Last Post from eHurst

We were so impressed by the lowering of Salt Creek’s level that we went over after a sushi meal to see if the Elmhurst Quarry (used for flood control) was similarly chastened. Well, it’s down quite a bit, but nothing very dramatic. Here’s how it looked just before the sun called it quits today:

Even though that’s actually a heap of acre-feet missing, folks, there’s so much more yet to go the picture fails to thrill. Tomorrow we’ll be speeding westward on the Oregon Trail, so some other intrepid reporter will have to keep you updated on Evaporation in Elmhurst.

Here’s where we ate before venturing on our fact-gathering mission: Sushi Nest. It’s our number one favorite restaurant in the area. We can always count on Sushi Nest to set things just right no matter what. Tonight was no different: it stepped gamely up to the challenge and soothed our bedraggled house-moving nerves with udon, tempura veggies and two kinds of maki rolls. Green tea ice cream sent us contentedly humming into the autumn evening.

One of the photos shows their awning with the Sushi Nest logo: a fish jumping out of bird’s nest. It seems to be trying to say something. The other photo is of the ink painting that welcomes you in the foyer: yin-yang carp.

Salt Creek During Ikelet and After Ikelet

Here’s Salt Creek at Butterfield Road in Elmhurst, IL nine days ago:

And here it is, photographed from the same spot, this morning:

This is what we would normally think of as high water. A tip of the Hatlo Hat (appropriately filled with rain) to the Elmhurst Flood Control engineers.

2021 Miles

I have kept the computer up and running for another day, but it wasn’t easy: I had to fight off the packers who are moving inexorably, mechanically, like locusts through the house, wrapping, boxing, taping. Those dirty clothes I’d dropped in front of the washing machine on Monday? We’ll be finding them in a box in October. While I defended my computer by covering it with my body, the packers got their revenge by packing my toothbrush somewhere; maybe in that box over there with the Ark of the Covenant.

They also boxed our Rand McNally 2003 Road Atlas, but do we really need it? Just how hard can it be to drive from point A (see map above) to point B? True, I did manage to get lost in Wyoming while driving from Chicago to Colorado Springs, but that drive entailed a sidetrip to Mount Rushmore.

Did I mention we’re making the drive with three (3) cats? I didn’t? Must be good old Denial kicking in. What would we do without it?

Bare Walls

Now I know we’re moving!

Nothing like an expanse of bare wall with only empty picture hangers to make the room not yours.

It’s as though someone suddenly switched off the Zeiss Star Projector in the planetarium. Where did the constellations go?

In our case, we’re taking our three mental Star Projectors west and we’ll be setting up a new star show on Mulholland Drive in The Valley.

The computers and modems and hubs and scanner will all go into their styrofoam tomorrow, but I can’t say when they’ll reemerge on the other side of the Rockies.

Until then: Migratioturi te salutant!

Passive/Aggressive in Wicker Park

Lulu and I sat in Lucia’s Ristorante in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, munching pizelles and drinking coffee while Momo let the stylists at Salon Blue work their magic. Wicker Park, like the Olde Towne area and the New Town and Lakeview neighborhoods before it, has just moved beyond the student and artist stage to the point where the professionals have made it too expensive and pushed the hapless urban pioneers to who knows where. A lot of that hip young thang protective coloration endures in the now upscale passing parade, so we were well entertained as we killed time.

To give you the flavor of the place, I took this photo:

Cute restaurants in Wicker Park. Lots of charming boutiques and tchochke shops. Florist shops that are like galleries and galleries that are like coffee shops. Upmarket salons galore. Wonderful, stylish people. But the mural says oodles about the political mindset of the local inhabitants. Che Guevera ‘n’ Gandhi? Say, how about a mural in honor of Albert Schweitzer and John Dillinger? Mother Theresa and Pol Pot?

Obama ‘08 signs abound.

A Quarryful of Rain

Back in 1987 mild-mannered Salt Creek, in a rare fit of pique, overflowed its banks and Venicized surrounding streets. This disaster inspired some smarty to propose using the 125 year-old Elmhurst Chicago Stone Quarry as a flood control reservoir.  A swell idea: the monstrous hole in the ground — it averages 200 feet in depth and can accomodate 8,300 acre-feet of water — was just sitting around not doing anything. Normally the quarry is empty except for a couple of feet of water in the eastern “lobe” (the half to the east of the narrow stone wall that bisects it).

After Ike the Hurricane sent his mere crumbs up to northern IL, both halves were filled.

Here’s a picture from the DuPage County web site that shows the quarry as it usually appears:

Now here’s my photo from about the same angle, except I couldn’t go inside the grounds. I had to clamber up a fence topped with barbed wire, where I injured my arm in my selfless quest to serve you better.

I can’t do the math, not knowing what the heck an “acre-foot” is, but 8,300 x 200 average depth = lotsa water. To give you a better idea of the scale of this thing, here’s a grab of a Google satellite shot taken in more clement days. The aquamarine hand and smiley face indicate Salt Creek as it meanders to… oh, I don’t know… Oak Brook, I guess. The bloody red hand and frowny face indicate the spot from which I photographed the expanse of Ike Water. The shadows cast by the walls of the quarry give some idea of their height. Or depth, I suppose. Can a wall have depth?

Finally, here’s another graphic borrowed from the DuPage County web site (paid for, after all, with MY TAX DOLLARS), which shows the same stuff schematically.

Oh, what the heck, here’s one more photo, taken at great peril, of the other half of the reservoir. It was taken from the southeast corner of the western lobe, facing north by northwest. The concrete structure is a pumping station.

Ordinarily a canyon, it’s now a lake.

