back in the 90s about the Doobies' concerts probably smelling pretty dank, he looked at me like I'd grown another arm. "Dad," I said, "A 'doobie' is another name for a joint. So the band's name is a bunch of friends smoking marijuana.")
Anyway, as I've been cleaning since my oldest left home, I've stumbled on the old Intellivision console that we now have in a plastic storage container, and I've begun some investigations as to how to get that and our Atari to connect to a modern television. Ironically enough, the easiest "solution" out there --outside of finding an old CRT television-- is to pull out a VCR and use it to convert the RF signal to a composite signal. Still, I'm not entirely convinced of this method, so I'm poking around at solutions that actually work that don't involve another large piece of electronic equipment.
It may not look like much, but given a 4KB game limitation, it's really quite impressive. From YouTube.
I periodically check out the prices of old 70s-era receivers and other audio equipment, and the asking prices make me cringe. Knowing that a lot of that equipment would likely need the electrolytic capacitors replaced as well as the belts for the cassettes, it's rather sad just how insane the used market has gotten.
Instead of that, at least I could listen to music from the 70s. Hence that Doobie Brothers' line from Takin' It To The Streets in the title.
***
I suppose with a title like that you'd be forgiven if I was referencing the shenanigans happening in Retail WoW's latest expansion, The War Within.
From a blue post on Blizzard forums. Thank you, Snip-and-sketch.
I'm not surprised, and my natural inclination is to look at this as a way to convince more people to spring for Early Access for the next expansion. After all, the beta test ought to have shaken this sort of issue out, but maybe that's an indicator that the beta wasn't as useful as it could have been.
But in general, I'm not shocked by this sort of behavior.
Does anybody else remember the Quel'Delar questline that began with the Battered Hilt drop in the Icecrown Citadel 5-person dungeons in Wrath? When those dungeons were first released, the Battered Hilt dropped far more frequently than intended, so those first several days a ton of people got to work on their Quel'Delar quests before the drop rate was nerfed down to intended levels. Those of us who followed behind those who rushed ahead were left scraping for the occasional drop if you didn't want to spring for 5000 or more gold for one on the Auction House.** Of course, that was a drop for a specific questline, not a general nerf to the actual leveling experience in the game.
Again, given that Microsoft plopped a ton of money on purchasing Activision Blizzard, they want a maximum return on their investment. So, while this ain't loot boxes, this is a way of using FOMO and other psychological tactics to convince people to hand over their money. I expect more of this sort of behavior in the future from Blizzard. Even if the entire issue is an innocent one it will always be viewed from the lens of profits first, players second, because once the trust between developer and player has been broken, it can't easily be restored.
And that's all I'll say about that.
*With or without Garanimals tags. You don't know about Garanimals? Hoo boy... Where do I begin?
From Pinterest.
Whomever came up with Garanimals basically made pattern matching easy for parents. Clothing came with animal tags on them; match the animals up for the different pieces (shirts, pants, skirts, etc.) and you have matching clothing. Sounds great in theory, but the joke among my peers as we became teenagers was that the clothing was so loud you needed help just trying to figure out what was supposed to go with what. Garanimals were all the rage in the late 70s and early 80s, but they've recently made a comeback aimed at clothing for babies and toddlers.
My Questing Buddy has been going into Alterac Valley with me the past week, as she has her eye on some gear that you can buy once you become Exalted with the Stormpike Guard. I know she'd had a rough time in Warsong Gulch in TBC Classic when one of her BiS pieces was available from the Silverwing Sentinels, but I think I might have miscalculated how her competitiveness was going to surface in AV.
One of the things that I've been doing since my oldest moved out is clean.
Part of it is simply cleaning the areas where the guinea pigs once had their cages, but beyond that I've begun moving stuff around as I clean so that I can finally give the house a thorough cleaning it's not had in at least a decade.
Normally this is a Spring Cleaning sort of thing, but since I'm taking a short break from working on the deck --and given the heat this week, that's very much a good thing-- I've channeled my energies toward making my space that much cleaner instead.*
Alas for me, that means I've been hit with nostalgia of a different sort.
