brettsing

+ i saw

A new design blog, focusing on design culture as well design itself.

Visit at http://www.plusisaw.com

Movin’ On Up.

Wow, I haven’t blogged in a long time… and I haven’t written a real entry in almost a year.

Harold got a new job (which he starts in July or August) so we are leaving Irving Park and moving to the South Loop. We’re really excited about our new place! It is on the 17th floor of a high rise at 900 S. Clark.s

We’ve really liked living in our current apartment, but faced with the prospect of NOT having to deal with its little inconveniences I am becoming acutely aware of how annoying they actually are.

I think while I’ve lived here I’ve tried really hard not to think about them too much, and to just focus on fixing the problems I can… making the place as livable as possible.

I have done a lot to this apartment and it has served us pretty well. I installed custom curtains in the Living Room, Bedrooms, and Dining room. I installed custom wood blinds in the Master Bedroom and Kitchen. I replaced all of the drawer and door pulls in the kitchen. Replaced 4 ugly light fixtures. Replaced a broken closet-system. Replaced a broken kitchen sink faucet. Installed several shelves. Installed a permanent shower rod (there was no shower rod when we moved in) Replaced all of the (really ugly) yellow brass towel bars, tp bars, etc in the bathroom with clean brushed nickel ones. Custom paint colors and job. Installed a programmable thermostat. Fixed broken window locks. This list goes on and on…

As much as I have done to this place, there are just so many things that I absolutely will not be missing. Little things that if you owned a place you could fix, but in a rental are just beyond what is practical to replace. (though I’m guessing many would say that several of the improvements I made already are beyond what is practical)

So here we go, things I will NOT miss about this apartment (in paragraph form, thankyouverymuch) Wires running the entire length because the cable isn’t installed into the walls. Hardwood floors that are impossible to keep clean. Years and years of layered paint causing much of the trim to always look dingy. Damaged finish of the doors. Bathtub that is up too high combined with showerhead that is too low. Hooking the dishwasher up to the sink to do dishes. A dryer that vents into the house (this is only really bad during the warm months). Broken closet door in the guest bedroom. A back gate with a chain lock that is almost impossible to open. Back stairs that don’t get cleaned off when it is snowing causing us to accumulate garbage and recycling during the winter months. A kitchen with little cabinet space and only one tiny drawer, causing us to have to store many of our kitchen things in the small amount of cabinet space we have. A back porch with no light. A living room light fixture that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. The unfinished trim in the bedrooms. The creeeeeepy dual-key-sided deadbolt locks on the guest bedroom which has no windows. Hallway and closet doors that don’t open, don’t close, don’t lock, or stick. Hallway closet not deep enough for hangers and with a rod that is very crooked. Windows that don’t open. Windows that don’t close. Windows with no screens. And then of course there are the projects I wasn’t ever able to finish… for example the curtains I never hemmed… that’s the only one of those I can think of right now.

*stuff I’ve thought of and added since this was originally posted: Front door to building has to be manually locked. Buzzer to let people in does not work. Have to park on street around corner and either a. park far away or b. move car by 9am every day (even the weekends) Sidewalks in this neighborhood do not get shoveled well. Graffiti. Living in-between two bars. Stove w/o vent hood which constantly causes fire alarm to go off. Kitchen Sink drain leaks in the right sink, bathtub drains slowly, mailbox lock is broken*

Yes I can’t wait to move… and hopefully this business that could potentially require us to not be able to get out of our lease early will be resolved and we can move downtown sooner rather than later. Keep your fingers crossed!

In the meantime, dreaming of the new time will get me through the rest of the old time.

Brett Patrick Casey :o)

Headaches & Frustration & Sondheim

“Look what a little Catholic rebellion will lead to… Paul would kiss me and I would think: Oh! I’ve got my very own Jew!” -from Company

I’m writing this from my old MacBook Pro that Harold now uses.

On Sunday we saw “A Little Night Music” in Evanston at Light Opera Works. Like the last Light Opera Works show we saw, this one was also fantastic. If you haven’t seen “A Little Night Music” and like clever, funny, sophisticated, and musically complex shows, I think you’ll like it.

