(no subject)

Okay, reading Heist Society after reading Less Than Zero is a little hilarious.

On the other hand, sometimes I really enjoy YA/Teen lit, because it's soothingly easy on the brain.

A couple of people were very "buh?" at my choice of Ally Carter novels, but honestly I've never heard of her before and the book came recommended as a good book about heists, so why not. It's a teen novel, and a bit typical of its genre, but in other ways quite surprising.

( Heist Society, by Ally Carter )

Final Verdict: The book has its flaws, though they're different from the usual teen-lit flaws and pretty insignificant compared to the enjoyment I got out of the book. The heroine is awesome, there's a ton of good heisting, and the dialogue is really snappy. I'd recommend it to actual teenagers (though I'm thirty-two, what do I know).

Tomorrow Coworker Crush, if she survives the plague currently destroying her immune system, is bringing me The Informers, which means tonight I'm going to try to get through a poetry book called Sinners Welcome inbetween final edits on Trace. All the major structural work is now done -- I'm just going to sit down with a printout and a bagel and go over it with a red pen. (The printout, not the bagel.)

(no subject)

I have tripped the Pedway fantastic this evening.

I decided on a whim, due to other things being cancelled, I'd try and have a poke around the extreme northeast Pedway. I wanted to confirm that what I'd been in before, a ground-level shopping area, was in fact Pedway -- that I wasn't walking around past Subways and Hanna's Bretzels and sushi places and thinking I was in the Pedway when it was below me. There aren't any Pedway Compass signs, so it was a legitimate concern.

This area of the Pedway is known to me as the Secret Food Court, because I had worked within five minutes of this vast complex of eateries for two years before finding out it was there. I came in off East Wacker, wandered through a hotel basement, circled around past a hair salon, and came out a block south after making a mental note of the location of a really awesome looking sushi place. I did actually find evidence that at least part of the area is Pedway -- there's a sign in the hotel basement.

Supposedly there's a Pedway passage that goes from there another few blocks south to Randolph, but I didn't have a map of that area of the Pedway, so I took surface streets down to Randolph and then went back into the Pedway via the Metra entry outside the Cultural Center. I thought I'd take my usual route west, past Macy's to the El, but I happened to glance at what I thought was just a Metra train stop and saw lights EVERYWHERE.

It turns out the "Metra station" marked on the Pedway maps is another underground retail area, and this one stays open later than the northeast quadrant or the west side of Michigan because people are commuting home via the Metra. There are news-stands, eateries, a florist...

This is where it gets a bit, for lack of a better word, industrial. Once you pass out into the station for the Metra South Shore Line (it's a mighty fine line), you can follow the walkway onto Randolph again, but it's like Randolph Below -- there's an overpass, and if you turn right there's a sub-level entrance to the Harris Theater, which goes on for fucking ever anyway, I've never been in a theatre that so resembles a high-rise. Just past that is the entrance to a parking garage -- an entrance decorated with random terrifying murals and marked with the Pedway Compass. It was the last Pedway compass I saw, however, because if you follow its enticing lead down into a parking garage, you become

TRAPPED IN RECURSIVE PARKING.

If you enter the parking garage next to the Harris Theater, you can walk straight south for three city blocks, which works out to FIVE PARKING GARAGES. I want to make this clear: I didn't walk through five levels of one parking garage. I walked through FIVE SEPARATE UNDERGROUND PARKING GARAGES, divided by narrow orange doors. The entirety of Millennium Park is apparently hollow. I have no idea how anyone navigates anything down there.

I thought I was going to be in a parking garage forever. When I hit #4, I wondered if maybe they were arranged in a very subtle circle and what I thought was a straight line was just me looping around over and over again.

The entire time, as well, I thought I was heading west, towards Michigan, when I was really heading south parallel to it. So I ended up coming out of the little parking kiosk at the south end of Millennium Park, which was not intentional.

Still, it's an easy walk from there to the El, and thence home.

Next time I'm bringing a bottle of water AND A MAP. So that if I do get trapped in INFINITE PARKING, I can at least pretend I know what the balls I'm doing.

(no subject)

This week's origami calendar kind of sucks.

SO I MADE A GOLDEN SNITCH.

Jason (sorry dude, I don't know your username!) linked me to it a while ago. Warning, that link goes to a PDF.

Also today was free ice cream day in our building, so I wanted to fold an origami bowl of ice cream. I used an old boat pattern and put two tiny water bombs (as they're apparently officially known) into it.

In the end I think it looks more like an orange balloon and a red balloon decided to run away in a boat together, but that's kind of a charming story in itself.