Okay, so a successful trip out to Villa Park and back on Saturday. And then on Sunday we headed out to the suburbs yet again, because my friend Kate just happened to win some free tickets to Six Flags Great America at her place of work, and Sunday was the last day they were good. And I should mention that Alamar and I discovered something about Metra that let us save quite a bit of money - that they offer a weekend pass for $5 that gives you unlimited rides all Saturday and Sunday. So, we already had free tickets to the amusement park itself, because of purchasing the passes the day before for our trip to Gothicfest; and we had free tickets for park admission once there as well, so why not head up there and check it out?

So we go all the way up to Waukegan by train, which is already like an hour's trip, but then we had a 45-minute delay because of some work happening on the track ahead. And then we had to kill 30 minutes in Waukegan itself, which is not that easy a proposition because they have this sad little downtown where half the buildings are closed and the other half are like old clothing stores from the 1950s, ugh. And then our Pace bus showed up, and there were so many people on it you could barely move. And then we rode that out for 30 minutes, until finally getting to Six Flags.

And then we had like another mile to walk, from the bus stop to the actual front gate of the park. And did you know, by the way, that Six Flags now has this overwhelming security process you have to go through to get in, with x-ray machines and cops hand-searching all your belongings? We certainly didn't! After all, Kate wouldn't have brought maybe two joints worth of pot with her if we had, which we had been planning on smoking maybe halfway through our day or maybe just on the trip back into the city.

And so, yeah, you've guessed it already, the security force found Kate's pot, and whisked her off to this dark little security room to the side of the front gates. And Alamar and I were already in the park, so just sat by the side of the front pool and waited for Kate to come out. And we kept sitting, and sitting, and sitting, and finally after like 45 minutes we went and asked what was going on, and nobody knew what we were talking about, and there wasn't anybody actually in the security room, so they opined that perhaps she was kicked out through the front gate. So we went outside the park and there she was, and it turned out these suburban rent-a-cops basically harrassed her for a half-hour, then let her off with a warning.

So, you know, thank God, because these guys could've technically been pricks about it and had her arrested - and jeez, just thinking about my friend Kate holed up in a transfer cell out in the middle of Gurnee, Illinois somewhere already starts giving me a headache. So we waited an hour for our return bus, then rode a half-hour back to Waukegan, then had two hours to kill before our train so got drunk at some sad little restaurant bar with the locals, then rode an hour again back into Chicago. And that was Sunday!

So, you know, hopefully one day I'll actually get to ride the rides at Great America, because I've been talking for eleven years about visiting the place and this on Sunday was the closest I had ever gotten to actually doing so. But like I told Kate, as long as I get an entertaining story out of something for my journal, I'm happy, no matter what the actual story is. And this is definitely an entertaining story, so ultimately I'm satisfied.

So, like I said, Alamar is currently finishing his last day of his Chicago vacation, and is currently visiting the Shedd Aquarium as I write today's entry. I myself am kicking around my neighborhood and waiting for today's mail, because I'm expecting money in the mail but am not positive it's coming today. And if it does, then I'm taking Alamar down to the Signature Room (the bar at the top of the John Hancock Center) for a last drink on his last day and to get a rather spectacular view of the city he can take back to Germany with him. And if this money doesn't come, then we won't be doing that.

And then tomorrow Alamar spends the entire day traveling back to Germany, and I get my apartment back to myself for the first time in two weeks. And I'll be in that state for about 48 hours altogether, and then hop in a car with my friend Tom and drive across the state of Illinois to St. Louis, where both he and I grew up. He's going for the weekend, to attend this crazy-ass wedding of a friend of his that's being held at home plate at Busch Stadium, a mere two months before the stadium is scheduled to be demolished; I'm going to help out around my parents' house for a bit, as my mom recovers from some particularly nasty surgery (having her hip replaced, to be specific). And I'm just down there to work, so that's what I'll be primarily doing - fixing meals, doing laundry, helping my mom get around during the day, while my dad's at his college campus teaching classes. Basically, my aunt's been there the last two weeks and doing all this, but then had to go home; so then I'll be doing it for something like four or five days, and then by then hopefully mom will be recovered just enough to not need around-the-clock help.

