Our celebrity sightings have definitely tailed off since we moved to Chicago, but Laura and one of her colleagues had a good one the other day. At the same hot dog joint where they were grabbing lunch, they spotted Dennis DeYoung of Styx.

(I'd suggest that he had too much time on his hands, but Tommy Shaw took the lead vocal on that track.)

For those of you who were chiming in the other day about the new waterbirds that have recently appeared on the lagoon at our local park, Ella and I took some pictures yesterday. The photos aren't great, but can you identify this bird?

Walking the dog in the park this morning, we heard a woodpecker in the distance. We followed the sound into a grove where Laura spotted the little thing drilling away about fifteen feet the trunk of tall tree. We watched in amazement for several minutes.

There are new birds on the lagoon as well, swimming with the mallards and the Canada goose. I've been trying to identify them in waterfowl galleries on line, but with no success so far. They look like ducks but are about half the size of mallards. The bodies seem to be all black, the head is smaller and the neck shorter relative to the body, and the bill looks bright white.

The red-wing blackbirds have been ubiquitous for the past few weeks, but we didn't see very many of them this morning. Migrating away?

Spotted in Chicago, and photographed by Laura's iPhone, at the corner of Diversey Parkway, Racine Avenue, and Lincoln Avenue:

And then, for good measure, they break your kneecaps.

Laura and I bought a 2000 Honda Accord LX early this afternoon. Less than three hours later, there was a boot on the left front tire.

Chicago.

A new natural gas setback here this morning. This time the leak is in a pipe in our front clothes closet. The pipe comes up through the basement, takes a bend through an elbow joint, and goes through a wall into the closet with our furnace. Well, the horizontal pipe going to the furnace runs at a bit of an angle to avoid another pipe, and that means the elbow joint isn't perfectly sealed.

We had thought we smelled gas in that closet occasionally, but this time the smell was unmistakable. The guys from Peoples Gas wouldn't touch this repair. Instead, they locked off our gas meter and issued a ticket. This forces the landlord to get the pipes fixed pronto, which in this case means he's got a guy coming at 2:00 pm.

Until then, Ella and I are bundling up and huddling together for warmth. At least it's gotten up to 23 degrees today. That's better than it's been the past couple of days. Still, my fingers a bit on the stiff and freezy side.

Late last week, I was going to write that the back yard is a winter palimpsest, with footprints and pawprints overwritten by successive layers of snow. I was going to write that frolicking in that world was like playing a god striding over plains and rugged mountain ranges alike, where deep alpine tarns lurk to entrap the boots that originally forged them. I was going to write of the delicate Mercator projections etched in the newly fallen powder by the rolling basketball the dog pushes with her faces through the runneled lugeways of the landscape, with spalding imprinted perfectly in reverse.

I was going to write all those things, but then it poured rain over the weekend and warmed up to around 50 before plunging back to single-digit temperatures. The rain caused flooding, and the subsequent temperatures froze everything afterward into the kind of rolling, glassy surface you might expect to find after a nuclear blast site has cooled. Walking is treacherous. And the car at the curb in front of our house demonstrates the danger of parking in a giant standing pool when it's still winter. That car's not moving any time soon.

Laura and I have started seeing a personal trainer—and boy are my arms tired! (Bah-dum!)

Of the many factors prodding us toward car ownership, this is the one that finally pushed us over the edge. It's an hour each way on the bus, with at least one transfer, to travel the mere 3.4 miles to Payne Management.

Our bus yesterday, once it deigned to arrive, we dubbed The Prop Bus. I didn't seem possible that it was a real bus. I was sitting in a seat adjacent to the railing around the rear door, and when I leaned against it the railing gave way. The streets announcements were more than half a mile out of sync with our real location. And at every stop, the bus driver got out of her seat to wrestle the fare box, which was not securely bolted to the floor, back into its proper spot. I'm surprised this bus didn't let us off on the shores of the River Styx.

Our buses back home were better, but it's no fun spending fifteen or twenty minutes awaiting your transfer unprotected from the subzero wind and bathed in the aromas from a nearby Popeye's Chicken. I said to Laura, "That smells like the Promised Land, the Celestial Kingdom, Paradise, Nirvana, and 72 virgins all rolled up together and deep-fried."

By the way, Laura took the accompanying photo Saturday on a gleaming new bus on North Avenue. I can understand why the older buses are in such raw shape if Chicago has problems with random drilling on public transit.

Or maybe they want to keep passengers from trying to repair city buses.

Any Chicago folks here going to TECH cocktail this Thursday?

Time Out Chicago says:

[F]or Frank Gruber and Eric Olson, no element of TECH cocktail, their semi-annual networking party, is too grand. And this could explain the success of the free event for tech-industry workers, which holds its seventh fete on February 21 at Wrigleyville bar John Barleycorn. TECH cocktail offers tech enthusiasts—from casual podcasters to programmers—a chance to connect with each other. They also can snap-up swag doled out by tech sponsors like Web-host company midPhase, which provided ... limos as a way to safely cart off the 350 or so techies who'd been imbibing gratis beer.  [full article]

No, not in the sense that we're running back to New York City with our tails between our legs. But we are going to become car owners for the first time in 13 and 15 years, respectively. It stings.