heat wave

today, according to weather.com, it's only about 80 degrees in chicago. tomorrow it's supposed to be 92 and yesterday it hit at least 95. ick. needless to say, i've spent the past two days sweating profusely. the heat is one thing, but the humidity is really brutal.

i love going to a city and discovering the truth behind weird tidbits and rumors, like, "Chicago is the windy city." i was, illogically, surprised to find out that, boy, are they not kidding with that one! it's very disconcerting to battle both hellacious heat and high-speed winds at the same time. why doesn't the wind help the heat problem?! agh.

anyway, other than the sticky gross heat, i'm having a marvelous time. this city is very traveler-friendly. i've taken the L a few times and walked most of the rest of the time, and i can pretty much get anywhere i'm going with very little hassle. the conference has provided shuttle buses to get us from the various hotels where the programs are being held to the conference center, and i have only two complaints about that. one, there is sometimes a really long wait between shuttles, but that's not really the fault of the shuttles themselves. the traffic here is nuts, plus "taste of chicago" is happening right now so that adds another million or so adventurers to the 20,000 librarians at this conference. the second problem is these shuttle buses have no air conditioning and the windows don't open! PLEASE STOP THE MADNESS. i'm sick of stinking.

right now i'm using the wireless at the conference center, which is $9.95/day. i heard a rumor, possibly from free range librarian, that ala might have a deal on the wireless price, but i asked yesterday and none of the ala info people (nor the people running the wired computer area) knew anything about it. alas.

i find myself to be jonesing for the ease of mapquest directions as i try to navigate this city. for some sad reason i walk out of the hostel and am consistenly at a loss. where am i? where am i going? i just don't know. it's sort of depressing. at first i thought maybe i was confused because the water was on a different side of the city than it is in philly... but the lake is to the east of chicago, just like the delaware is to the east of philadelphia. guess i can't blame my directionlessness on that...

just now i heard the peculiar sound of a small child wailing from very far below... this convention center is the size of a small neighborhood, and each level is staggered on top of the others. there's a lot of open space, so there's a very weird echo effect going on. creepy.

that's all for now. i have to figure out where i'm going next!