And boy, I've got some really exciting personal news as well about my upcoming trip to St. Louis - one of my readers down there has decided to donate a new desktop computer to me. And it's a Mac G4 system as well, which means a couple of sudden new profound changes to my life - not only my first Mac with a G4 chip, but also my first Mac with OSX, and my first Mac with a USB port (so I'll be able to sync my Treo directly to it, my digital camera as well, and the external card reader I use at internet cafes to transfer files, all of which I had been doing on a half-broken Windows laptop a friend donated to me a year and a half ago).

So gee, where do we start with all the things this is going to mean?

--I'll be able to transfer large files directly on and off my Mac for the first time; the way I was doing it before was by floppy disk from my Mac to that Windows laptop, which meant that no file over 1.38 megs could be transferred;

--I'll be able to finally teach myself Flash Action Script, which means I'll finally be able to make some cool funky Flash animations for some of my old poetry, something I've been wanting to do for five or six years now;

--I'll be able to run widgets for the first time, and OSX versions of all that software that now exists;

--I'll be able to go back and forth directly between my Treo and my Mac for the first time, which will save many intermediate steps in a bunch of different processes - emailing, posting to my website, posting photos, archiving old journal entries, etc etc;

--And if I'm lucky, I'll be able to find either a program for my Treo that will let me use it as a dial-up modem for my desktop browser, or someone in my building with a WiFi signal that they'll let me tap into while I'm at home. And that way I'd finally have a desktop internet connection for the first time, and could download PDFs whenever I wanted, and attach whatevever kinds of files I wanted to emails, and be able to participate in wikis and discussion boards, and be able to download video files and podcasts, and be able to use all those desktop apps at places like Gmail and Flickr and Yahoo Instant Messenger that apparently make the entire process a whole lot easier and more powerful. And that would be extremely cool, needless to say. So anyway, lots more on this, as soon as I get the actual computer and have more to tell you.

So this means I have, what, two days or so to myself here in Chicago, between the time Alamar leaves and the time I head to St. Louis. And like I mentioned last week, I've discovered accidentally that I've really been missing the chance to ride my bike, and come Friday I won't have a chance again for another four or five days. So I'm thinking of squeezing in my third official bike adventure on Thursday! And man, it would be a really interesting one as well - a trip to the Garfield Park Conservatory, by way of the green boulevards that hook together the West Park System. And Chicagoans can already envision, of course, what would make this ride such an interesting one - it includes a trip through Logan Square, a stop at the Centennial Monument, a ride through Palmer Square and a whole trip through Humboldt Park as well. And for those who aren't Chicaogans, here is just the briefest of explanations of why you might find this upcoming report interesting:

I've already mentioned many times this summer, of course, the overwhelming nature of the Chicago Park District - over 500 separate facilities they are maintaining, over 7,200 acres of land, with thousands of activities servicing millions of citizens. And the parks system here has a really long history as well, over 160 years now and counting (in fact, the first city park here was established three years before the government even acknowledged Chicago as a city), with some periods of this history much more important than others.

We're just now celebrating the 100th anniversary of one of these important periods, in fact, when fate came together to establish a thirty-mile series of "green boulevards" to hook together the twelve or so city parks that were currently in existence. And there's this whole long and complicated history of these boulevards and original public parks, which tomorrow's entry will be solely devoted to because it will literally take that long to tell; but in basic terms this came about because of the Industrial Age reaching its peak in the same period, with just thousands and thousands of people packed into these dirty, polluted, unsanitary urban jungles. Like Europe, America experienced a powerful back-to-nature movement in this period, with advocates promoting an agenda of getting city folk out to the country on a regular basis, and bringing a bit of the country into the city on a permanent basis as well. So this was the basic idea behind the green boulevards - special streets where commercial traffic wasn't allowed, hooking together all the city parks in a ribbon, where no matter where in the city you were you could find a 80-foot-wide "green oasis" close to you, a brief respite from the miles upon miles of slums and factories.

And these boulevards did indeed turn out to be very popular, so much so that a hundred years later almost the entire 30 miles of them still exist, and still serve the same purpose of connecting the largest city parks Chicago has. And like I said, there's a whole lot more to the story, with not only one but two "creation" dates celebrated for the westside parks I'll be visiting (one for the date they were actually created, another for the date they were all switched to Prairie-style landscaping). But I'm almost out of space today, so that'll all have to wait until tomorrow. See ya!