I accidentally bought a digital camera off eBay. I say this with the full knowledge that nobody slips and makes a bid. At some point, you're serious. I was looking at DSLRs, digital single lens reflex, cameras that use viewfinders and sensors sharing the same light. Not that it matters as much today with viewfinder-less digital cameras , but the cool thing about SLRs before they went D was that the mirror that sent the image to the viewfinder popped out of the way when you pulled the trigger to take a picture. This made a satisfying potato chip "click". Camera makers now sometimes add "click" sound files to bring back that soul-satisfying virtual celery crunch, but it always suffers from small camera speakers and you can't feel the camera jump in your hand like a startled pet. There's also the issue of interchangeability. SLRs have (expensive, holy cow!) lenses you can pop on and off depending on whether you need to shoot a hummingbird mid-flap or Lindsay Lohan in a bikini on a private beach, 300 meters away and hiding behind a particularly long blade of sawgrass. Finally, in the realm of "what you immediately get with the camera besides promises and a neat sound", we have depth of field. In a nutshell, this means the camera will get a shot of your subject in focus with the background out of focus. It's a way to make the viewer see the final picture in 3D without resorting to headache-inducing polarizing lenses, dorky glasses or intricate modelwork.
I put in a bid at what seemed an absurdly low price for the camera. It was. Another eBayer outbid me in about an hour. I thought, "I'll check back later and see how high this sucker gets." I did. Numbers stayed low for the unit, so I made another bid. And, I think, another. I'm kind of stretching the word "accidentally" here, aren't I? Like a bad gambler, I did not establish an upper limit for myself, and higher prices started to seem quite reasonable. This is why, on the eve of my first foray into the tense world of home buying with my partner, pal and caller-outer Brandi, I found myself trying to explain why our household needed a fifth digital camera (sixth, including the camcorder, although I also count crappy 640 x 480 camera phones). The fact that I needed a piece of tape to hold the battery compartment closed did not help my case.
So I'm hoping that posting some pictures I took this weekend redeems my cause somewhat. Also, bitterly muttering, "silly, silly me".
Sixty Pound Cotton
Thanks to Brandi's brave steps in the direction of laundry by the pound, I took a look around my office / dressing area - I like to multitask? - and decided there was a Solution. I loaded all my dirty duds into two bags and dragged them to a swell place by Diversey and Elston. We dropped them off, picked up poker chips for Brandi's Ladies' Poker Night, saw a bunch of condos (more on that later), came back and loaded everything into the car. Wow! I can see why things have gotten hashish-smokin' easy for the modern housewife and overworked, home-schoolin' college dorm dweller. Even the cost is bearable, considering the cost in quarters and time of dragging sixty pounds of mostly cotton blends to the laundromat's bulk washers. Oh, and I also just bought a DSLR. I can't complain about money, ever... again.
Real Estate Note for the Day: a man urinating on your window is a sign you must not buy that garden apartment, even if you really like how much light it gets.
We were out looking at condos and stopped in at an open house around Lawrence and Kedzie in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago. There was one finished unit and the rest you kind of had to visualize. I like that part. Dad sees the world through the lens of an architect, so to relate to him past childhood, I've learned to appreciate architecture in the raw, and hopefully to fill in the gaps between studs with my imagination. The first floor unit looked nice but a tad small. Brandi pointed out that some places work out great for renting but stink when you know you're going to own them. We wandered across the hall to a condo with two bedrooms, a kitchen, two bathrooms and one great room almost as large as a basketball court. The developers had combined the living and dining rooms into a Devastator-esque giant room designed to knock down and steal the candy of lesser rooms. It was nice but just at the edge of what we can afford and, we were informed, headed north by $10,000 in the next week if we didn't snap it up. We finished looking and started back down when we spied the garden-level apartment door open and thought to take a look. One word sprang to mind, "feh." It had decent light for something buried just slightly in the earth, but overall felt like nothing to write home about since it lacked southern exposure and abutted on one side to the building next door. Again, we started out... but, then I spied, just across the back deck, the ground-level version of the light-filled apartment with the uber-room upstairs. The back door was open and, while not explicitly welcome, we weren't forbidden from traipsing across and taking a look.
It looked decent, though varying significantly with the floor plan of the room above. Here, the rooms were more segregated and the overall impression of vast space was dampened by it. I went to the bedroom space forward and realized with a shock why significantly more men live in garden-level apartments than women. A man was urinating, pretty much anywhere he pleased, but certainly on the building and in clear view of the windows and quite possibly on the windows. See, the building on that side went right to the sidewalk, and, to his credit, moments before he had been peeing in front of an empty apartment.
By the way he staggered when he was done, I'm pretty sure he was drunk or ridiculously proud of watering the windows. In hindsight, maybe it's like those movie villains who insist environmental disaster is the earth's immune system trying to shrug off the pestilence of humanity. Maybe the building's immune system was this man, peeing at us from behind the safety of a pane of glass. I don't care. Brandi felt that the neighborhood might need a few more years to turn itself around and I agree, wholeheartedly.
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