Why I Oughta...

I've long wondered why we see so many non Chicago-area transit cars on our rails around the western suburbs, but on a drive to Iowa recently, I think I've finally figured it out.   There's a HUGE Nippon Sharyo factory in Rochelle, Illinois .  I snapped this photo of one of the massive buildings as I drove by, but there were *at least* two of them with track laid right next to the building.  They call it 'rolling stock', which I think means everything but locomotives. The Metra cars are marked with Nippon Sharyo and I'm guessing so are these MTA North line cars that I spotted on the Union Pacific West line back in 2012 .

Saw these Party Chimes - which appear to be a metal set of bells that hang above taper candles - at an antique store recently.  Kind of like a German Pyramid but with music, I guess?  The heat from the candles causes some part of the metal to move and strike the bell it appears. These didn't come home with me, but now you know that $10 is the 'going price' if you come across them again.

For a certain segment of our house (welp...it really is the entire household but me), this is a big deal:  These Crunchy Rice Rollers from Bamboo Lane are back at Costco.  I took the King of the Ball Tossers to the Melrose Park Costco over the weekend and we stocked up.  I think he ate three on the way home.

He joins the cast that includes a Dilbert or two and some other random web-weirdness.  This can't hurt my reputation around the office, right?  #FlatRonnie

Back in July, I took a photo of the demo on the site of the new massive apartment complex being built on the west side of York Street, just south of Panera.  The City of Elmhurst has been calling this the "Hahn Street Project" for years, but Morningstar, the developer, is calling it Elmhurst 255. That crane out front has been lifting sections of this development into place for the past few months and now it looks ( from the sketch in this pdf ) that at least this section of it has topped out.  Let's call it about half of the building is up.  The entire first floor, which will be retail and maybe parking(??), is up, but I think they're going to build a bit more out closer to the street/sidewalk area when it is done. 192 apartments.  Seems like a lot, right?  But, if it works, won't it be nice to have even more foot traffic for downtown?

As part of my work with a new client, I - as well as my entire team - took a survey to help everyone understand each others themes of talent.  As you can see above, my #1 strength is positivity.   Yes....seriously...positivity.    Thought that was really interesting and something that Nat will tell you she doesn't agree with most of the time. This was a useful exercise and something I'm going to have to share with the team this week as I meet more and more people.  Placing it here so I can reference it and find it if I forget the order/importance when people ask me about it during my interactions with the client team over the coming weeks and months. Along with the delivery of my themes, I also received little snippets on each one.  There are tons of themes and while I only inspected the five that were selected for me, I think they reflect accurately how I fit into an organization and how I can best leverage my talents in building a team and delivering strong outcomes.

 That right there is the Cheesecake Factory in Old Town Pasadena.   CalTech is located in Pasadena.  That makes this the place that Penny from Big Bang works, right ? At least, that's what my father-in-law says.   So, of course, I couldn't walk by it without taking a photo.  Alas...while Pasadena was pretty great, we avoided this place and instead spent our lunchtime at Slater's 50/50 and had some very excellent Vampire Dip.