I stayed home from work Yesterday, which I rarely do. I had (and continue to have) such a terrible sinus headache, that I can barely stand the thought of moving. I spent most of the day on the couch. Yesterday morning I was still able to sleep so I slept until about 10, then woke up and watched movies all day. He’s Just Not That Into You, then The Breakup and then switched to a couple of Sondheim musicals while slicing up the new design for this website. (Hopefully you’ll like it, I do)

I upgraded to the newest version of WordPress and got about halfway done converting the Photoshop file into HTML & CSS before stopping to quickly set up the backup disks on our new Airport Extreme to function as drives for Time Machine. I couldn’t get this to work so I decided I would run the firmware update on the router. This opened up ‘Software Update’ which kept locking up around 20% into checking for software… not downloading it… just checking for it. I noticed earlier in the day that any new files I created were not coming up as searchable in Spotlight…. I decided a restart was definitely in order, maybe it would fix all of these little issues. It didn’t. I restarted and my computer got stuck on the gray apple with the spinning spokes screen. About 20 minutes later I shut it down, cleared the PRAM, and as of yet have not been able to get it boot back into OS X.

Harold ran the firmware update on the router which then had to restart itself. He didn’t realize that I was watching something on Netflix on TiVo. Having lots its connection during internet play, TiVo locked up. Upon restart, the audio track for the movie I was watching loaded about 1 second before whatever was happening on screen. It was about then that I lost it.

I decided I must leave the house. I needed to go see the pretty lights of downtown, take in a little bit of night air, and get out of the house and away from all the non-functioning electronics. While out, I stopped by the Bad Times Burger King for a diet Coke. Naturally, they gave me regular and I had to go back through the line to exchange it. We returned home and I checked one more time to make sure my computer still wouldn’t start up, took some pills as instructed by Harold, and the moment my headache went away was finally able to go to sleep around midnight.

The medicine must have worn off around 2pm, b/c that’s when I woke up. The busy noises of Irving Park (we live on a pretty major road) which usually are my comforting friends who help me sleep, are now my enemies. Its no matter though, with my two hours of sleep I’m now wide awake.

I would work on my website some more, but I can’t get to the files. How I wish I had thrown them on a network drive. I decided to put on Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Company’ on Netflix on TiVo (which Harold was able to fix) and try some more things on my computer

I’m pretty sure the hard disk on my new computer may have failed. In addition to not booting to the hard disk, my brand new 17″ MacBook Pro also will not boot to the TechTool Deluxe CD. I was finally able to get it to boot to the Mac OS X Leopard install disc. It ran through normal setup procedures (you know, it checked the CD and everything) and when it finally tried to install the operating system to the hard disk…. I got this fantastic “Install Failed’ screen. I’ve been through this before on my old PowerBook G4. Basically these are the same events that happened when its hard drive failed.

I’m pretty sure I’ve lost all of the work I did on my website yesterday, which totally sucks. I noticed that if I hold T while starting up, it will boot into transfer mode, so I thought perhaps it might be worth a shot to see if I can pull the files off of it that way, however I don’t have a FireWire 800 cable, and the new MacBook Pro does not have a FireWire 600 cable. My guess is that it doesn’tmatter though, if the Hard Disk really has failed, I’m sure it wouldn’t actually work.

On the plus side, after trying for about 10 seconds on this computer, I was able to get it to see the network drives for Time Machine Backup. Yay! The other positive here is that I haven’t had the computer for very long. The only files I don’t have on this computer are a few Musicals I downloaded since I got that comptuer and those website files. Who knows, maybe I’ll hit an odd spur of luck and actually be able to get them!

Additionally, on Friday the blower motor for my cars A/C stopped working. I found out it I didn’t have to drive to Mid-Missouri and that it could be fixed here in Chicago so I made an appointment. It promptly started working again, and has not stopped since. I figured they probably couldn’t fix it if they couldn’t see how it was broken, so hopefully if this issue decides to manifest again, it will happen sometime during the next 6,000 miles… because after than my warranty runs out and then it would be expensive to fix.

Well, that’s all for now. Wish me luck!

Brett Patrick Casey :o)

Gordon Matta-Clark at MCA.

Today Wesley and I ventured into the city with two specific missions in mind: to visit Luxe Home (which really reminded me why I want to be an interior designer) at the Merchandise Mart (b/c I decided Wesley needed to see it) and to visit the Museum of Contemporary Art (because Tuesday is the free day… apparently brought to us by Target) The largest exhibit space contained the work of one mister Gordon Matta-Clark.

