ALL ABOUT ME
Well, duh. It's a personal web page. Of course it's about me.
Places I've Lived
Chicago and Environs
I grew up in and around Chicago, and spent the majority of my life there. I
lived all over the North Side as well as in the suburbs of Tinley Park, Niles,
Des Plaines, Mount Prospect, Northbrook, and Evanston. A few intervening years were
spent in Champaign, IL (no, I didn't go to school there, but it's a long story that
I prefer to not tell), before returning to Chicago, eventually ending up in the far
north neighborhood of Rogers Park. I lived there for 5 years before leaving the
area to spend some time in Purgatory California.
Not only is Chicago my original hometown, I still consider it my home though I don't live there now and may not ever again. I love the city and the way it looks, the parks and the forest preserves and the lake and the beaches and the skyline. I love the festivals and the music and the restaurants, the record shops and the bookstores, the libraries and the museums. I love the mix of ethnicities and the way that some neighborhoods reflect them but others reflect only the melting pot that the United States is said to be. I love the kooky politics and yes, I even love the Daley Empire.
If I couldn't live in Chicago itself, I'd pick Evanston. It's close enough to the city to be able to experience it easily, lays along the lake so that I can still be near it, and is a college town, which means it has both a great place to work and a lot of stores geared towards college kids.
California/SF Bay area
I spent about 5 years in the Bay area one century.
I went out there to take a job. I couldn't find anything good in Chicago, I was
sick of my life as it was, and a friend of mine
suggested the place she worked had a job that was just perfect for my skills. So I
applied at HighWire Press, worked there for
a billion years about 4 1/2 years, and then left.
Of course there's more to it than that, but honestly, the job became so stressful and draining that any joy I once had in it evaporated. I still think they perform a useful service and I suppose I'm glad I had a hand in providing that service, but honestly... I hated living in California and I am never going back.
I spent the majority of my time out there living in San Jose, which is as close to a real city as you're going to get outside of San Francisco itself. I suppose it wasn't a bad place outside of the fact it was, well, in California.
Some people like it there. They can. I don't.
Indianapolis
I currently live in Indianapolis, which is my compromise between house prices and being close to a large number of my friends. I have friends locally, and Chicago is just up the highway.
I don't have a lot to say about Indianapolis yet, but I can say I like it enough that buying a house here definitely sounds fine to me, especially at local prices. My sweetie and I are spending a lot of time exploring the city and probably at some point I will put up pages with more info on it.
more will go here
I probably have some other things to say about myself, but at the moment for some reason I can't think of anything. You could always go read my livejournal, though.
This is version 1.0 of this page. Planned improvements include some sub-pages about Indianapolis and possibly about Chicago.