This morning I woke up early to the quiet of my computers and air conditioner being off. It’s always weird when you’re startled by quiet instead of noise. My first thought was that I had blown a fuse since I have 4 power strips full of electronics plugged into one outlet, one of those items being an air conditioners that’s working it’s ass off in this sweltering summer heat.
I went down to the basement and played with the fuses for over an hour. They looked okay, so I tried swapping them around—eventually just getting new ones even though the old ones didn’t look blown (genius idea huh?). Nothing helped and the only thing gained was an understanding of what fuse goes to what. So I tried unplugging the power strip chain from the outlet, and the outlet spit sparks all up into my face. That blew the fuse.
I put on my giant, yellow rubber gloves that I bought specifically for dealing with touchy electrical problems, but every time I got near the outlet sparks flew; totally shady. I’ve swapped everything over to an extension cord from another room now; hopefully my landlord will come by tomorrow and fix it up.
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Meredith and I banked at National City when we lived in Kalamazoo. It’s a huge bank in Michigan, available in any city, and super convenient with ATM access everywhere. We thought that we’d be okay with keeping our accounts here in Chicago, but it turns out that the nearest branch is miles away downtown on Franklin Street. We haven’t swapped to new banks yet though, so today we needed to go down there to cash some checks.
I drove my truck, and found a parking spot directly across from the bank at a meter. Inside it was a weird setup with only one teller whose setup made it seem like you could only do complicated or “important” things with him. We did our normal check cashing with him, but it was weird; you sit in a chair while working with him. While there we ran into someone who recently moved from Kalamazoo and recognized Meredith from a Stunt Weasel show at The Space. National City seems to be a Kzoo connection.
Anyway, that’s the boring part. The strangeness started when we left and noticed a security guard and plain cloths police officer standing around my truck and jotting things down in a notepad. Apparently I wasn’t in a real parking spot, even though there was a meter, and I was blocking the driveway from some sort of Jewish organization. The cop started asking me all sorts of questions about what I was doing there, and bringing up the fact that Israeli and Palestinian tensions are really high right now. Apparently they were suspicious that my truck was a car bomb or something. It is shady I guess: totally rusted through, gas cans and unmarked bottles of fluid in the back, out of state plates that have the word “army” in them.
Then I lied to the cop. Why I did this I’m not really sure, but once I started I had to follow through with it. He asked me if I lived in Chicago and I said no. True, I’ve only lived here for two weeks, but it’s still a lie. I did it because I didn’t want him to ticket me for not having switched my plates, which is a pretty irrational reason to complicate the situation. He let us go, but I have a nervous, bad feeling about lying. I don’t know how it could, but I hope it doesn’t come back on me. I’m always nervous around the police for some reason, even though I don’t do anything illegal on a regular basis and have a clean past.
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I got a thank you note from my sister and brother in law today for some birthday presents that I sent them last week. Check out the return address label—yikes!

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