From Wikipedia: He is most famous for works that radically altered existing structures. His “building cuts” (in which, for example, a house is cut in half vertically) alter the perception of the building and its surrounding environment.

There were quite a lot of really cool pieces. My favorite consisted of three pieces of an exterior wall of a house, all cut to the same height and width, however they weren’t consecutive pieces… they contained different parts. The wall is presented with the exterior of the house showing first, as you walk around it… you view the inside (shown below in another gallery)

Though some were done legally, a large number of his “building cuts” were done illegally in abandoned buildings in boroughs of New York City. He actually had (from what I read on the wall) at least 1 warrant out for his arrest, though I would imagine that there were more. The way he cut the buildings (inside of them) was especially deliberate. He didn’t just cut them anywhere, he cut them in places that would open up the space in some way and allow it to be seen differently.

Many of the abandoned buildings that he altered were demolished, and to document we are left with photographs (which was largely what the exhibit consisted of) as well as some of the pieces he actually removed. Though it was quite cool to look at the pieces, the overall point in most cases had to be understood through the photograph. (To me anyway–if you’re altering space, the piece you removed won’t tell you quite as much about it as the result after it was removed.)

All in all, it was quite an interesting, cool, and very fun Chicago day. Days like this remind me why I love this city so much. For anyone interested and in Chicago, his exhibit runs through May 4. There were also quite a few other cool exhibits that you can learn about at The Museum of Contemporary Art website.

In other news:

No news on the job front yet.
I got to hang out with Brandon B. today, he was in for work as per his usual for Tuesday nights. Normally I can’t hang out during the small window of time he has in which to hang out, because I have to pick Wesley up in Aurora during those times. However, today Wesley was off, so it finally worked out. Even though I was quite tired, I treked back into the city for a visit. It was quite fun, and very good to see him.

Well, I should attempt to sleep I suppose…
Brett Patrick Casey :o)

Insomnia & Soup

Hello there my faithful [and anyone who still reads with the tiny amount I update really deserves the word] internet companions! I hope life finds you well at the present time. I find myself quite unable to sleep at the moment. I should be sleeping because Wesley has to work in the morning… I’ll get to that a little later.

As many of you know, I recently moved to Chicago… Again. Well, I suppose I should say that I am in the process of moving to Chicago. I am up here, and have been since the evening of Sunday, January 19th. I’ve been living at one of the three Extended Stay America hotels in Schaumburg. (A northwest suburb, about 30-40 minutes out of the city, depending on traffic) I hope (only for the sake of those in the other two Extended Stay hotels in this suburb) that we are in the bad one. There is a tiny kitchen-like thing that does contain a microwave, a hot plate (with only one functioning burner) and a small prep-sink. Irritatingly, the room is only serviced every five days… that’s right… same towel and washcloth for dishes for 5 days at a time. Yuck! (the card in our room says they are changed every three, but they most definitely are not.) You actually can go down to the front desk and exchange them out, but that seems kind of sick to me too. “Here are these dirty towels, may we have new ones?” I just wash them out really well every day. The beds here are very hard, and by the time the morning comes, have hurt my back much more than my bed does. The TV has about seven channels, the most entertaining of which is the Discovery Channel. A few minutes ago, I watched a man hollow out a camel (after drinking the liquid from one of its stomachs) and sleep in it for protection in the desert. We’ve also been on a very healthy diet of “How it’s Made,” “Smash Lab” and millions of episodes of “Mythbusters.” I like such shows, I guess… much more than I like watching animals being hollowed out while eating my tasty minestrone soup. Yuck to that. (I like soup but I’ve never eaten so much of it in my life.)