Right now, I've got this out of the basement, cleaned up --thank you, isopropyl alcohol-- and currently scanning away:
It's a Radio Shack Pro-2035.
I acquired that from a yard sale before I began playing WoW, so probably sometime around 2006 - 2008, for the grand total of $35. Considering the original list price of $449.99 in 1995, that was a pretty damn good deal.
For a while I wondered why the person was selling it so cheaply, but a few years afterward I discovered why he sold what was at one time the top of the line scanner that Radio Shack had: Cincinnati Police and Fire were moving toward a trunked system, which this scanner could not receive.
Still, there are quite a few broadcasts in my local area that can be received by this scanner, so this afternoon I've been hearing about all of the paramedic and fire department activity within several miles of my house.**
***
I was never really a scanner listener, although when I did that 8 month stint at Radio Shack we did have our (then) top of the line scanner up and running, which made for very interesting listening when there was nobody in the store. There was a McDonalds about a football field away, and the things people said into the hot mic while waiting to order at the drive thru made me realize I should keep my mouth shut while in a drive-thru lane.
For a while, these scanners used to be able to listen in on old style cellular phone calls; that became a bit of a political problem early in the 90s when a scanner listener happened to listen in on a conversation between top level Republican Congressmen discussing strategy via cell phone, and as a consequence of that leaked conversation a law was quickly passed banning the cell frequencies from these scanners. That's not an issue now, given that digital communications have advanced significantly since those days, but it did highlight digital privacy issues even way back when.
***
I don't really have a listening station in the house these days, since I no longer work out of the basement, but I ought to consider making one somewhere. Right now, if I want to listen to shortwave I bring the radio upstairs with me and place it in a room away from my home office, as the computers there interfere with reception.
No, this is not me. I only have a couple of radios. From Wikipedia, and this is the attribution: By Mw0rkb - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24682534
I guess I ought to add an outside antenna (or two) to the project list...
*This was all part of my project plan I had been working on while I was figuring out costs associated with the deck, as mentioned here.
**That's interesting, but it can be morbidly so. I had to get up and go do something else away from my work desk when a call for paramedics for a suicide attempt came over the air.
While my teenage years were in the early to late 80s, my formative childhood years as a kid born at the end of the 1960s were in the Era of Plaid.
The 1970s were so damn long ago...
How long, you ask?
In two years it'll be the 50th anniversary of the release of the first Boston album.
My first copy was a cassette from the mid-80s, long enough for the album to be classified as Classic Rock by some stations. From Spotify.
How long?
The US Bicentennial fell in the summer between my First and Second Grade.
(Yeah, I'm old.)
So, in honor of that dubious distinction, here's some 70s memes. And no, none of those "The 70s were better!" memes, either.
I disagree, btw. And to be fair, most of these all-in-one cabinet systems were purchased in the 60s but we all grew up with them in the 70s. Except me. My parents didn't have one. We had a Centrex by Pioneer* that they bought in 1978. From EdnSarna.
Yes, my parents' house, built in 1976, still has the paneling in the basement, despite my arguments with my mom to finally get something brighter in there. From Sheila Creamer Bidon.
Remember, these were the people who looked at the punks and new wave crowd and said their fashion sense was terrible. From EdnSarna.
Let's kill three birds with one stone: Bad clothing, WKRP in Cincinnati, and the Cincinnati Reds (aka The Big Red Machine). From Ridiculous 70s Memes.
Oh, and there were blockbuster movies, movies that people watched all summer and stayed in theaters for more than three months. From YouTube.
Again, another item my family never had. I really need to create a Meme Monday on memes about things my parents never owned. From The Gamer.
And finally, one more meme:
It might be cheating, combining CB Radio and Star Wars like this, but if loving this is wrong, I don't wanna be right... From Imgur.
*For clarity's sake, Centrex was a sub-brand of Pioneer Electronics for their all-in-one stereo systems. If you ask an audiophile, they're not as good as the "Receiver Wars" receivers of the 70s, but if you had a good pair of speakers they punched above their weight class.
This is the model my parents had, the KH-5511. It had a cassette, not an 8-Track, and they got it in 1978, so cassettes were hard to come by for a few years since the 8-Track market dominated so thoroughly. From EBay.
