The Not-So-Doomed Dunes

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Location Taken: Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, Indiana
Time Taken: October 2006

It can be somewhat difficult to remember that Indiana has a coastline. I mean, the stereotype of the state tends to be a mix of the mid-country corn farmers of Iowa and the back-country rednecks of Kentucky. And well, most of the state is like that, flat and farmed, with not much citification going on. Above all, the state is thought of as “boring”, well, when it’s thought of at all.

But it’s not entirely like that. Indianapolis is the 12th largest city in the country, the southern area around the Ohio River is rather hilly (which, admittedly, is where the “Kentucky redneck” part of the stereotype comes in), and the northwest corner is full of Chicago’s suburbs.

And that corner is also where the coastline is, along Lake Michigan. And the area around it is solidly dune-lands and the rough terrain of a glacial moriane. There’s a long line of beautiful beaches and bogs there, that they’ve set aside as Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.

It’s a good thing, too, since there are factories right up to the edge of the park. It’s right next to Gary, which used to be one of the most industrial cities ever, the king of steel mills. And then the Steel Belt turned into the Rust Belt as manufacturing collapsed in the area. Gary fell apart, both socially and literally, with high levels of crime and abandoned buildings. It seems to be picking itself back up again, and it still has a strong industrial base, at least. Even if that includes large factories on the shoreline.

Which was part of why Indiana Dunes was set apart. It’s not that special of a place. You can find dunelands like it all around the Great Lakes. But it does have a long history of being the place to get away from Chicago for the weekend. And if it hadn’t become what it is, it probably would have disappeared, the land bought up for even more factories.

But it did become a National Lakeshore, and it’s still a place to get away from the big city. And while it’s not unique, it is beautiful.

  

Creepsy Cares!

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Time Created: March 2012

I…

Sometimes I just don’t understand my brain. It comes up with WEIRD stuff.

Like Creepsy, the Happy Creeper, who really cares about education.

I can see some of the inspiration trails that lead to me making this in the wee hours of the morning.

I mean, there’s the obvious one. Creepers are a Minecraft monster that moves very quietly, creeping up on you until it’s quite close, then “ssssssBoom!”, it explodes. That might kill you, or it might not, but the real terror of the Creeper is that it doesn’t just damage you. It can actually destroy blocks, and if they happened to be, say, the side of your house that was all that was keeping the other monsters out, well, that’s just too bad.

They also have a decided frown in their in-game texture. Their face might just be an 8×8 pixel square, but that’s solidly a frown.

So that’s two elements. The “sssss” sound they make before blowing up, and the frown.

Now reverse them.  The frown is a smile, the “sssss” is positive.

And add a dash of 80’s style blatant public service announcement. I may not remember the 80’s, but stuff like Mr. T’s “stay in school” messages or “just say no to drugs” filtered through the culture enough for me to pick up on.

Now mix with a touch of anime-style imagery.

Try not to go mad.

  

The Glorious Rays of the Sun

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Location Taken: Highway in New York
Time Taken: March 2007

Every so often I try taking a photo out the front window of a car I’m in. It’s pretty rare, though.

Most of the time I’m in the front, I’m driving. And when I’m in the passenger seat, well, I’m more likely to take the photo out the side window. Besides, there’s usually a lot of motion blur. Though this photo doesn’t have much for some reason.

Still, every so often there is a marvelous sunset. Or sunrise, in this case. And I just want to capture it.

Well, at least I think it’s a sunrise. The time stamp says 7:59, and it does use 24-hour time. But if I remember right, I’d have been driving west at the time, which makes the angle completely wrong for a sunrise, and I wouldn’t have gotten on the road before 10 in the morning, anyway. And the photos just after it chronologically show the sun a bit closer to the horizon, with the red blaze of sunset…

Ok, it’s a sunset.

I guess that means that there’s something up with the time stamps for my older photos from my first camera…

At least I do know it was March. That’s when I’d have my spring break at college and go back home for a visit. And I’ve got crocus photos as well from this trip. So at least I can trust that part of the time stamp.

…I wonder if my old camera didn’t use 24-hour time, and the program is just chopping off the PM in the conversion…

  

The Gentle Early Morning Light

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Location Taken: Columbia, Maryland
Time Taken: March 2007

Through a variety of circumstances, I happened to be driving at 7 this morning, heading home to get some sleep. It was just getting light out, the world was softly lit, the air was nice and crisp.

I love that time of day. All the pollution and noise of the day has faded away overnight, and the gentle light is gorgeous. The trees are painted in muted greens, the birds are just starting to sing, and the traffic around my old high school is really heavy because the school buses are dropping off the students now…

Ok, that last one doesn’t fit the tableau right. It’s also why I hated mornings for many years. I was seeing them from the wrong side.