Wesley’s work has put us up in this hotel, it was quite convenient at first as he was working at the restaurant here in Schaumburg, which is right around the corner. Starting today (and from now on) it seems that he’ll be at the one in Aurora. Aurora is not close to Schaumburg. Its about a thirty-five minute journey (one way) that involves two interstates and a tollway–I-290 to tollway I-355 to tollway I-88. There is, however, another way you can take that does not involve the tollway–that is if you’d like to get there in one hour and fifteen minutes. Don’t forget that I now get to drive this FOUR times a day. There, to drop Wesley off, and back to the hotel– (I’ll get to how I spend my days in a minute.) and then back to pick him up, and back to the hotel again. The drive actually isn’t that bad as the entire thing is bordered by buildings, etc. At night, most of it is very well lit. Its just a lot of miles, and a lot of driving and a lot of tolls. I did get I-Pass today, which I totally couldn’t afford– its $50 bucks. A $10 deposit for the transponder, and $40 in preloaded tolls. One advantage to I-Pass is that tolls are only 1/2 of what they are if you pay cash. (I wish I’d realized this BEFORE last night as I’m VERY out of coins, and I need to do laundry again.)

Our hotel does have coin laundry facilities. Four washers–of which two are broken, and six dryers–of which three are broken. For $2 in quarters per load, I can do laundry. Growl. Aside from paying lots of money to do laundry using a shitty facility, I also spend my days applying for as many jobs as one can possibly imagine. My resume has been re-written and re-set up to accomodate my most recent job at MBS, and I have lots of different cover letters for different kinds of jobs. I should probably have different resumes as well, but I’m not trying to bother my nice resume writer that much. What I have is pretty comprehensive. I also watch DVDs… the first couple of days were hell as I forgot the power cord to my computer and had no internet or DVDs. Barf– my parents FedExed it though, and everything was okay. (Thank’s Mom and Dad!) Today I began work on a really cool concept for a portfolio site for myself, now if I can just figure out Actionscript in Flash a little tiny bit more (and yes, I do have a book on it with me that I’ve yet to look at… I’m sure it won’t be too bad once I actually work on it.) and then I can make it super-cool and jazzy and fancy. I’ve already completed the Adobe CS3 Classroom In A Book on Flash, so I’ve got movies and button states, and symbol types and all that crap down pretty well. Now its just putting the programming with it (its always putting programming into stuff that slows me down.)

I also spend small portions of my days exploring the suburbs. A little bit around Schaumburg, but after being here for two weeks, I pretty much get it…. and around Lombard and Oakbrook. That’s where we’ll be living. We found an apartment in Lombard, IL and were accepted and everything.

WHAT? You say?!?! LOMBARD, IL. Wesley will be working in Aurora, IL which is about an hour out of the city… he doesn’t want to commute that far every day (I suppose I can’t blame him, I wouldn’t want to either.) so we picked Lombard which is just about halfway in-between. Its about 25 minutes from My friend Brenda (in a e-mail she sent a few days ago) could not have put it better: “Correct me if I’m wrong, but Aurora is NOT Chicago” Well, Brenda…. neither is Lombard. Lombard is 22 miles from Chicago, Aurora is 25.5 miles from Lombard. maps.ask.com lists the drive times as about 1/2 hour each… I think they’re closer to 20 minutes. Maybe it’s factoring in traffic… I don’t know.

Unfortunately, this means (not only that I have to live in the suburbs—– Y U C K !) that I have to keep my car, which I had certainly not intended to do. I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to make it work yet, but we’ll see. I’m just going to go for it I guess. I’m hoping to get a good job that I enjoy. There sure are a LOT of opportunities for jobs out here. Tons and tons and tons. The Chicago Tribune, and Careerbuilder.com (which I suspect may be headquartered here as it has a very large building right next to the Cumberland stop of the blue line) have teamed up to make a pretty cool job-finding site. It has all of the regular stuff from careerbuilder.com, but specifically on the Tribune’s site. I would guess they probably add the postings from the paper in as well or something, I dunno…. anyway… the site is different. It lets me quickly research jobs and apply for many at once by simply checking boxes… and voila, it sends them all my resume at once. It doens’t let you click ones that require extra work (like jobs where you must include salary requirements or a cover letter, or a real copy of your resume, or design samples or whatever) which keeps you from looking stupid and applying twice… once incorrectly. Hopefully all of this lovely techology will help me find a job in the very near future.