I have been enjoying the opportunity to play Alterac Valley this past week, and Friday night my Questing Buddy and I participated in something I haven't in quite a while...
The summoning of Ivus, the Forest Lord:
Needless to say, we won this one.
Yeah, I didn't make the leaderboard, but I also was holding down Iceblood Graveyard so that we could keep our side in the fight. Sometimes, the smarter thing to do is do the small things so that the team can win.
Thursday night I was visiting my local game store, perusing the shelves,
The silver dragon has a few friends now!
when the Lofi music played over the speakers by the dragon began playing a familiar tune. "Hey, that sounds like Silvermoon City!" I thought. As I'd played Blood Elves the 3-4 years of my WoW career, I became quite familiar with that seven note theme.
Here's the original...
The music quickly moved on to something else, but when I got home afterward I hopped online to see if I could find the Lofi version that I just heard.
I think this is it.
My first thought was that Blizz had released more lofi beats in advance of their next Retail expansion, TWW*, but it was released by a third party instead. Lofi isn't the most difficult music style to emulate, but it does take skill (technical or whatever) to transcribe the score into something else. Yes yes, I know that generative AI and other software programs can assist in this, but it does also take critical listening to get the sound "just right", in the same way that writing fiction using generative AI doesn't really have a good voice (yet).
Anyhoo, I'm typically in my happy place when I'm perusing a game store, so hearing the strains of Silvermoon City just kind of made my evening.
***
Oh, and while I was there to peruse RPG materials, such as this:
I could not find this at Gen Con, as the Kobold Press area looked like it was completely wiped out by the end of Sunday.
I did discover that a game discontinued back in 2010 was making a comeback:
You can get the unpainted ones too if you want to paint the minis yourself. From Boardgamegeek.
Yes, Heroscape is hitting the stores after a 14 year hiatus. Well, I am surprised.
*The World Wound? No, that's a Pathfinder thing. The World Within? Sounds like a description of The Underdark from D&D. The War Within? Yeah, that's it, but everybody types TWW as if they were repeating corporate jargon: "Okay, we need to complete the prework for the CAB and then once that's done we need to focus on the RDT and weekly SDT, then on Monday we handle the DR issues in the DSR." (And yes, those are all real corporate acronyms.)
I realize that the title of this post isn't exactly a new sentiment, but I was thinking about it while I was watching a YouTube video over lunch.
Yes, Megan's posts on social media had started popping up in my YouTube feed, and the "Life of an English Teacher in Japan" shorts were incredibly quirky and fun to watch. That Megan was another member of Team Red ("Go Team Red!") also endeared me to her.
Well, today she dropped the video you see above, and it's a ~21 minute video about why she left what seemed to be her dream job.
The TL;DR is that yes, it was her dream job, but it wasn't what she hoped it would be.
From housing issues --and issues left by her predecessor-- to dealing with the loneliness and the bureaucracy (not to mention the language barrier), there was a lot to work through.
I always had a lot of respect for people who left what they'd known to come to a foreign land and make a new life for themselves, but for every success story there are a lot more stories that are like Megan and Ben's. When you couple that to the knowledge that no matter what you do and how much you succeed you are still considered "the other"... Yeah, that is something that can be hard to accept.
***
To bring this around to gaming, these are themes that can be explored in any rich game world. Now that I think about it, they have been explored in the Dragon's Age and Mass Effect games, but in MMOs not quite so much.
The thing is, I'm not quite sure whether it would be better to be explored in fiction or in an MMO itself. If you put in quest chains in an MMO, you run the risk of simply telling rather than showing the problems that are faced by people who are The Other. And MMOs aren't typically well known for showing rather than telling, because they do often seem to subscribe to "The School of Massive Info Dumps" when presenting quests.
I honestly don't know the answer to this conundrum.
If you're busy in Blackrock Depths, you just might know the answer to that question...
Good ol' Private Rocknot, he of the "I love my ale so much I assault kegs for more" behavior in the watering hole in Blackrock Depths, seems to have found his love.
