Being a typical American (United States Citizen...blah blah blah...for all of you other residents of this half of the planet), I work. I work a lot. Most weeks I work more than 40 hours, all hours, so I spend a great deal of my waking hours looking at the world, or Chicago mostly, through the windows of a trolley.
I
am a tour guide and driver for Chicago
Trolley, so I take people to and fro, torture them with bad jokes and worse
singing (if they don't behave) and get to meet the world every day. It's not
a bad way to make a buck, and it capitalizes on my interests and skills.
I have here a few pictures that represent some of my daily existence. More will be posted later. These two shots were taken on a dinky little disposable camera that I got from a client as part of my tip! I now have some higher quality images in Photos to add to this burgeoning online gallery.
Amanda is leaning back, out of the way, while we watch an airplane try to land at Miegs Field. I say try because the plane was skewing around quite a bit, and it nearly slid off into the grass along the runway. If you look carefully, level with her cheekbone, on the right of the same window, you will see the plane. It's not really easy to see, but I like the shot 'cause I know what I'm looking for.
Miegs Field, in case you didn't know, is Chicago's lakefront airport, for now. It is slated to be removed and turned into more parkland, as it is attached to the Museum Campus (Shedd Aquarium, Adler Planetarium and Field Museum of Natural History) and Soldier Field (Da Bears, Da Fire) which is now quite torn apart and being rebuilt.
The
second shot was taken while on the Roosevelt Road bridge as it approaches the
light at Clark, westbound. I was on my way to gas up the trolley at the end
of my shift. The bridge is very, very high as it goes over not only the south
branch of the Chicago River, but rail lines that (mostly) service the Metra
railyard. This makes for a really great late day view.
The stacks to the right of the curved trolley window frame are part of a power substation. If you know anything about Chicago and electricity, we're not far from the transformers that blew summer of 1999 and shut down downtown in the middle of the day. The same station caught fire in 2000 on the anniversary of the Chicago Fire, affecting nearly the same area as the disaster! OOooowwwwwwwoooOOOOO! This is the same image you'll see worked over in Photos, check it out!