You know you live in an interesting part of the city when you have to run police barricades to get home.
For those of you frightened by Sarah's claims that we live in "da hood," I should clarify and say that the last few days have been the Puerto Rican Festival in Chicago. For reasons I'm not quite clear on, that means putting up police barricades all around my neighborhood. I suspect that it's an attempt to control traffic and pedestrians so that they don't completely overrun us residents. Or get hit by fireworks. Anyway, what that means is that those of us who really do live there have to talk our way through the police guards or find a barricade we can squeeze around.

Living dangerously (for yuppies) on the West Side of Chicago....

Books: Ok, my latest attempts at rewrites of early chapters don't entirely suck. Maybe I can still write even when I'm burned out at my day job.