Although... a Succubus?
I mean, Mistress Nagmara does seem to be nice enough, and we did help her out with that love po...
::BLINK BLINK::
Oh.
Now that I think about it, how is it that the Private didn't drink the love potion and fall in love with the kegs of ale instead?
I've been asked this question periodically in MMOs by a variety of people, especially when we need someone like a tank or healer in a group format, and I've typically waved the question off with a "I just like playing Mages".
Of course, when I started playing WoW back in 2009, the answer would have been that I just liked playing Paladins --I think I have three in Retail at this point in time*-- but by the time I quit playing Retail in 2014 I'd switched to playing Rogues. That style of toon persisted through Age of Conan, Elder Scrolls Online, and into my early forays into Classic WoW, but I have since returned to being primarily a Mage or Mage-like player and I don't deviate from that very much at all.
If you'd have given me the opportunity to play an Elemental Shaman in TBC Classic --and I did request that-- I would have likely continued playing that Shaman a lot longer. After all, of the three specs a Shaman has, Elemental is the DPS caster type**, the most Mage-like of the Shaman specs.
But when I hear about people who, to get ready for a new expansion to whatever MMO they're playing, plot out the leveling and preparation process for all of their toons, I simply don't grok that. If you like that, great, but to me that looks too much like work.
Maybe it's because I simply don't love these games as much as other people do.
Me: We've discussed this already, Card. I'm not saying I dislike you.
My reasoning for that conclusion stems from my deck work.
In order to figure out how to renovate the deck, I had to do quite a bit of research to make sure that not only could I accomplish this task, but the order in which I was going to accomplish it. As my kids have pointed out to me on numerous occasions, I do love to research a topic when I'm going to do something.
On Friday, I was at the auto dealer while our old '97 Accord was getting regular maintenance taken care of***, and I was writing out what steps I need to perform to complete the deck renovation sometime next year. After that was finished, I began jotting down other projects that I'll be working on the next few years --there are quite a few-- since the kids have left the house and I don't have to worry about waking them up in the morning while I'm working. Before I finished, I'd already plotted out a basic timeline and potential costs and pitfalls before judging the priority of each project.
So why do I research projects such as these, I thought suddenly, but I refuse to do so for video games?
Well, that one's kind of easy: I'd rather figure that out myself since, by and large, whether I fail or succeed at a video game won't directly affect my life.
But screwing up a deck rebuild just might, especially if it collapses while I'm standing on it.
That's fair, I decided as I left the dealership. Despite the opinions of a certain subset of gamers, games don't rise to the level of seriousness found when you're doing repairs or a project around the house. If you've ever had to pay a plumber to show up and fix your fuck-up, you know what I mean.
By extension, if I like playing MMOs, why don't I do more than play one or two toons?**** I just play pretty much one character in a type of game that encourages multiple playthroughs with different types of characters, so why don't I follow along?
Looking back on my game playing, once you get beyond my stand by games such as Sid Meier's Civ series, some of the Total War games, and some other city or civ builder games, I really pretty much stick to a couple of characters. The only real exceptions to this are Stardew Valley and SWTOR; the former you could argue doesn't rise to the story level of a BG3 or World of Warcraft, and the latter I did play through (almost) each class once just to see all of the stories.
(Confession time here: I never finished the Imperial Agent's story in SWTOR; I'm at the end of Taris as far as the story goes, and I kind of left it at that and haven't been back since. So... 8-10 years, maybe? Then again, the reason why I don't play SWTOR much at all has to do with the broken companion pathing, and since that hasn't been fixed in at least 5 years I doubt it will ever get fixed.)
***
The funny thing is, I don't feel like I'm not enthusiastic about video games, it's just... Well, if everybody does it, why should I do it?
It's not as if I haven't leveled new characters before. I went through the stage of starting a new toon for each new expansion in WoW, and I quickly discovered that if I wanted to examine content solo, that was the way to go. By the time the two toons I was leveling in Cataclysm reached their first L80-81 zones, they were mostly empty. And Mists... Well, Pandaria was worse, because Pandaria really was empty. The only exceptions to that were the areas where there were farming dailies and location of that Black Dragon who gives out the legendary questline (whose name escapes me); beyond that there were times when the number of people in a zone were less than 5. Believe me, that starting area once you land in Pandaria would have been a lot easier if I had some more bodies around, but starting out with quest greens from Deepholm and Uldum (which was where I dinged L85) and jumping straight to Pandaria wasn't a fun time either.
