Ran west to Racine, north to Waveland, east to Halsted. . . then I started walking a little. Stiffness in my right instep and calf. I guess I only have one leg to stand on! Coach said no problem. Still good to go on Sunday for our standard 3.
Signed our lease today for the apartment on 3600 LSD. That's just a few hundred yards from the lake front path so many nice runs to come. We move in on Tuesday. Yay.
Chicago Story. . .
I walked from the loop to UIC yesterday. Just thought it would be fun to walk around my old campus and it was. It was the same and very different at the same time and much improved over the concrete monstrosity that it was in the early 70's. Visited the Alumnae office just to say hi and then on down to SES (Science and Engineering South) where the physics department lives. Yeah it lives but I fear all my profs are dead. I guess 34 years will do that! Still interesting to sit in the old places. The same but different.
To get home I took the Halsted bus north to Belmont which I had taken about a thousand times before. Once again everything the same and different at the same time. At one stop I looked up and a ramp magically appeared out of the floor of the bus for a woman in a wheel chair. The bus lowered a little to make it easier. A person sitting in the handicap section got up and flipped that seat up to make it accommodate the chair. The woman rolled on and the ramp disappeared back into the floor. The driver asked if she was locked in and yes she was and away we went. This all took about as long as it would take to board about 3 people walking aboard.
It made me remember when there were fairly hot debates about how much it was going to cost to make buses (and sidewalks, restaurants, public buildings, etc) accessible to the disabled. This was completely backwards thinking. Things were unthinkingly designed to exclude a subset of the population. It's not that it was going to cost MORE to redesign the buses it's that they were mistakenly built at a bargain by making them inaccessible to a fraction of the population. Turns out with a little ingenuity it's not that hard to make a bus easy to roll on to.
At North Avenue the driver got out of his seat and walked back down the aisle saying he just had to take care of something. What the. . . ? He left the bus at the rear door telling us that he was sorry but he just HAD to go to the bathroom! He went into the Borders there while we waited patiently with the engine running.
Only in Chicago?
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