I ‘ve gone into the city mabye about five times since I’ve been here. Going in really helps me take my mind off of how much I miss all of my friends, and especially my family (and my dog Casey!) Sitting by yourself in yucky hotel is NOT good for the mind body or soul. A few days, its been absolutely necessary as its been two snowy to do anything. Most days though, I just can’t do a lot because I’m waiting for Wesley to get off of work so that I can pick him up during the times anyone I know in the city can do anything. (8-10pm) I really must call people and try to see if anyone has any time during their days free. I have this 30 day transit pass that I bought for 80 dollars the first day here (because I thought I was going to need it— that was before we found out about Aurora) so I might as well get some use out of it. I really do need to get out of the hotel though… I get pretty depressed sitting up in here all the time. Naturally, when Wesley gets off work, he really doesn’t feel like doing a lot. Not that I have the money to be doing much of anything anyway, just… REALLY sick of being at this hotel.

Unfortunately, we’ll be here for almost as long as long as we have already been here. We have fourteen days behind us and eleven ahead. I’ll check out of this hotel (FOREVER! Mwhaha! and return to Jefferson City to get all of my stuff on the 13th. I’ll be back in Chicago on the 16th unpacking. I will then be alone for part of a week (except the weekend, while Josh and his boyfriend come visit from DC!) while Wesley goes to Florida for final training classes. Upon Wesley’s return, his friend Matt from Jefferson City (who I sort of know) will be joining us up here. (I guess we’re moving all his stuff in the van with ours before that date, and he’ll be spared the trouble of moving it! Lucky him!) Yay on splitting the $1100 rent 3-ways instead of two.

By the way. Living in the suburbs is not at all cheaper than living in the city. The apartmets (until you get about an hour out) are almost exactly the same thing as in the city, for the same price… only you have to keep your car… so that sucks. It actually costs more to live in the suburbs. For some reason, Wesley has it in his head that it doesn’t… has I’ve heard him say multiple times on the phone to people, that living in the suburbs is cheaper. Normally I probably wouldn’t be so irritated by this, but aside from meeting with a two new friends (Scott from Wisconsin and Carlos who lives in Chicago) he’s essentialy the only person I’ve had face-to-face conversation with in the past two weeks. We all know how social I tend to be, and how this cooped-uppedness is NOT good for it. I almost feel a little bad for him at times, because I know when I’m being bitchy for no reason… but he can dish it out just as well, if not better, than I… so then I don’t feel bad. We actually are getting along fantastically well for two people who have been sharing a small and shitty hotel room for the past two weeks though.

Living in the suburbs isn’t all bad though. The only West Elm store in the midwest is very close to our new apartment…. and there are two malls within an 8 minute drive (the closest Yorktown Center/The Shops on Butterfield is like a 2 minute drive) The further away one (Oakbrook Center) has a full Crate&Barrel, Pottery Barn, Neiman Marcus, Tiffany & Co, Bang & Oulfesen… as well as a ton of other things. Though the whole thing is oddly minus a roof… it feels pretty much like a normal mall… and most of the stores look like normal interior mall stores… but the whole thing is outside. There are also tons and tons of good and suburby chain restaurants really close to us, if you enjoy that sort of thing. Buca Di Beppo, Maggiano’s, BRIO, The Capital Grille…. and that’s just the beginning.

Since we’ve been here, I’ve thrown a bit of money away on a few good meals. As far as chains go, I can only remember eating at Big Bowl. For local fare, all in Chicago: Foodlife at Water Tower Place, Socca, The Kit Kat Lounge, Halsted’s. I haven’t had a bad dining experience at a local restaurant yet. I’ve also had some good drinks. My favorite by far was something chocolatey and minty at The Kit Kat Lounge. Sidetrack is still as fun as I remember it, I went to Musical Monday’s… yay for showtunes on videos! (Though they were a little more well known and more accessible to the public than the ones they play on Sunday’s at Freddie’s in St. Louis, which I did NOT appreciate… I like the obscure stuff… I know it better.) I also went to Roscoe’s on Wednesday to celebrate Wesley’s birthday and sing some Karaoke (which was actually Friday, the 1st but he worked.) A drag queen named Honey took our songs. They had considerably more Broadway selections than A&C in CoMo, but I suppose that’s to be expected.) I sang “Find Your Grail” from Spamalot, and also an Elton John song that I sing a lot.

Well, I’m still not really sleepy… but I should at least close the computer and try a little harder to get that way. Thank you for reading, as always!

Much love….
If you’re in Chicago: Let’s hang out soon.
If your’e in Mid-MO: Come visit me soon!
If you’re Josh: See you on the 18th!
Brett Patrick Casey :o)