I suppose that my experiences leveling those toons in a post-Cataclysm world may have something to do with my lack of desire to level multiple alts, but at the same time game companies have come up with all sorts of ways to speed up the leveling experience itself. Less pain all the way around, right? That might work if you're inclined to level multiple toons and the leveling itself is getting in your way, but... I'm just not really interested.
***
I've seen it bandied about that when you play WoW, you're a WoW player. There's not much room for another game when you play WoW, because playing WoW will consume all of your available time. I do have a bone to pick with that assertion, as I know plenty of people who play multiple MMOs and play other video games on a regular basis. That being said, there's more than a kernel of truth to that statement. If you plot out leveling all of your alts so that you have all of your professions covered and/or all of your potential mains raid ready, well, that takes time. And all of the speedy leveling experiences in the world won't eliminate the time sink of maxing out a half dozen or more toons over the course of an expac.
(Somewhere an altoholic laughed until they wheezed, because they likely have 30 toons to level in the upcoming Retail WoW expansion.)
I guess it comes down to what I want to do with my time. Do I enjoy the leveling experience so much that I want to repeat it a dozen times over? Or even a couple of extra times? And even if I do, will I want to speed along at the pace offered me, or do I want to poke around, doing it my way?
Bender is missing that middle finger, and we're missing "Don't You Forget About Me" playing in the background, but you get the idea. From Tumblr. And The Breakfast Club.
*In an era of dozens of potential toons 3 may not sound like a lot, but when you consider that the toons I've played to a significant degree in Retail WoW are only 6, then 3 is about 50% of my WoW toons.
**The other two being melee DPS (Enhancement) and Healer (Restoration/Resto).
***Before you ask, while I'd like to do this stuff myself, I don't have the tools to make it happen. And I'll be honest in that a car built in October 1996 could decide to give up the ghost at any moment, so I'd rather bring ol' Putt-Putt to a shop that actually has people who have worked on this generation of Hondas before.
****Or replay long story driven video games like other gamers do? Such as finishing Baldurs Gate 3 then restarting the game with a different main character and a different class. Or one of the Mass Effect stories, but with a different person to romance. Or replaying one of the Diablo games ad infinitum.
EtA: Not sure what happened, but was missing half of a sentence. Corrected. Also, corrected a formatting error.
Saturday night, I wasn't doing much, just hanging out in Darnassus in between Alterac Valley runs.
Or a raid. Or a dungeon run. Or... You get the idea.
Until this happened...
I looked up from my typing and found this:
Yeah, your eyes don't deceive you, she was up close in my grill:
I wasn't planning on moving, but I certainly entertained the thought. Of course, that could be what she wanted, so I flirted back just to call her bluff.
But nothing happened. She didn't respond, and neither did I. Since I knew the Alterac Valley Battleground was going to pop in probably 5 minutes or less, I decided to just stand there and watch a YouTube video with WoW up in the background until that happened.
It was an uncomfortable silence.
But then the BG finally alerted, so I winked and went to the Battleground:
Since my oldest is now going to be a Wisconsinite*, I figured that this Meme Monday ought to deal with some of the quirks --gaming and otherwise-- from my fellow Midwesterners.
Yes, we passed Lake Geneva on the way to Milwaukee. Lake Geneva is the home of Gary Gygax, the co-creator of D&D, and the original home of both TSR (the publisher of D&D) and Gen Con.
That's a 'Draw Four' I could get behind. From The Chive.
Yes, it's funny, but it is also not a joke. I've seen it done. From Cheezburger.
Yeah, tornadoes and other severe weather events (minus hurricanes) are pretty much a staple here. From Cheezburger.
This week, we moved my oldest and her partner up to Milwaukee.
Her partner had gotten a job up in Milwaukee, and so they both moved north of Chicago farther up along Lake Michigan.