UPDATE: Okay, I looked it up. An “acre-foot” is a measure of water volume. It’s the amount of water you’d need to cover one acre under one foot of water. It comes to about 325,851 gallons of water. The number I found for the volume of the quarry is 8,300 acre-feet. Now get this: 8,300 times 325,851 = 2,704,563,300. Two point seven billion gallons.

Here’s another way to look at it, courtesy of Wikipedia: “As a rule of thumb in U.S. water management, one acre-foot is taken to be the planned water usage of a suburban family household, annually.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: I took some photos downstream from the quarry during the height of the rain and later when then waters had subsided a bit. You can see the photos as this post: CLICK ME NOW, NOW NOW!

Also, at this post, you will discover another photo of the quarry taken two weeks later: PLEASE CLICK ME AND SEE THE QUARRY PICTURE. PLEASE.

Nice Work Review of Books: Obsession

Jonathan Kellerman’s most recent mystery thriller about Milo the cop and Alex the Pediatric Psychiatrist did the trick. Compulsion (reviewed elsewhere in these pages) was a “tale well calculated to keep you in… suspense!” So I lifted the embargo on Milo Sturgis/Alex Delaware potboilers imposed after reading the over-the-top sadistic conclusion of Kellerman’s 2005 outing, Rage. Not that the child abuser of that novel didn’t deserve what he got, but, geez, Jonathan, give your readers a break, willya? We didn’t do it!

Anyhow, I went back one to his second-to-last Milo/Alex thriller, Obsession – read it as an eBook on my lil Palm PDA — and am happy to report it’s a heapin’ helpin’ of what the audience paid for:

The Kellerman Tour of L.A. begins thus:

“Not a whodunit,” said Milo. “A did-it-even-happen?”

I said, “You think it’s a waste of time.”

“Don’t you?”

I shrugged. We both drank.

That’s the stuff! And it ends with Milo addressing a stunned couple of paramedics:

Standing and removing his jacket and dripping blood. Shouting, “O-positive in case anyone’s remotely interested.”

In between Milo and Alex talk to lots of Angelinos and it’s this dialogue that keeps bringing me back to Mr. K. That ear for how people actually speak. A cop asks Milo’s advice on how to proceed on a case. He answers, “It was me, I’d keep it basic.”

I love that “It was me” for “If it were me.” That’s what Milo would really say. I also like the withering Chandleresque wordplay, like the description of a thug’s “heavy black mustache, right-angled down to his chin like a croquet wicket.”

Obsession features more murder than I, for one, experience in a normal week, but less than in your usual serial killer novel and it ends with a burst of rat-a-tat action that falls, thank goshness, way short of the I Spit On Your Grave excess of Rage. So this happy reader set his PDA down on the bedstand with a sweet smile, turned off the light, and drifted into a night of only mildly scarring nightmares. FOUR STARS and a CUP OF JOE!! ☆✬✰✪☕

Obsession
by Jonathan Kellerman
(Ballantine Books, Mass Market Paperback, 458pp.)

Moving Checklist

Not to cast aspersions on the intelligence and good sense of the unusually bright (and well-groomed) readership of Nice Work, but it is possible — just possible — that one or two of you have decided to move house.

Far from being resentful that these statistical outliers have lowered the IQ average of my audience, I am touched by their suffering, and so I have decided to help the poor perplexed wretches in their hour of need by passing on hard-won Moving Lore, learned in the School of Adversity.

And look! It’s all nicely boiled down into a handy checklist for easy understanding. Here:

• Bicycle to Post Office to fill out Change of Address Form
• Pick up loaf of bread while you’re at it.
• Get all Rx’s filled!
• Bicycle part way home.
• Wait for long freight train pass.
• Bicycle the rest of the way home.
• Watch a couple of episodes of Frasier.
• Drop off car at Toyota to make sure it’s all tip-top.
• Replenish Summer Sausage supply.
• Buy new cat carrier. ::Moan::
• Call phone company.
• Stare. Blink.
• Call IDOT to cancel tollway transponder.
• Play on computer. Heh.
• Watch a couple more episodes of Frasier.
• Dinner!
• And so to bed with a Good Book.

Your list may differ.

Sold

When the sun finally came out after hiding behind the torrential remnants of Ike for the last few days, it shone on an altered For Sale sign in front of Nice Work HQ. We do not suggest a causal relationship between the storm and the sign, but let the facts speak for themselves.

If emotions can linger in a place like ghosts, then we hope the new owners will sense the ten years of happy laughter with which we filled this house and which will silently resonate in these rooms for years to come. Maybe a yelp or two where the house geist has absorbed our reactions to tripping over cats, but mostly jolly laughter.

Below is a photo we took the day before yesterday when we braved a soaking to give you some idea of the effect of Ike the Hurricane even at the remove of 1,218 miles from Galveston. This is Salt Creek, a wee dinkum trickle normally, that passes far below Butterfield Road in Elmhurst. Ordinarily you would need to stand in your canoe to touch the bottom of this bridge, but now, as you see, the waters of Ike would force you to portage your canoe across the bridge if you were so foolish as to go paddling at all.

If we have a chance to return to this spot before Moving Day, if the waters have receded by then, and if the dove we release does not return, we will try to get a photograph of Salt Creek as it looks when not overfed.

Pomes Penyeach

Now that there’s a “Contract Pending” shingle appended to the For Sale sign out front, there’s no longer a need to fill the plastic TAKE ONE box with stats ‘n’ pix about our house. So we printed up some copies of Rudyard Kipling’s Seal Lullaby for anyone wise enough or simply curious enough to “take one.” We realize this sort of thing seems like affected artsiness to certain people and aggravates them no end, but that makes it all the better.

Liz found the poem on a web log called “Poetic Anthropology” which you can summons to your screen by clicking on these word: HOME IS THE HUNTER.