Location Taken: Chicago, Illinois
Time Taken: January 2008
It’s really interesting to see snow falling from above. It looks a lot like fog, but the edges of things are even more white and blurry.
Though why I’m telling you that when you can see for yourself is another question.
It was interesting living on the 17th floor of an apartment building. You get a great view since many of the surrounding buildings are shorter than yours. And it’s easy to people-watch, since you can stare all day and no one will notice. You’re far above the street noise of the city too.
But I still think I shall keep lower to the ground in future housing. For one thing, you can’t hear the rain. There’s just not enough for it to hit to make noise, unless the winds are just right to drive it into the wall. And I love the sound of rain. It calms me down, helps me sleep, and well, cleanses my soul. That’s the least schmaltzy way I can think of for describing that.
For another, if the elevator goes out, you’ve got an issue. That happened one morning. Going down 17 flights of stairs is awful on the knees, if not quite as tiring as going up 17 flights. And I both have really bad knees and was having a lot of trouble with them that year. It got to the point where they hurt with every step I took, and I had to do some serious mental pain blocking to manage a full flight of stairs. After that long hike down the stairs, just standing was painful.
My knees aren’t as bad anymore. I’ve strengthened them and rested them and all the stuff they needed. But I’m still never going to live anywhere that’s that high up.
Oh, and the wind blows the building around, especially in Chicago, which is known as the Windy City for a very good reason. Every so often a large gust would come by and the building would shudder. It was never enough to really worry about, and quite common, so we just ignored it.
Which, alas, meant I missed the first earthquake where I was in the area that could feel the shaking. It was a minor earthquake, 4.0 on the Richter scale or something small like that, but that’s actually pretty high for the midwest. And Chicago was on the edge of the perceptible shaking zone anyway. But any shaking that did hit my building wasn’t any stronger than the regular wind gusts, so I didn’t notice.
And I’ve felt another earthquake since then, a 5.8 that hit in mid-Virginia in 2011, so I’m not too bummed out about missing that one while I lived in Chicago.
Still, there’s something special about feeling an earthquake when you love studying earth science.