My job was driving the U-Haul from Cincinnati --where we added some of my oldest's stuff-- up to Dayton, where we loaded her partner's boxes and whatnot.
This was early on in the loading process.
I was met up in Dayton* by my youngest, who was lugging up from Louisville an old kitchen table her boyfriend was unloading, and we put that in the truck as well. Then we went back home to Cincinnati, leaving the truck up north, to get some rest before the epic trip.
Early in the morning on Wednesday we drove up to Dayton, and I settled into my seat for the next several hours.
It's a Ford E-Series engine (something you'd find on a Ford Econoline). It's not well known for being a quiet engine, and the sign saying "the floor will get warm" didn't endear me to the cabin.
Having driven a U-Haul across town back home when I moved my son into his and his partner's apartment, I knew what awaited me: noise.
Sure, THAT U-Haul was a Dodge and this was a Ford, but it still was going to be a noisy ride. I did have one saving grace: I put on my earbuds and plugged into my smartphone, so if people tried to get a hold of me I could talk without fumbling for the phone. The earbuds cut out most of the noise, and I could listen to music and podcasts along the way.
Gentle, my ass.
We took off, and my oldest and her partner, her partner's sister, and the guinea pigs quickly pushed ahead. My wife and youngest were in our Honda CR-V and followed suit, and I lumbered along behind in the U-Haul. At least the U-Haul had air conditioning and automatic transmission, because it was not the most pleasant thing to drive. There was also no cruise control, so between the rough steering and constant need to put my foot on the accelerator, I had no opportunity to get distracted.
Okay, I wasn't driving a big rig, nor did I have
a CB radio, but it certainly felt like what I was
doing as I followed the semis heading west.
The trip west to Indianapolis, and then north to Chicago, reacquainted me with the Indianapolis highways in a way that the trip up I-74 to Gen Con never did.
THIS!!
As soon as we crossed the border from Ohio to Indiana on I-70, the roads almost literally went to shit.
I bounced along like I was driving a trampoline, and I was eternally grateful that I moved the container of cleaning materials from the top of a mountain of boxes to the floor, right next to the truck's sliding door. And what had to have been a cruel joke, all of these signs along I-70 kept proclaiming that Indiana was building "Next Gen Roads".
"How about making your roads CURRENT GEN instead of these pieces of shit!!!" I shouted more than once.
Nevertheless, I pressed on while listening to an episode about Elizabethan Spycraft from Professor Suzannah Lipscomb's Not Just The Tudors podcast. Yes, I am SUCH a nerd.
Somewhere before I reached Indianapolis itself, I discovered another truth about U-Haul trucks: they are thirsty bois.
Putting it on the truck doesn't make it true.
I filled up the gas tank before I reached Indy, and again before I reached I-94 up at the northern edge of Indiana. Holy crap was that tank gigantic, and even more than that was the hole in my wallet after each pit stop.
After that last pit stop --with a short break for lunch sandwiched in between at the exit for West Lafayette, the home of Purdue University-- I spent a miserable time driving through mid-afternoon traffic in Chicago.
There wasn't a point where I was at a standstill, but I crept along just slowly enough so that I couldn't take any pictures of the sights, such as the downtown skyline or a view of Lake Michigan. Or this building:
I was not expecting to see this in Chicago. From LinkedIn.
I knew Steelseries is a Danish company, so when the Steelseries building in Chicago appeared in front of me, I was surprised. Again, I had to fight the truck the entire way through Chicago, so there was no moment where I could take a pic of the building itself.
My drive through Chicago was made more painful by the reality that I didn't want to deal with the toll roads. If I were driving my own car I'd have no issues paying the tolls, but I was driving a rental and I wasn't dealing with anything that might cause me to have to pay U-Haul some extra money. So... I ended up getting off of I-94 out of Chicago and onto US Route 41 until we reached the Wisconsin border. Once there, no tolls awaited us so we got back onto I-94 and away we went.
***
Even though Wisconsin and Ohio are both part of the Midwest, you knew you were in Wisconsin when the first billboard I saw was for a place called "On The Border", a "Gentlemen's Club" in Franklin, Wisconsin.