I was born a night owl. By nature, I would never see the early morning, because that is the “right” time for me to sleep. This was fine until I hit middle school years and went from being home-schooled and able to sleep in to my natural waking time of 10 or so to having to get up at seven grumble grumble in the morning to get to classes at 8:30. And High School started even earlier, at 7:30. And my bus came at 7:00. Which meant I had to get up at six grumble grumble instead…

I usually missed the bus.

And Dad had a really hard time getting me up in the morning. He even occasionally had to pour a cup of cold water over my sleeping head to shock me awake. But my natural rhythms did NOT want to wake up 4 hours earlier than they wanted me to. And I kept having to do so, and slowly I adjusted some, but not in a good way, and certainly not in a happy way.

I’m pretty sure that’s what broke my circadian rhythm. Being forced to wake up far too early made my rhythm complain and strain and finally it just threw in the towel and said “Fine! I’m not messing with you anymore! Heck, I’ll even make your life more challenging!”

My current rhythm isn’t a rhythm. I do not naturally fall asleep and wake up at the same time every day. Instead it shifts, usually slowly, a few minutes one way or another each day, but occasionally I have “reset” days where either I get really tired in the middle of the day and fall asleep really early or I just can’t fall asleep at all for hours and hours after the time I fell asleep the previous day. And it sticks. That’ll be my new rhythm for the next week or so, until I have another reset.

This makes committing to any schedule long term difficult. Especially since I’m allergic to caffeine (I get really nasty headaches from it), and thus don’t have the normal morning pick-me-up option available to me. I’ve trained myself to be able to get up and be functional on very little sleep, but the training actually made my inability to fall asleep if I’m not tired enough even worse.

Heck, even simple schedules are tough. I’m currently working at the Renn Fest two days a week, which involves getting up at 8 in the morning. I fell asleep at that time today. Tomorrow will be really fun, since I’ll have to work during the hours my rhythm’s claiming I should sleep…

It does seem a little ironic that what prepped me for being able to function in the adult world (high school) is also what made it impossible for me to function as expected in the adult world. I’m not able to commit to a standard job because either I’ll keep running more and more sleep deprived and go crazy or I’ll try my hardest to keep my sleep schedule constant and go crazy as the strain from that builds up.

Why do schools still have such early start times? There’s been study after study that show that later start times are much better for teenagers, improving both academic performance and behavior issues. Is it really too much to ask for, the slight inconvenience on parents of shifting the times later, in return for smarter and happier kids?

And maybe it would prevent night owls like me from breaking our rhythms.

  

Buildings Growing Tall above The Field (Museum, that is)

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Location Taken: Chicago, Illinois
Time Taken: April 2008

Ah, beautiful Chicago!

Well, at least a little of it.

This was taken right by the bus stop outside the Field Museum, the natural history museum in Chicago. I had an internship there during the Urban Studies program I was in. I wasn’t the best employee, something about both having no real supervision AND being in the middle of a slow social phobia caused nervous breakdown that would climax at the end of my time in this town – but that’s getting off topic, and it really was a nice place to work.

Still, it did mean busing in every work-day (which was three times a week, if I remember right), or more specifically, train then bus. The thing I miss most about Chicago was the train system. I wish every area had the infrastructure to travel to anywhere I wanted via train…

And that’s off topic again. Not that I actually really had a topic in the first place.

From this angle, only a few of the many skyscrapers in the skyline are visible. The black one is the Sears Tower. Well, these days it’s officially called the Willis Tower, but it was the Sears Tower then and for so much of its lifespan that that’s how I (and many other people) still think of it. It’s the tallest building in the USA, ya know. It’s actually really impressive and mind-boggling to stand right next to it and look up, and up, and up. The sheer perspective starts becoming overwhelming pretty quickly. And the current top building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is nearly twice as tall as this one, 2,723 feet to its 1,729 (and that’s counting the spikes on top!).

They were building an even taller building when I lived there, down near Navy Pier. The Chicago Spire, they called it, and it was planned to be 2,000 feet tall, and didn’t even cheat by putting antennas on top and claiming them as part of the height. They’d broken ground on it, and I went past the site a few times when I lived there.

Alas, that was in early 2008. If you don’t recall, late 2008 was when the economic downturn hit hard. And the Spire project did not survive it. So the Sears- I mean, Willis Tower is still the top dog in Chicago.

The other skyscraper in this photo (the tall one with a curved roof) only looks that tall because its close by. It’s right on the other side of the Field Museum, and was brand new when I lived there. Heck, they were still building it! I think it was a residential tower, with the apartments being very high-end, in the one million dollars price range. I suspect that price point ran into problems when the housing bubble burst as well…

Oh, wait, never mind. Found the name of the building, and its current price ranges. One Museum Park, it’s called. And it still advertises “prices from $800,000 to $2,500,000″. Guess some places weathered the economic storm better than others. Well, so much for any vague plans of living there…