"Wow," I said to myself. "You don't see that in Ohio."
Not that those clubs don't exist in Ohio, but that they had actual billboards for them on the highways. At worst you'd see the occasional billboard that says --and I kid you not-- "Love Stuff up ahead". I always imagined 'Love Stuff' being said with Isaac Hayes' low voice, which is something I simply can't imitate.
There's another thing that let me know that I was in Wisconsin:
Yes, they take their cheese seriously in Wisconsin. Again, too busy to drive to take a pic. From Wikipedia.
The Mars Cheese Castle is very much a thing --we visited it once when we were up for a friend's wedding back in 2004-- and given that my oldest loves cheese, she'll likely become a regular customer.
Milwaukee itself wasn't what I expected. Throw out any images in your head that were driven by old episodes of Laverne and Shirley --or even the knowledge that breweries such as Miller, Pabst, and Schlitz call Milwaukee home-- because they don't really fit the reality. The downtown skyline doesn't look as impressive as Chicago, Cincinnati, or Cleveland, but the layout is much nicer and cleaner, and there are tons of old buildings still around. The weather was in the upper 70s with a nice breeze blowing off of Lake Michigan, and people were out and about in both downtown and along the lake shore. Parks covered the shore, as well as marinas and a beach and the Milwaukee Art Museum, and joggers and families were enjoying the early evening.**
I took this photo of the Milwaukee Art Museum after we dropped off the U-Haul. Yes, your eyes don't deceive you, it looks like a yacht.
The apartment itself was in the upstairs of a renovated building that dated from 1913, less than a mile from Lake Michigan. The first floor contains shops while the upstairs floors all had been renovated into modern apartments. My oldest completely lucked out in how nice the entire neighborhood looked. Sure, there's the obligatory Starbucks, but there was also a small bookstore, several nice restaurants, some quirky shops, and even a small repertoire movie theater. Oh, and a hospital is about 1/2 mile away, so there's that as well.
Now, all I had to do was park the damn truck.
It took a while to find a spot, and I became very acquainted with the narrow roads and the beautifully maintained century old houses ringing the neighborhood, but I finally "created" one by parking in a "private parking only -- violators will be towed" spot behind the apartment and emptied the truck. Then a short trip back through downtown Milwaukee --which included the beautiful Historic Third Ward-- and to the U-Haul spot to drop the heap off, and that was that.
***
The guinea pigs did survive the trip, although the weren't so sure about the new place until the very end of our stay. By then, they were happily munching on treats and begging for more.
As for us, we grabbed some dinner at the end of the block at a local bar, and set out for home.
We originally intended to get through Chicago and then grab a hotel for the night, but after making it that far, we decided to rotate drivers and just push on to home. I won't bore you with the details, as it involved a lot of dozing along the way when I wasn't driving, but we made it back home at around 8 AM EST. My youngest and my wife grabbed showers and then slept, but I simply konked out. Several hours later, my youngest went back to Louisville, where she was working that evening assisting with the front ensemble for one of the local high schools' marching band, and we began our career as (semi) empty nesters. I say "semi" because our youngest is still in college and may yet come back home after graduation, but we'll see.
***
So now you know what I was up to this past week.
Since I was determined to basically keep a low profile, I wrote up a bunch of posts beforehand and scheduled them to post over the course of the week.
Now, when we go back to Milwaukee to visit, I ought to see about getting a six-pack of Schlitz just to say that I tried it. And for those who remember how Schlitz' owners pretty much destroyed the brand by trying to go cheap with the brewing process, the original recipe is back and is being made in small batches.
*Technically speaking it was Huber Heights, a suburb just north of Dayton, but nobody outside of SW Ohio knows much of anything about Huber, so let's just say it's Dayton and leave it at that.
**Not to put a damper on this, but I'm sure that by winter this weather will be rather brutal.
EtA: I corrected some grammar and the missing link to Laverne and Shirley's theme song, which includes highlights from the show. In case you didn't notice, Laverne and Shirley worked at mythical "Shotz Brewery", a riff on Schlitz Brewery.
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